Nest cam update

All three eggs have hatched, and the little ones are doing well -  they are already bigger than they are in this photo.   I continue to watch, fascinated.

Couplets Blog Post Tour continues

(photos of some of the WOM-POs -womens poetry list serv group - at the AWP in 2011.)


This has been a wonderful project all through National Poetry Month! I'm so glad I was part of it.

This link lists the stops on the tour for this week just ending:


 http://www.upperrubberboot.com/couplets-a-multi-author-poetry-blog-tour/

Doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me
when I'm sixty-four?                             ( Beatles song)

John Lennon never made it to sixty-four, but here I am, today. 

How did this happen?

I can still remember five:

Couplets Blog Tour for National Poetry Month

Today, Sue Burke has posted an essay/memoir by me on her blog. Here is the link:
http://mount-oregano.livejournal.com/122462.html

Another nest cam report

Things improved for the red-tails.  Still cold up there ( 34 and blustery) but snow is gone, and baby has survived. Two more to hatch.

Photo from Cornell:

Crazy Weather

Is it really the end of April?   Cold and rainy here, but four inches of snow at Cornell University in Ithaca, where I, and about 6,000 other people, am ( are?) anxiously watching the nest cam of the red-tailed hawks.  Newly hatched eggs, and the female hunkered down over them on the snowy nest.
Thirty-one degrees.

Couplets Blog Tour for National Poetry Month

Carol Berg interviewed me on her blog  for National Poetry Month.  The interview is posted today.

Visit Carol's blog at:

http://carolbergpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/04/coupletstour-carol-berg-hosts-anne.html

Distractions and Procrastination

I should be either writing poems or grading papers.

Instead, I am indulging my addiction to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology live-stream nest cam of the Red-tailed Hawk couple and their soon to hatch eggs:

When I'm not staring at the hawks, I am surfing the web to try to see if Ellen Bryant Voigt is doing any summer poetry workshops, and if she is, can I afford to go to one.  Can't find any.  I am still waiting to hear from the MacDowell Colony, if I got one of their residencies  --- I have just about given up on that. Sigh.

I will try to wrench myself away now, and get down to business.

National Poetry Month - Couplets

In the April 14th Couplets blog tour,Elizabeth Barrette is hosting me on her blog The Wordsmith's Forge. 
I wrote a very short essay about the poetry of Kate Daniels and Jane Hirschfield.

Visit Elizabeth's blog and enjoy!  http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/2273311.html

National Poetry Month - Draft Thirteen

photo from TripodGirl.com

Intensity of Fragrance

Hyacinth,

Jonquil,

Lilac,

Lily of the Valley,

Viburnum,

Peony,

Mock Orange.

Incense of Spring,

Nothing in all the world of summer

Smells like you.

Too heady for me to keep

n my bedroom,

You clot the air with sweetness.

I will dream of bees.

National Poetry Month - Fragment for today

This is all I can manage.  I'm aiming for a villanelle, eventually.

George Frederick Watts   Hope   1885

#12

Hope strums her harp and sits astride the world;
  the kerchief keeps her, catlike, blind, alert -
around the spring-gold ball her knees are curled.

National Poetry Month: two more drafts

#10  Fanny Denlinger Kauffman

My mother’s mother died from

Septicemia

In 1922

Two weeks after she birthed

My uncles

At home.

Delirious, tossing in the bed,

Then dead,

Stiff like marble

When they lifted my

Seven year old mother up

To kiss her goodbye.

Sepsis

Toxic response to infection

Pathogens

Raging from

A bed full of childbirth,

 A barely noticed cut.

Septic

Blood gone bad

Coursing poison through the body

Poisoned muscles screaming pain

Poisoned heart slowing down

Worse than arsenic,

Body turned against itself

Still , we can't stop it.

 ( photo from Google Images)

#11

Waiting for the Grosbeak

Grosbeak -  teutonic lumpy word

For gorgeous bird,

But the adjectives redeem

Blue Grosbeak,

Evening Grosbeak,

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak.

Rose-Breast, each day now I wait for you

To meander by my window

On your way north

Before the Beebalm blooms.

I keep my feeder full

Of Sunflower seeds, your favorite,

Hoping I am home

When you appear.

National Poetry Month - Poem #9

I'm still one day behind...

( photo from Audubon Magazine)

( photo from smedesphoto.com)

At Fort Clifton Park, Colonial Heights Virginia

We walked the boardwalk through the little swamp

almost at twilight

almost at closing time

for the nature preserve.

In the quiet

sudden

 flash of buttery yellow

and the Prothonotary Warbler

arrived

three feet in front of us

on a crusty branch,

to feed her flapping fledgling.

Unmindful of us

paralyzed with joy

to see her

so close

so close.

( photo by David Lindsey)

National Poetry Month Poem #8

at five o'clock Easter afternoon, my friend Maureen, creator of this watercolor, died.

Weeding

Wheelbarrow dumped

Hay, Wild Strawberry, Bishops Weed,

New Crabgrass,

Make way for my friend Maureen

newly planted in

Paradise

National Poetry Month - catching up

Here are seven poems for the first seven days of April. Actually, they are shabby drafts that will, hopefully, someday become poems:

#1

Nest Cam

( photo from Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

It’s 38 degrees and blustery

on the campus at Cornell.

On top of a light post in the parking lot,

the red-tailed hawk broods

over her nest of three eggs.

Her mate spells her every several hours.

Fluffed up, looking smaller and younger

than she is, she also looks calm but alert.

Traffic doesn’t bother her, nor the lights

in the partking lot.

Brisk winds tousle her gorgeous feathers.

She turns her head to the sound

of car alarms and crows.

Some recently added evergreen spriggs

add color to the brown stick nest.

 From her brown and white dappled feathers.

the red tail sticks out sharply, stiff and rusty.

#2  Turtlephobia

I know someone who fears turtles,

The tiny ones, green quarters, I used to buy at Woolworths

and nurture in my childhood,

the shy brilliant box ones,

making their way across Route 40,

the snapping ones

sunning themselves in the ponds

at Blackwater.

She thinks they are snakes under cover.

Their plodding unnerves her –

might be plotting.

She, who plows through life like a bulldozer,

Reactive,

unmindful of her own shell,

huffing, watchful,

on the defense.

#3   The Blue Flowers of April

The blue flowers of April

showed up three weeks early this year,

 starry stems of Ajuga,

 bells of grape hyacinth,

thumbnails and thibles of creeping phlox.

Even the blue butterfly, fragile

and penny sized.

 Virginia Bluebells with their

tumblers of Spring.

 

#4   As the darkness clears away

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

Melody of minor notes and

Haunting incense,

Mysteries in the morning

As the color returns to the world.

#5   Camera Obscura

Chamber of darkness

 little known room,

Mysterious, remote,

secluded, cryptic

device,

but able to capture an image

and project it

onto paper

or onto an oval table

in the center of a dark room.

Large ones

resided in domed sheds,

entertaining  

the viewers inside,

who saw a remarkably accurate –

 but slightly darker –

 reflection of whatever its pinprick of light

observes,

with an almost imperceptible

 double image.

#6

Theremin

Weird and funny

Waves of sound

Gathered like invisible cobwebs

By the hand of a deft musician

of physics.

Therein lies the pheromone,

The vitamin,

The ermine

of music.

 

#7

Holy Saturday

“He will revive us after two days;

 on the third day he will raise us up,

 to live in his presence.

 Let us know, let us strive to know the LORD;

 as certain as the dawn is his coming…”  1 Hos 6:1-6

If Macrina could argue Gregory out of his grief,

All the while softpedaling her own whistled breath,

So can I calm my sister with my hand on her sharklike shoulderblades

Sharpened by cancer.

There’s a land of mild and homey
,not milk and honey,

Waiting for us across the lake.

Where every garment rolled in blood

Will turn to grass stains and pollen powder.

Celia Lisset Alvarez

The website  Upper Rubber Boot Books URB is hosting "Couplets - a multi-author poetry blog tour" for National Poetry Month. 

Today I am hosting Celia Lisset Alvarez, a wonderful poet from Miami Florida.

Her blog location is:  http://writingwithcelia.blogspot.com/

Her post for  my blog is  "Poetry of the Urban Pastoral"  :

Poetry of the Urban Pastoral

Having lived all my life in urban Miami, I often feel at odds with the majority of poets, who continue to find inspiration in pastoral themes and landscapes that I can only imagine. How does one know the names of the flowers that grow in the back yard, the names of trees and birds, the sound of silence, if the back yard is paved in concrete and separated from a busy street by an aluminum fence?

It might be odd to think of Miami as an unnatural landscape; after all, isn’t it a tropical paradise? Down here, don’t we all roll out of our hammocks and into the ocean, and spend our days sipping mojitos on the sand? If one thinks of Miami apart from the beach at all, it’s only to imagine pastel-colored Art Deco hotels lined up against the sand like sharps and flats on a keyboard. In reality, however, Miami-Dade County is a vast urban and suburban sprawl where the majority of spaces are crowded and paved. The beaches and certain other oases, like Coral Gables or Coconut Grove, do little to mitigate the overwhelming traffic jams of the Palmetto Expressway or the cemented front lawns of Hialeah.

Where’s my Tintern Abbey? Such a landscape changes one’s approach to poetry. I don’t often write poems that I feel can be described as “contemplative,” since contemplation is a mode I seldom experience. The poems of the city are not necessarily what one would call antipastoral, either, since when one does find openings to the natural world it’s difficult not to sentimentalize them. I prefer the term “urban pastoral,” a way of finding meaning in the urban spaces that surround us.

photo:

Sunset at Antonio Maceo Park, in the heart of Miami.

Here is a wonderful example of the urban pastoral from Miami poet Campbell McGrath, an excerpt from “Nights on Planet Earth”:

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a

familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars,

a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color,

laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or

canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful

gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan

when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can

neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping

champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of

peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander

                    alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

Here you see the city landscapes imbued with possibilities, much as natural landscapes are in the pastoral tradition. Though he doesn’t mention Miami in this poem, one can see here the poetry that emerges from a life in cities—McGrath has lived in Chicago and Washington D.C. as well as in Miami.

In my own writing, I don’t necessarily always find the redemptive qualities of this city, nor do I idealize it the ways other do. Yes, it is a tropical paradise, a multicultural capital. But it is also poor and dirty, congested and contested. Nevertheless, it defines us in both positive and negative ways. I drive through Hialeah, Miami’s sister city, often, on my way to work in Miami Gardens or to visit my in-laws. Some days the drive is depressing:

All day long the traffic groans

like a birthing woman,

all day long and all night, too.

This is the city that never sleeps,

that works all day. 

The old men, too tired to stand or sit,

wait on their haunches

for the liquor store to open.

In a few hours they turn into beer bottles

             girdled in brown paper bags, scratched-off

lotto tickets, spit thick as bird shit.

They go back to the dog track,

to Mango Hill, to their daughter’s houses. 

The women sigh like bus brakes.

There are no girls in Hialeah.

The factories stack up like cardboard boxes.

All day long they make uniforms and

artificial hips.

                                       Every corner has a clinic,

a convenience store, a gas station, a fast-food pit.

At other times, however, these very details can be seen another way, and the city’s industry becomes a testament to its motto, “La cuidad que progresa”—the city that progresses.

No part of the natural world exists in isolation. Though we should try desperately to preserve those places—like the Florida Everglades—that should remain undisturbed, those of us who live in urban areas need not feel as if we are closed off from them. Florida has had to pay for its reputation as The Sunshine State with overcrowded beaches and sea-grass parking lots. Even sleepy Sarasota, home of my childhood summers, now features an hour-

                                                                                                photo:  Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Florida

long wait on Midnight Pass Road to get to Siesta Beach on weekends. We can be like the egrets, and enjoy the patch of grass, or we can plant an umbrella near the water, and claim a patch of sand. Preferably, a little of both.

National Poetry Month

It's here... and I'm not ready for it.  I have three poems in process... but they are not yet ready to post.

I resolve to work on them this afternoon....

In the meantime, Spring marches on.  My lilies of the valley are almost ready to bloom: