Welcome
Sometimes just before sleep, a memory returns, after being forgotten all day, of what I did first that morning.
I might have eaten mulberries from a tree beside the river or watched a coyote cross the levee trail at sunrise. My creature self has the sense that these are the most important experiences of the day, and before dawn the next day I tell them—them and whatever else comes—to my notebook.
Otherwise, it’s easy to lose an idea. Writing it down, before I do anything else that day, honors the thought and allows it to grow. While the morning writing is mostly about drafting poems, and more like taking dictation from my least civilized self, what’s posted here is written at other times of day, when I’m wide awake. These are vignettes, short exploratory pieces I try to work into something coherent and whole that might be a point of departure for a larger, later work.
My practice at both stages of writing has been very private. But twice in my life I have had the chance to put short essays before an audience of readers with regularity and have been rewarded for it. It helps the writing get done if I know someone might read it. So here, for now, I put my words forward again, outside of paid work, without expectations.
He might have been a teacher
My sister and I have just had another birthday, so I think over what I know of the autumn of our birth and my father’s travel south at that time. He drove to Baton Rouge alone to begin his first semester of graduate school at Louisiana State University. His Naval Defense Education Act fellowship would cover the family living expenses—modestly, but fully. My mother’s parents had given them a good used car and a gas card.
Ways of growing zinnias
I know something about this, having done it most of my life, sometimes even for pay. The first way, the way most people do it—people who know enough about seeds and what happens with them when you add soil, sunlight and water—is this: You open up a patch of soil in spring in a sunny place, clear off the weeds and fork it up a bit, and you dig very shallowly, and you scatter the seeds from the cheapest packet of mixed colors you can find.
Crying for a vision
I’ve settled back into the doldrums of routine work, and the quiet drizzle and mist hanging over the hills to the southeast this morning draw me back to the fog and tall conifers of Marys Peak. Two weeks ago while we were in Corvallis we drove up to that place, the highest point in the Oregon Coast Range and a Kalapuyan vision quest site, and walked the trails.
Miss Lizzie
All my life a friendly, ageless woman has accompanied me, waiting for me to grow up and meet her for coffee. I would visit her whenever I went to my grandparents’ house in Alton, Illinois, where she lived in a book on a shelf upstairs in my aunt’s old bedroom.
Walking an old dog home
The gravel road north of us is quiet enough and crooked enough that I can go for a walk at 7 in the morning and not be bothered by traffic. Only a handful of people travel this way toward town for work or to take children to school or camp. They slow down as they pass, considering the dust, and wave from their Toyotas and Suburus.
Magicicada
Outliers from Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas have been calling from the edge of the woods this week. I look for them on tree trunks at 5:30 a.m. and midnight, but so far I have found only their shells, five so far, all on the railing of the old front deck.
A poem, a day
Since January 17, I have been writing one new poem every morning. First thing, before I face the tasks of the day. These are drafts of poems, some with more potential than others, but I take them all.
Three days on Orcas
Islands, by their remoteness, by the water barrier, have a tidal draw for the curious and those who seek a sense of protection. For me, they are an antidote to the overwhelm of cities. Or maybe what I’m really seeking are boundaries to help me order my thoughts.
Santa Sabina
I noticed after a day—and I realized this suddenly, in a conversation with one of the other workshop writers—that my recall of names and words came easily again. I woke every morning and remembered: I was in San Raphael, in what had been a convent; I was reframing my story of California.
Florida Canyon
In my mind, Florida Canyon is where you live now, among the Mexican blue oaks and agaves and native cotton along the stream, needing neither food nor rest, with the ladder-backed woodpeckers and Bewick’s wrens for company.
Eating in silence
My bowl is cup-sized, hand-thrown with horizontal ribs formed by the fingers of the potter. It has a blue matte glaze like the bloom of my blueberries and just a shade brighter. The perfection of the container for the contents delights me.
Snake in a glue trap
I should say up front that the snake in question was a literal snake that was in fact stuck in a glue trap for several days and that, though I did not set the trap, I freed the snake (a garter snake), and it made its way, apparently unharmed, through the leaf litter toward a better den on a warm afternoon the week of Thanksgiving.