Revising Toward This

Things are quiet here on the blog, but I'm bee-busily revising. This image has been helpful for me, and maybe it will be for you, too.

Cross-Pollination and Book Trailers

This week, I received a beautiful gift. My friend Amy Monticello (who is a wonderful writer and teacher) had her students choose books to read whose authors agreed to be interviewed. I was happy to do so, and her student Kristen Sallaberry reached out a couple of months ago with some fun questions about my book, In the Kettle, the Shriek. Yesterday, Amy shared that Kristen made this gorgeous book trailer to accompany my book. I absolutely love it--I found it so touching to see how sensitively Kristen translated the mood and images from the poems. I loved the way the camera treats landscape and details of scenery, the dreamy atmosphere, and the introspective music (I didn't know the "Lanterns Lit" song before, but it is right up my alley).

What an absolutely beautiful and inspiring surprise. What a gift writers and readers and artists are to one another.

What youth is

is the gift of unaccounted for time

What to make of our unremembered times
Rinsing my face
Pulling a loaf of wheat bread from the grocery shelf
by its twist-tied piggy tail of cellophane
An elevator One elevator in a lifetime of elevators
All that has happened in one minute fed
forever to the meter

What will it mean if I enjoy these or not

Youth doesn’t ask

Vista

"Somewhere outside some village," by Prashant Prabhu

Vista

I.
The eye hurries and hurtles and rolls downhill to gobble it all up

It: the green proof that places
are alive and that we can trim and locket up
their tendrils

All: the Great Sweeping Up
the room that the broom invents
with wishful walls

Up: down
inside A secret-clasping place
which we know is called a safe

II.
There is beauty here and I am anxious to claim it
There is pain here and I am anxious to reject it
but not by pretending it does not exist

Where has my disembodied voice gone
Now when I speak all I can say is baby boy
and ache and love and worry

Voice what has happened to you
Flower sounds like terror and power
just like it always has

and more than it ever has before

The Woods by John Muir

The Woods by John Muir

In the dream this is a poem
I am failing to memorize

Each time I lift the page
the lines have shifted themselves

It is becoming a different poem
because I am trying to memorize it

It wants to elude me a reader
who wants to own it Like every poem

Every song's running faucet
Every skypatch of canvas with

its shoulder braced against a door
of pigment and crushed minerals

Like the woods Definition
Clusters of trees whose edge

you cannot see Whose ending
mercifully you will not reach