2.

I dropped pebbles
from my pocket

with the hope
of being found.

With an eye towards
building roads,

with the ambition
of the blind.

Failing to note--
they were seeds, all along.

1.

at your touch
i am both

weak
and strong

like the tree's last leaf;
every ring within its trunk

New

The snow was new. The dream was old. 

She walked past the barn, setting a course for the pond, clad only in a white nightgown and a pair of muck boots. Beneath their rubber soles was half a foot of January powder. Around her were charcoal limbs and the stillness of snow and every so often, a gathering of white-tailed deer, their eyes wide and staring, the placid aliens of this frozen planet. Soaring over the eastern hills was a half moon, tilted on its side, scattering stars across the Milky Way. 

As a girl, she’d tried to count the stars and failed. As a young woman she’d plotted every constellation, believing math and myth to be the star-crossed arms of God’s embrace. It had been years since she’d troubled herself to check for more than an act of weather. 

She was conscious of moving towards a goal, undeterred by its non-dimensionality. To move was enough. To move, at her age, was a gift. The snow gave beneath her slight weight, and for some reason, on this particular evening, she saw the quantum glow of Cheshire cats with every step pulling her closer to her destination. 

To Lovers’ Lake. 

A foolish name. They hadn’t striven for creativity; to live back then seemed a poetry enough. To fall in love, during the spring of her seventeenth year, was simply her due.  

His name was Thelonius. An impossible name. 

Impossible times. 

Time. The night had sharpened its claws on it. Luckily, she had no teeth left to chatter. As it was, the wind lifted her hair and stiffened her nipples; it howled at her meager pound of flesh. She wouldn’t last long in it. Perhaps sooner than that.  

To lie down and sleep the sleep of the angels. 

The pond was as she remembered it, at the far end of the acreage. She stopped several feet from its southern lip. Where there should have been ice, water steamed like a boiling spring. Approaching the pond's edge, she could see through the condensation to the stars reflected in its black pool. She picked out Orion easily enough. 

“Thelonius.” 

The wind died. She hunkered down by the side of the pond, looking towards its western face. The oak tree had been felled long ago by her daddy’s men. A gawping blankness remained.The limb Thelonius had hung himself from had been too burdened by the task before it, fracturing sometime after her discovery of his body, during the lost hour of her dash for help, the promise ring he’d given her bouncing secretly against her heart, her knees bleeding from so many falls to earth. 

When she’d returned, screaming incoherently by Mama’s side, how her heart had leapt!  As big a leap as any they’d taken from oak tree to pond splash. Thelonius wasn’t there. Just a branch snapped off to bone. Mama was confounded. Perhaps it was all a dream. Perhaps her daughter had lost her mind. 

She’d prayed it was so. 

In the end, they’d had to drag the pond (“for a Nigger, mind you”) as the summer sun gave up and she’d wept through the hands half-covering her eyes. 

Let him be, she’d begged, as they fished out the body. But they’d paid no attention to a girl gone to hysterics. Her pleas had come too late. 

She’d fought for him too late. 

“Thelonius,” she said again, the fulsome vowels a thaw on her tongue.   

The cold stopped and stars dropped from the sky as snowflakes. Softly, with a falling grace. A dying wish. 

Tipping forward, she looked to her reflection in the water, unsurprised by the youthful countenance that inspected her in turn. She’d been so pretty once. She’d forgotten how much. She touched her face. The girl did likewise.  

Slowly, as she continued to gaze into the water’s shapeshifting depths, the stars of Orion sharpened into the brightness of a man’s eyes. And then a smile: a brilliant blossoming of white crescent through a dark throne of night. Eventually, there arose the constellation of his cheeks and neck. And finally, the whole of him. Thelonius. Suddenly and miraculously. Yet somehow, during this moment--and at this holy coordinate--the most natural thing that ever was. 

She reached out to touch the water but stopped, scared. 

Jump.

She heard the voice as clear as day. She heard it as a bell. Snowflakes melted against her bare shoulders and breasts as she peeled the nightgown away and kicked off each boot in turn. She laughed and lifted her palms upwards, hesitating but a little as the snow collected in her hair and hands. 

Jump, May. 

She jumped. 

And before her splash, she heard the nightingale cry out its darkling song.  


--


For more in my "New" series, see 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008. Special thanks to Aniket Thakkar for keeping it going. A nod of gratitude to John Keats as well.

Happy New Year, everyone. May 2013 be good to all of us.  

Newtown

In this land of 300 million guns,
logic is a defenseless child. 

I love my country, 
I hate its paranoia 

Where they trade on our apathy
to stockpile their crazy. 

The cost of their "freedom?” 
The lives of the innocents. 

A well regulated militia--
well, Obama is a socialist. 

“I hunt.” 
'Nuff said. (Hunters are such sacred cows?)  

Self-defense?  
Man up. Statistics say otherwise. 

Guns for teachers! Guns for everyone!
Are you fucking kidding me?

Ignore this futile exercise. 
Every word since Friday comes out like shrapnel. 

And still, we bleed. 

--

These links have offered me much insight, if little solace, in the days following the Newtown massacre: 

So You Think You Know the Second Amendment? 
Guns Have Never Saved Us

Gun Deaths Vs. Gun Ownership by Country
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence 

Statistics on U.S. Gun Violence

Connecticut's Rules For Purchasing This Gun

Portrait of Eleanor Holding a Shell

(Eleanor Holding A Shell, by Frank Weston Benson)

Eleanor, 

how his sunlight adores you

Transforming your frock 

into waves and white horses

Igniting your hair 

with King Neptune’s touch.  

Yet how like Hamlet to me

you are with your token!    

Your youth arrested 

by the pearl of a whisper 

A crossroads suggested

in the purse of those lips 

Grave before beauty        

and the silence within.  

Whereupon the gulls cried out 

or your feet got drenched

The conch slips free

and Eleanor—I hear your laughter

As your father pauses 

to mix ochre and ivory 

and you take his light, 

running.  

Gut check: Reviews

(Self portrait in a letter, André Breton)

Here are some thoughts on reader reviews:

1. You are nowhere as good as your best review, especially if said review was written by a friend. (Thank you, friends.) 

2. Likewise, you are not the sum total of your most negative review. Or, rather, the thing about your writing that person hated could very well be the thing the next person savors. 

Which leads me to...

3. Writing is subjective. 

4. Reading is subjective.

5. Writing and reading are subjective. 

6. Resist the temptation to respond to your reviewers, even if you really, really want to.  

7. This one's tough: try to absorb the constructive parts of the bad reviews, especially if they consistently reinforce your own worst suspicions about your writing.  

8. By the next morning, say "Fuck 'em." Prove it. Stop refreshing your Amazon page every hour. You're not a lab rat. Earn back some self-respect. 

9. Start over. Write. Do it because you love it. Do it because you must. Write for selfish reasons, because in my very possibly worthless opinion selfish writing gives way to honest, universal writing. Stop short of self-indulgence, though. 

10. Be grateful for the ego check. Be thankful you have readers at all. Remember when publication was once a distant dream. Count the stretch marks of your progress. Treasure them all. 

Stand tall. Climb the next hill. 

Tumble to the bottom. Repeat if desired. 

It's better with the blindfold off. 

Plum Blossoms in Paris: Free eBook

Just a heads-up: the eBook version of Plum Blossoms in Paris is free on the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks, now through November 30th. 

Thanks to my publisher, Medallion Press, for running this promotion. I'm curious to see what the results will be!  

Lascaux Flash

Photo by Catherine Vibert

There's an exciting flash fiction contest happening right now I wanted to tell you about. Using the photo prompt above, submit a piece of fiction (250 words or less) by midnight, September 22 for the chance to win the grand prize: $250, a virtual medal and publication in The Lascaux Review. Instructions for entering are here. 

I submitted a guest entry--titled "Orange Juice"--which can be found here. 

My thanks to Stephen Parrish and Wendy Russ for running such a quality contest and literary review. Good luck to all the participants!  

Autumn Rhythm

(Autumn Rhythm No. 30 by Jackson Pollock)

Again, September 

where the leaves begin their long surrender

and I hold fast to every before and after. 

Above me, a cacophony of geese, recycling their

rites of spring, fashion themselves into a lopsided 

victory sign, sticking their faith in the future's eye, 

and I salute them, metaphorically at least. 

Remember when poetry was something that happened to you, 

when it pierced you through and through and through? 

When it kissed your knees and encased you in light? 

An apple of Newton’s, God’s own Eureka! 

Of course you do, and I’m happy— 

so pitifully glad to be a part of the mad, happy dance—

yet there’s something to words that makes one a surgeon, 

prone to the dissection and rearranging of miracles. 

So that even as sunshine slides down my sleeve

and empties my pocket of gold and debris, 

a part of the self hangs back, detached,

making of the present a more beautiful past. 

“It was different back then,” 

but the difference is in the remembering,

as we stuck each moment like buddhas on pogo sticks, 

so Zen we thought eternity could be numbered in 

the days before Christmas.

Players on an infant stage, not knowing such

scenes would grow heavier with replay,

we ignored the warning in our grandparents' examples

—bodies bird-light, faces sharpened into arrows—

backs bowed over with layers of sediment.    

  

Is it possible the phoenix looks to us for inspiration?    

We are the only backward-looking, forward-driven creatures of nature

and autumn is our renewable feast, a creaky time machine set on ache 

one more chance for the leaves to scatter  

so we might leap backward and fore, transitioning

forever, into our piles of lukewarm nostalgia, waiting to 

see where the colors will land so we may jump 

again 

Deleted (WTW)

Pulled for submission

Although the subject of the poem is a little

macabre, it was inspired by a moment of perfect

solitude on the lake dock above. I happened to look at 

the plank of wood I was leaning against, when I saw 

my name inscribed there. Sort of hard to see

in the picture, but it made me smile.