March Onward

March has been a rather hectic month.  I had the most projects due for my grad classes so far, I joined the gym, and I’ve been trying to write poetry and work on some short stories.  Truthfully, I’m not happy with any of the writing I’ve been doing, but at least I’ve been trying.  Unfortunately, this blog somehow fell behind my writing desk and I just found it again and dusted it off.  I’m going to try to start posting at least once or twice a week; I feel like that’s a good starting point for me as I try to get back into the groove of things.  We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, March has been a beautiful month for New England.  It’s hard to believe there’s going to be some snow, tomorrow!  There was one day a week and a half ago that it reached 70 degrees and I was walking around outside in shorts and flip-flops, and today I was wearing my winter jacket.  What is going on???

On that 70 degree day, I brought my rabbit outside, along with my camera, and took a few pictures that I’m going to post here.  I know it’s not much after being gone from the blogging world for over a month, but it’s something.

First Flowers

 

Curious

 

Blue Lady

 

Broken Path

 

Old Garden

 

Spring Cleaning

Bottom Dweller

Bottom Dweller

 

You are a bottom dweller of the deepest kind,

hidden away behind dark glass, scales and eyes,

where the air hugs your skin in balmy gloom.

This is black Atlantis in a basement room:

flickering jeweled bodies under secret light and

your love swimming with them amid hollow castles

and breaths of air that rise to the surface as pearls.

 

And I am no fisherman, but you are the trophy-fish of lore,

the dream that ancient Ahab could not stop searching for,

ghostly beautiful but battle-scarred, slipping slow

between veins of algae and mud-slicked stones.

Living somewhere between deep silence and earth,

because those are the biggest parts of you.

What else is there?

 

Oh, if you would surface, I would show you the sun

so it would peel away your slimed olive skin,

and you would breathe the air again.

And somewhere there would be what is real,

the father I know you used to be,

who held a little girl’s hand because she was afraid

to follow you into that monstrous myth, the silent sea.

The Mystery of Trees

The woods behind the fields are guarded by a crumbling stone wall and a maze of pricker bushes with thorns an inch long.  It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure.  Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.

They instantly reminded me of a favorite book from my younger years, The Lost Years of Merlin, and how the trees have their own language.  The wind moaning, branches creaking and shifting…it isn’t hard to imagine them speaking to each other, wondering what intruder has entered their canopy of twisting vines and groping roots.

Poetry Exercise: Rise of an Avocado Day.

Exercise taken from Creating Poetry by John Drury.  Page 19, exercise 14:

Write a poem that’s all sound, a babble of word music, letting vowels echo and consonants repeat, not worrying much about what it means.  Savor the sounds.  If this seems hard to begin, try listing as many delicious words as you can, words you can taste (and proper names too), like “crush” and “deliquescent” and “Susquehanna.”

Rise of an Avocado Day

Silver’s gossamer evanescence slips down a cherrywood banister,

whispers a phosphorescent dawn.

This is an avocado day, the sky jade over the sea, so

our lips hover over taste in hope.

This is morning that knocks on your cellar door like cymbals,

crashing, open, but listening, glistening, freshening the sun.

Dew like clear pearls between grass blades, our toes curling

under chestnut earth, the delicate doves gray against green.

Wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room, fog like

cigar smoke hovering above water.

Our breath is just an undercurrent of the breeze,

slender as invisibility

but grasping everything with the strength of a titan.

My love,

we go free with this daybreak,

we rise like robins,

rove like gypsies under mauve morning.

And we won’t return even when the moon steals the sky.

By:  Janessa Barrette

What I think:

I enjoyed this exercise because it allowed me to free-write with words that feel like honey on the tongue.  I found myself writing with a hunger for how the language sounded, not necessarily what it meant.  That’s for later revisions, not for the initial exercise.  I like “avocado day” and “wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room.”  I think the end became a bit cliche, but I’m not too bothered because I was just going with the poem’s feeling…I think there’s something to work with, here.

The Backyard

I spent a lot of time outside, today.  The weather was so beautiful that it would have been rather stupid not to do so, since I had the time.  After I got out of work at 3, I took my new camera and went for a walk in the yard, my dog trailing me (or running ahead of me), everywhere.

February 1st and 50 degrees.  There was some wind, but the chill had a nice brisk feel rather than going deep to the bone.  And the earth was moist with the scent of spring, which always tugs at my heart because of the memories attached to that smell.  They say that smell is the sense most attached to memory.

The wind's chill in the chimes

There are fields behind my house that are still used for hay in the summer months, but in the winter they take on a dead feel–there are the bare trees in the distance, and at night you can see the lights of town way off on the horizon.  I like the emptiness there more than I would like to see houses constructed and plopped down like gravestones, littered everywhere.  That’s what has happened on the rest of my road:  fields turned into driveways and huge houses nobody can afford to buy.

The trees stand between two fields

There are also woods that sit next to the field, and that’s where I spent much of my childhood.  There is a  barn that has since been rebuilt; it used to be all peeling red paint and shattered windows, with a door that hung off its hinges.  Now the only sign of what it used to be is the broken glass all around the perimeter and the silo’s foundation that sits empty.  We never owned the barn–the man who sold us our house still owns it and uses it to store lumber.  He also owns the fields behind the house and promises nobody will ever build on it; he would hate to see the last beautiful land on the road be destroyed by construction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then there is the garden.  My parents have worked extremely hard to turn the yard into a place of relaxation.  Though many of the lawn ornaments have been brought inside for the winter, there are still a few scattered in the dead grass.  My favorites are a tiny toad house and a wand that catches the sun.

The toad house

I’ve never seen a toad in that house, but I like to imagine one coming along to find it, one day.  Some people say you become too old to believe in magic, but gardens always make me think about silly “impossibilities” like talking toads and tiny people hiding in the grass.

A crystal wand

 

 

 

 

 

I know I’m very lucky to be able to step into my backyard and see beauty everyday.  Unfortunately, I too often grow bored with the scenery because I don’t look close enough.  Today I made myself look closer and am very happy with what I found.  I think a lot of us forget to look at the world with new eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them […] the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.”  -Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time