~Sweet Tea
Beneath ivy and
outdoor fans, the Southern heat
liquifies ice cubes. ~me
~Grandparents’ Garden
It’s been years since I’ve
run through rows of tall cornstalks
bare-footed and free. ~me
~Waiter Gossiping
“Ate his sundae first,
stayed skinny as a fence post
–every day, same thing.” ~me
Today I’m working on a story, editing, and I’m also thinking about the economy of haiku. Maybe I’m procrastinating. But a few minutes ago, as I looked at words I’d written, and moved a paragraph up higher and looked at it some more, I felt the urge to say something quickly and to know that someone had read it. Call it breaking isolation or instant gratification or something else—I don’t know. I do know that I’ve been longing to go out with my camera, and somehow I just haven’t found the time to set up my gear at night. Haiku can be a snapshot for me—satisfying that photographic urge—a complete image in words. And when I post to my haiku clubs or twitter or this blog, I know someone has heard me, someone has seen what I’ve seen. Now I can get back to work.
That first glimpse of sea
through the narrow path in dunes
–do you remember?
If the mountain sleeps
this humming sun would wake her
–dancing on meadows.
Even the river
with its steel gray loneliness
–responds to the wind.
The trash shed looks like
a hungry bear’s had at it
–and raccoons love that.
I’ve been in North Carolina visiting family for a week. And now, just back, I’m sitting at my desk catching up on some blog posts about writing. I know that I’m getting ready to start something new, and I decided to free-write for a minute after reading quotes of writing advice from Stephen King and Charles Bukowski. Here’s what came to me.
This is salt of the earth work, nose to the grindstone work, it’s work for strong wrists and forearms muscled thin with the wrestling of it all. There’s nothing removed and prissy about it. You must get down to the earth and hear the rivers move past rock and feel the wearing away of creek banks thick with bramble and brush. There are briars in the passages to where you’re going. You will brush up against them. Their pricks will remind you of when you were young, and that sometimes may be the clue to where you’re headed. Other times you must leave all of that as it tugs—and roam off into another landscape, one you’ve never seen. That is where you find what brought you here in the first place.
Thrilled that my poem was chosen as a winner in The New York Times Haiku Challenge by Marie Howe, the state poet of New York. Please click on the link below.
The New York Times Haiku Challenge
Photo: Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
Since 2002, NYC has celebrated Poem In Your Pocket Day. Several years ago on April 24, I realized I’d left home without a poem, so I wrote this and put it in my pocket.
Poem In Your Pocket Day
After lunch in the cafe, I wrote a poem
on a napkin—my pen sinking into soft
paper, words framed by a design like linked
chain, raised and skirting the edge,
neat as a hem.
The poem is for my jacket. This low-tech
activity—a city scribbling words and folding
them, pocket-sized, ready to walk a block
to the corner, run for the bus, hop on
the subway.
These are the words I’m wearing today. Moving
with them, I contemplate the trailing off—how
they can follow us when connections drop or
crackle to a halt. Words like hem or him,
link and chain, words like paper. These are folded
in my pocket, beside the word you.
Two of my poems are finalists in The New York Times Haiku Contest celebrating National Poetry Month, and I’m thrilled. There were thousands of entries, and the poems that I read online were beautiful, thoughtful, playful and so very New York. Poetry still matters here, and I find it heartening that The New York Times celebrates this fact. Day jobs fuel the words and commutes inspire. Poets write in cafes, on the subway, in cabs, while walking in the park or waiting for the light at a street corner in Midtown. We’re everywhere. And that’s one reason, even as the city changes so quickly, that I still love New York.
Here are a couple of poems that I posted last week on the haiku-a-day page. The first was inspired by a photograph, a long exposure image by a North Carolina photographer, of fireflies. The second is pure Woodstock. Obviously, I’m dreaming of summer while watching the first hints of spring arrive after a very long winter.
The neon fireflies
incendiary lovers
–craving darkened sky.
The mountain mist floats
above coves of valley pine
–lifted on birdsong.
The New Yorker. February 10, 2014.
My Manipulated Instagram of Tomer Hanuka’s “Perfect Storm.”
Yesterday I saw a recent issue of The New Yorker perched on a coffee table against several urban shelter magazines. The cover made me look twice and then move closer, and after finding the artist’s name on The New Yorker site today, the reasons that this illustration commanded my complete attention—even making me stop and grab my notebook and write about it when I had the first free moment—are so bound to New York’s brownstones and grids that I had to explore the provenance of the drawing. Then friends started talking to me online, unrelated to my discovery, which I didn’t mention, about the latest issue—although that’s for another story. This essay, though, is about how ideas find us. Winter is almost over, and it’s been one of the coldest and grayest and snowiest since I moved to NYC in 1991. Staying indoors more than usual has me thinking about apartments and the ways they influence our lives as New Yorkers, especially New Yorkers who are artists and writers.
Something about NYC real estate speaks to us in a very specific ways. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook yesterday while standing, literally standing because this is New York, between meetings.
Lying in bed, looking past the clanking radiator and layers of paint, possibly 100 years of layers, stacked on one windowsill, you’re living in the same conditions in which Pollock, O’Hara, Basquiat, Ginsberg lived and, inspiring for many of us, Patti Smith still lives. If you’re lucky enough not to look at a brick wall, snow might be gathering on rooftops that are stair steps of story—softened, uneven, timeless.
In two winter scenes, the light and terrain inspire me in opposite ways. Simplicity and texture, monochrome landscape to color and shape. On two different days, during this weekend in the country, the beginning of March speaks.
A snow field’s brilliance
shines through bare farmhouse windows
–no color, no sound.
Shapes of ice transform
the few snow-free surfaces
–into Pucci print.
A second polar vortex swept over NYC, along with the first big snowstorm of 2014, and, while I didn’t know this at the time, the winter that never stops was on the way. I’d begun the day scrolling Twitter—checking news, joining morning chatter about minus-degree temperatures—when I saw a photograph, a detailed close-up, of fashion blogger Bryanboy’s snow boots. Boots were on my mind, like they are every January. Salt trucks and icy sidewalks don’t dampen the lust for fashion in NYC, and I wanted a piece of the winter action. After a quick one-two message (Bryanboy was kind to get back to me), I knew the brand.
Armed with that knowledge, and my own seriously warm Canadian Pajar’s, I headed from the West Side to the East Side for an appointment. First sinking into a snow bank, then nearly slipping in the street, I finally made it into the building and noticed a woman’s chunky boots. She noticed mine. They were exactly the same, with different trim. I smiled at the silent exchange. Even bundled up and battered by the wind, some of us carry on and appreciate shoes. The moment passed, and since I didn’t know her twitter handle, I couldn’t tweet an @ message later, include a photo, and say, “Look at Bryanboy’s Tori Burch. Aren’t they fabulous?” But I wanted to—and what we didn’t know then, was that the city would soon sell out of boots. We were lucky to be wearing the ones we already owned.
Me in My Pajar
——
Bryanboy in Tory Burch and NYC Blizzard
