she who is named donna

Through the satellite lens
of my cellular phone I spoke
to she who is named Donna,
mother of my mother.

I picked up on the scent
of my granny's fresh-washed
skin, right before she turns
in for bed. A touch of baby shampoo.

(This was from over 2,000
miles away.) I smiled
as she said for me to enjoy
my youth and its vitality.

"Got a bit of rain, lately.
When you bringing that girl
of yours down here, Nate?
You excited?"

Trying to say Laura like
"or" instead of "are" was quite
a challenge. I murmured
a laugh and imagined

the smiles I've had at her
expense. Being a grandchild,
however, covers up
a multitude of sins -

she's forgotten all of them.

something

Ralph Ellison say:
Opalescence, contrition
that's all that lies upon life's way.
Do you, sullen poets, agree?

I feel, do not think, to be:
They're two such very odd
and natural
ways to be.

I'm diminished
finishing, finishing,
something of a polish,
a lacquer, a veneer, sacked
by salient divinity.

poem

You sweat coal,
and I'll get sold:
growing less cold, we'll use the proceeds
to procure waste-paper baskets
for the heavy-but-well-set,
the shakers who put the salt on the table -
still insisting on silver -
and the movers in love with the meaty,
the thirsty, and the able - the ones 'got skills'
and 'got time' of day and no need
for time of sleep 'cause they got
someone workin' on that too, what's more,
don't they not know it,
got weed.

Dig it up, sweety-pie.
I'll not deny you no pleasure or pain.
But the one's got my name
has got me running.

for theodore roethke

Writing about the rabbits
caught in the mower,
their guts torn up
by the unfeeling
yet not quite consciously
cruel blades, he walked
through the high yellow grasses,
feeling the heads of grain
glowing gold on his nicotine-stained
fingers, sifting the seeds, heading for the waters
that rippled clear as the glassy stones
beneath the surface, he walked
and listened, waiting to feel
death's hands cutting the bright
green flower-stems, waiting
to feel those hands
wrap their long fingers
around his swaying body,
singing in the wind.

jim harrison on sentiment in fiction

"I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass."

- Jim Harrison

when art becomes religion

"I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered--—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor."

- Woody Allen, interviewed by The Paris Review.

Read the whole interview here.

a long soak

Watching you weep today

quietly made me

hurt for you. Me looking

at you caused your water levels to rise,

and I laughed softly at the absurdity,

and wanted to smile at you, hold you,

to whisper:

You'll be on time again, love.

Missed appointments are inconvenient

to both those who missed them

and those that got missed

but your head doesn't need such shit

in it. You need a break. A rest:

A long soak in a tub

with a view of the colder waters

of Puget Sound, not to be in them;

and for an hour

not to think of sin, or of

falling face-first into the ground.

The warmth of being

held, for a whole day

of not getting

ran through the rain.