Category: photos

Saturday Musings

Butternut squash from our CSA.


Acorn squash from our CSA.


Fall flowers.

Swedish apple pie. The recipe was my aunts’ and it is delicious.

___________________________________________________________________

Last night we went to the Indie Handicraft Exchange at the Harrison Arts Center. There are booths for local vendors to display and sell their crafts. There are also a lot of studios where local artists have their original artwork for sale and display.


We purchased three different items. Pictures are listed below.

Fun pushpins for my office by Becca White.

This beautiful journal is made by Binding Bee.

This little pillow is made by Bebito.

We also entered a raffle and won this cool, modern clock.

This clock is by Uncommon.

____________________________________________________________________

The second reading in our speaker series at school is taking place today. Today’s program features South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth. Here is a poem of hers that appeared in Nimrod.

Nocturne 2006

1
Owls call from the hollows.
This is the sound of the moon.
Light shattering like glass
across the night. Sky
filled with ghosts. They have
traveled far. This room holds
their voices like a box
of cracked bones. I remember
how to write my name
in a swirl of Arabic.
It is a secret. Sound,
like the sound of my name
in the halls where I walked
through moonlight, stepping
over soldiers facing Mecca.
The faces of the tortured are
familiar. Beneath hoods, a voice
I recognize. A muscled thigh, feet
in shackles, buttocks and kneecaps.
Skin smelling of sweat and urine.

2.
A man is named for a prophet.
He calls for him in the darkness.
Naked and cold in a cage,
his middle name is God.

Majory Wentworth

Thursday (A Precious 30 minutes to Update…) Musings






These are photos from Eagle Creek Park and Anderson Orchard. We went to both places last weekend and it was great. I love fall.

This week is proving to be just as busy as last week. I’m sure there is something I’m supposed to be doing right now besides updating my blog, but I think my brain is starting to give in to all the information I’m trying to cram in to it.

Here are a few poems that are collecting dust on my desk:

Wild Peaches

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among the wild peach trees, miles from town.
You’ll never wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and scuppernog;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.

Elinor Wylie

Devotion: Hawk

I know spring by the hawk pinning down songbirds
in my neighbor’s yard,
the little Ophelias crying in their blown-away silks
that the sky
has lied, a hedge has lied.
Then the pool
of chaos — the hawk in clench and drill and
thresh.
How quickly the song goes out of them. The
aftermath, soft,
circular. A labyrinth in ruins
I let the wind blow through
for days.
And then the rain, its soaking drench. Sun.
On the back porch slab the arterial runs of worms
dried
to a beaten silver even the stars might envy.
The trails a Silk Road crawled
body and spice
to the far cities, moist domains. And so now I stand
and the moon hangs as bold
as talon.
The black teeth whisper — narrow seeds — as the column
fills. The dead are not my worry,
slave to song.
Finch: come back. Cardinal, wren.
That one bird on that one branch
like Coltrane
on a cylinder of smack.
From high in the stacks of the power plant
where it nests,
the hawk banks
the pollen-heroined air of the neighborhood, sifts for
sparrow, muscle and throat.
Dennis Hinrichsen

Tuesday (Poetry, The Pope, and Photographs) Musings

Today I went to Starbucks and worked on my poetry. It felt great. I’ve decided that I’ve got to start managing my time better. This summer was dreadful in terms of writing and it is my fault. Beginning this week, I’m turning over a new leaf. I know all this comes with graduating from MFA and no longer having a structured writing/reading schedule. I’ve got to do it myself.

In lieu of my renewed commitment, I read the June issue of Poetry this morning. Out of the entire issue, I found two poems I liked and they were both by the Greek poet A.E. Stallings.

Tulips

The tulips make me want to paint,

Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,
Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.

The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,

The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

A Mother’s Loathing of Balloons

I hate you,
How the children plead
At first sight—
I want, I need,
I hate how nearly
Always I
At first say no,
And then comply.
(Soon, soon
They will grow bored
Clutching your
Umbilical cord)—

Over the moon,
Lighter-than-air,
Should you come home,
They’d cease to care—
Who tugs you through
The front door

On a leash, won’t want you
Anymore
And will forget you
On the ceiling—
Admittedly,
A giddy feeling—
Later to find you,
Puckered, small,
Crouching low

Against the wall.
O thin-of-skin
And fit to burst,
You break for her
Who wants you worst.
Your forebear was

The sack of the winds,
The boon that gives
And then rescinds,
Containing nothing
But the force
That blows everyone

Off course.
Once possessed,
Your one chore done,

You float like happiness
To the sun,
Untethered afternoon,

Unkind,
Marooning all
You’ve left behind:

Their tinfoil tears,
Their plastic cries,
Their wheedling
And moot goodbyes,
You shrug them off—
You do not heed—
O loose bloom
With no root
No seed.

This second one is especially brilliant. I love that line “they will grow bored/clutching your/umbilical cord.” However, the rest of the issue I found lacking. There was one poem in particular that got on my nerves a bit. It was “Agape” by Timothy Murray. To be fair, the poem wasn’t what bugged me. I liked the poem well enough, although not as much as Stalling’s poems. It was the note at the end of the poem that bothered me. First, the note was about as long as the poem. Second, this poem apparently came to the author in a dream from which he awoke and typed it into the form we see in Poetry. Forgive me for being the cynic, but what? Also, what Pope John Paul said to the author, Te Dominus amat (God loves you), seems lacking. To be perfectly frank, the note at the bottom of the poem seems to be more interesting than the poem itself.
_____________________________________________________________________

I took my camera and went for a walk in Broad Ripple today. Here are some photos from that walk._____________________________________________________________________

Collage


Galileo’s Daughter signed by Dava Sobel


The 2009 issue of New Voices. This is the yearly literary magazine put out by my community college, and I helped copy edit the final proofs.


Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens. I bought it today at out local independent music store, Luna. Today celebrated independent music stores across the country.


RJ’s birthday present. He went to Don’s Guns and shot a .37 magnum.
He gave me one of the shells.

The winners of the 2009 Poetry Contest.

Monday (winter storm warning…) Musings

We’re supposed to get some snow starting tonight and continuing through Wednesday. Indiana is different in the respect that they’ve already issued the storm warning and schools are already “closing in preparation.” This has happened in the past and the snow has gone right over us. We’ll see.
_____________________________________________________________________

I’m still thrilled with my camera. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon.



_____________________________________________________________________

Hair

In a scene in the film
shot at Bergen-Belsen days after
the liberation of the camp
a woman brushes her hair.

Though her gesture is effortless
it seems also for the first time
as if she has just remembered
that she has long hair,

that it is a pleasure
to brush, and that pleasure
is possible. And the mirror
beside which the camera must be rolling,

the combing out and tying back
of the hair, all possible.
She wears a new black sweater
The relief workers have brought,

Clothes to replace the body’s
visible hungers. Perhaps
she is a little shy of the camera,
or else she is distracted

by the new wool and plain wonder
of the hairbrush, because
on her face is a sort of dulled,
dreamy look, as if part

of hersef that recognizes
the simple familiar good of brushing
is floating back into her
the way the spiritualists say

the etheric body returns to us
when we wake from sleep’s long travel.
With each stroke she restores
something of herself, and one

at a time the arms and hands
and face remember, the scalp
remembers that her hair
is a part of her, her own.

Mark Doty