Slick Ice

What was I saying about winter slash summer yesterday?

I'd forgotten I'd be posting this poetry feature by Susan Elbe at Escape Into Life today, containing the lines, "Even then I was for slick ice, the danger / of sharp blades..."

With fantastic photo art by Glenda Lissette!

And when, I was wondering, will it stop raining? But today was sunny, gorgeous, warm, and I did my research outside!! Because books can be carried there. Books by and about Dylan Thomas. But that's another story. That's left me a little melancholy.

And slightly uplifted:
1) I am not him.
2) I am enough like him to feel like a sensitive poet.

Yes, slightly uplifted. With red hair.

Winter/Summer

I have a poem in the current issue of A-Minor Magazine, called "Winter/Summer." The poem came from more than one report of awful boating or jet ski incidents involving blades, the vulnerability of being in the water near them. And from the sharp dangers of winter, ever returning. It seemed important for the title to be rendered with a slash mark.

And when will the furnace stop coming on overnight? Will it ever get all the way warm this May? May is almost over. Golden columbine and Ohio blue spiderwort are blooming. Pinks are beginning to open--today! Soon it will be June.

By the way, the slash is not just a punctuation mark anymore. It's a word, a slang word used frequently by young people. See this cool article by Anne Curzan in Lingua Franca.

Indoor Picnic

Happy Memorial Day. Today it'll be an indoor picnic. I'm responsible for the fruit salad. But I've been thinking about alignment, the universe, synchronicity, synchronization, and so on. Thanks to all that, it's a Random Coinciday in the blog. Thanks to the rain, it's a Blue Monday.

And real thanks to veterans today. Remembrances to those who have died, veterans of life if not war.

And thanks to this NPR story, I've been thinking about synchronicity and alignment via metronomes. I recommend watching these two short videos and reading about how and why they synchronize. We talk about "good vibrations," and I often send "good vibes" out into the universe when people ask me for prayers--sort of a thought ripple of hope, rather than wishful thinking addressed to a god figure.

Sometimes I talk about realigning myself in the universe, meaning straightening my spine via yoga, but maybe I should reconsider it in view of these metronomes. What am I really asking? Or doing? Am I trying to enter the flow of good vibrations? Or am I seeking some kind of conformity?

I'm more of a fruit salad kind of girl. I didn't even notice that the colorful metronomes were all in rows, until...they were synchronized! Once they were, they reminded me of soldiers.

On Sunday, the pastor quoted Forrest Gump: "I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I think maybe it's both. Maybe both are happening at the same time."

I think it's both, too. Some of us chart our lives, and some more evidently float, but we usually don't see the story till we look back. Even if my life is more like the path of a floating feather, it may have hit points in the air that create an invisible constellation. A dot-to-dot picture. A story. With meaning.

Bananas and Clematis

Today I woke up to five very ripe bananas and five new blossoms on the clematis vine. Plus, the rose trellis is popping roses, and both the dark purple iris and the lavender blue dilly dilly iris are in full frilly bloom. So I baked two loaves of banana bread, refraining from adding flower petals, though I ate some flowers a couple weeks ago at Station 220, a cool farm-to-table restaurant.

Very busy writing, editing, and sending out submissions lately, catching up after my adventures in the theatre, which sort of continue, but in less intense ways, this summer and fall. And, um, rejections are rolling in again, but nice ones, saying to send more. And a few acceptances, too!

I got a little behind in my poetry book reading & reviewing, but posted a review yesterday of Survivor's Picnic, by Debra Bruce, at Escape Into Life. She has a reading coming up in Chicago on Friday, May 31, with an open mic attached, if you are a poet in that area. (Details at the link.)

I do connect summer with summer reading, even though I am not a student or teacher anymore, tied to an academic schedule. I just read Look Me in the Eye, by John Elder Robinson, the teen & tween paperback edition, minus most of the swear words, and learned so much about Asperger's syndome! And soon my book group will meet to discuss Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver. (It has butterflies in it.)

Happy reading, happy blooming, and happy banana bread.

Book of the Heart

These are my beautiful grown-up children. My daughter graduated from high school on Saturday, and my son came home to cheer her on. It was a lovely, breezy day--a little hazy in the morning, which kept it comfortable and not too hot, and then the sun came out right when the graduates came out to take pictures with friends and family.

Graduation from Normal Community High School used to be a pretty hot, crowded affair in the gym. You could only invite a few people. Now it takes place in a huge coliseum that also accommodates ice hockey, Olympic volleyball, and the Bob Dylan concert we attended a few years ago, with Elvis Costello as the opening act!

So a jillion people can attend. Comfortably. High up and all around, with a good view of the proceedings and close-ups provided on a big screen (of which I was blissfully unaware any time a camera was aimed at me, fortunately). Because, by happy chance, I was up there on stage at my daughter's graduation, receiving a Distinguished Alumni award, along with Walt Byerly '48 and Judith Preno Boekholder '60. The awards committee was delighted when they found out my daughter was graduating, and I got to read a poem to her class and hug her when she came up for her diploma!

Don't worry. I checked it all out with her beforehand, and she was fine with it. She okayed the poem in advance, too. And her friends liked it. And their families. And that's what matters.

Book of the Heart

The wise ones say to know yourself.  They’re right.
If you don’t learn to know yourself, you might
someday wake up in the middle of the night
afraid, unable to get back to sleep
and wonder if you lived your life right.
But the wise ones, who are many, are very deep.
They know already what you keep
inside you, like a secret flame:
We are all human.  We are the same:
hopeful, yearning, timid, if there’s need,
bold, courageous, able to succeed
at loving one another, if we really try.
That’s all that really matters.  You and I,
we know that, don’t we?  We learned it here,
in the book of the heart, year after year after year.