more NaPoWriMo

#8

Phoebe , nestmaking


Slatey grey on the tilted head,
brown dark shiney eye thoughtful
facing camera
absorbed expression on her face
fiber filament of last summer bindweed
clutched in beak
ready to add to cushion
the mudspattered floor
on the edge of the ceiling.

NaPoWriMo

stands for National Poetry Writing Month... I'm still trying to catch up. Should have 9 poems by now, but this is only the 7th, and it's a revision of one I started several years ago, about the grounds at our Provincial House in Los Altos Hills California:

What the Angel Saw

God planted a garden in the high hills west,

and there placed the black tailed deer

in the cool of morning to stroll by the lake,

arch their necks in the breeze

where the fountain shines a spray of water

on their fine fur.

Out of the coyote ground

grew trees for a throne,

their months each one twelve

fruit produces,

grapefruit, apricot, lemon, orange,

leaves for medicine,

eucalyptus oil to light

my lamps.

Underground hoses rise to quench the garden

with crystal clear as water.

Beyond there, the brown hills divide

and become the abode of millionaires.

There shall curse a deserving nothing.

The middle of dawn flowed,

light growing

down the steepness,

giving life to the river in me,

thanks to the Angel who opened the blinds.

National Poetry Month

I should have written six poems by now; however, the first five days were so busy that I couldn't . Now I am fighting inertia.

So I will post five poems "from before" and add a sixth one, hot off the press:

#1

Typo

One slip of the finger and

Divine becomes Diving

Deep in my dream to the floor of the flooded cellar

Through a window to the green sheen

Of chlorine depths of the swimming pool

At Lenape Park

Where I opened my eyes to stinging wonder

Of watching my white wrinkled feet

Flutter like flippers

And back to Harry Potter somersaulting into

The lake and down to the lair of the grindylow

And back to myself,

Sprinting off a cliff into Crater Lake,

Turquoise and freezing

Gritty grey crumbled lava clouding my eyes

As I plunge further, further,

To the center of breath.

#2

The Stone Dog

My father and I

Wander the Protestant cemetery

Oaklands

Examining the tombstones

And a flat stone

With a life size stone dog

A Labrador

Keeping watch

Over the bones of his owner.

I’m small enough to ride him,

And I do, while the brown leaves flag me

While my father smokes and waits.

#3

Peripheral Vision

My mother can see me this way

Seam ripper stole her center

Partly curly hair weather

Perennial Thyme

Capricious Apocrypha,

burning aura of clementines.

#4

Saving Stamps

candy for later

the cerulean warbler

money

my soul

#5

The Meaning of Radiance

Radiation still cooking my colon

Years after the machine

Delivered its killing light

Waves in defenseless air

Through the tissue in the wrong place

At the wrong time.

Light of sun distilled, forced

Through tunnels into funnels

Glowing the teeth of the smile of the

Child in Hiroshima.

The Meaning of Radiance

#6

Corot Blue

puckered with clouds,
Damask wards off rain
Father Hopkins, lick ink into my pen
shake blue over paper.

Advising Conference

My students are signing up for next semester's courses. I try to give them good advice about prerequisites, major requirements, and the importance of choosing alternate courses before they sit in front of the computer screen for the online registration. Most of them are very organized and come with a plan. Each year, one or two come with no clue. I wonder how their lives will unfold.

In the garden, the flowers are coming on a bit later than last year. We continue to live in a cold snap. I wonder where that expression, "cold snap" came from. Sounds like a poem.

Life in Me Like Grass on Fire

The Maryland Writer's Association has published an anthology of poems about love, and three of my poems are included in it!

I love the title, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire - and the cover art.

Garden Report, part one

The waking garden lifts my spirits

The Emperor of All Maladies

I'm reading this book right now; am about a third of the way through it. It is gripping; the story of cancer and the evolution of cancer treatment. The author, an oncologist, is an excellent writer, and he tells his story in a way that is not only understandable to a non-scientist like me, but tremendously interesting.
I don't think it's interesting to me just because of my own experience with cancer. However, I must say that I have learned more about my own struggles with anemia in this book that anywhere else.
I keep reflecting on how little my doctors told me. They told me what they assumed I could understand, but I was capable of understanding so much more. However, I did not even know what questions to ask!

More on this another day.

My Amish Family

I didn't know about my grandfather, David Kauffman, until I was 22. On the way to a family gathering that summer, my mother mentioned ( by the way) that he had been Amish. He was raised Amish, but did not join the Amish religion when he reached adulthood. Instead, he met and married my Mennonite grandmother, Fannie Denlinger. So I assume he joined the Mennonite religion. I discovered in 2006, that they attended the Kinzers Mennonite Church, and were buried in that cemetary. My grandparents died within two years of each other when my mother and her brothers were children. That, I knew. It was the Amish part, or the fact that I have a small army of Amish cousins, I did not know. I am still gradually learning more about this side of my family,
through the gracious friendship of my Mennonite first cousin Glenford. It is quite a story.
Here is a photo of my Uncle Harold Kauffman ( Mennonite) when he was teaching in an Amish school. The other photo is the back of my second cousin twice removed, Rachel Stoltzfus. The third photo is one my cousin Glenford took recently of some girls going into an Amish wedding in Perry County, PA.

Giving Talks

I've been asked to give three different talks in February, March, and April. I gave the first one this past Friday at the Survivors' Reception at the Relay for Life, which was held at the university where I teach. Relay for Life is a wonderful event held by communities all over the nation and all through the year; it's a fundraiser for Cancer research. Our students raised about $39,000 this year. Last Friday their efforts culminated in an event which involved about 200 students walking around the indoor track in our Field House from 7PM to 7AM... in relays, with lots of other activities going on at the same time. I walked with about 30 other survivors, and then spoke at their reception.

That talk wasn't too difficult to compose. I told my cancer story, which I have told in this blog back in 2009. I tailored it to them. Here are a few excerpts:

...Talking to survivors, you know and I know that cancer is not pretty. Much of the details of what cancer does to the body, and what the treatment for cancer does to the body, involves messy details. But when you are going through cancer treatment, you live with those realities every day...

...Procrastination didn’t kill me. By the time I went to the doctor and was diagnosed, the cancer had spread, so they couldn’t operate. However, I was very fortunate that the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes. So I began the journey through cancer treatment that all of you have been through. The details are different for each of us, because we had different kinds and stages of cancer, requiring different kinds of treatment. But in many ways, the experience is the same.
My cancer doctors prescribed a treatment plan in which radiation was the main weapon. I had chemo, too, but the radiation was the main weapon...

...You all know that the main side effect of all radiation is fatigue. I had that, but also the radiation gave me such out of control diarrhea that, three weeks in, I had to stop teaching for the semester.
I also didn’t realize how dehydrated I was getting until I woke up one morning with impaired vision. My vision was so blurred that I couldn’t read. I went to the eye doctor, who told me there was nothing wrong with my eyes… it was my brain, suffering from the dehydration.
I ended up in our infirmary from Feb.6 to April 8… continuing to go for treatment each day, but also getting IV fluids, and being monitored by the nurses. The doctors all told me that my vision would eventually clear up, and it finally did, in May. But up until then, I thought I would never read again, or drive again, or teach again. It was a very hard time for me.
However, the treatment killed the cancer. I’ve been cancer free, with clear PET scans, ever since...

...Something no one told me when I was going through treatment was about the radiation damage, the long term damage. I found out about this, when the damage began to show up, and then, when I read the cancer boards and blogs on the Internet. So many other persons have the same kind of damage...

...that most of us as survivors are just glad to be alive and to be functioning. To go back to living a normal, ordinary life again is what we really want, and we treasure those ordinary, undramatic days that we have been given...

Then I read them three poems, two of which were posted earlier. The third one, "Henrietta Lacks as Rose Red," is still really unfinished. I told them her story and read them two stanzas of the poem. It is a hard poem to read:

Henrietta Lacks as Rose Red

She kept her nails short, but she painted them crimson.
Toes, too, so that even at the autopsy, the assistant saw the chipped red on the dead toes and knew this was a woman who loved beauty and color,
Who loved Clover, Virginia and its fragrant foliage,
Who loved to cook spaghetti for her hungry cousins,
Who loved to go dancing.

From what furnace of hell did that cancer come,
That viscious vicious virulent voracious purple grape
Called Adenocarcinoma?
Was it radiated by her husband’s philandering
Returned
Before the Hopkins radium tried to kill it?

So that was the first talk.

The second talk is coming up on March 23. I'm talking to a parish group about poetry about Jesus' passion and death. I've given this talk before, so I am just revising and refining it, perhaps finding some better poems.

The third talk is April 3, at the Theology Honor Society Induction at the Mount. I have not yet settled on a topic. I know that the subject will be something about poetry and spirituality, but I am not yet sure what. Today I was toying with the idea of talking about the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, but I really don't know enough about his poetry to do justice to it in a talk. I am also toying with the idea of giving a dramatic reading of my friend Kate Daniels' long dramatic poem "In the Marvelous Dimension" but haven't really decided yet.

In the meantime, I need to return to paper grading and journal reading, and to my own writing.

I am ashamed at how little I have written in these months.

We had five inches of snow last night; just when we thought Spring was imminent. The daffodils are up about two inches in my garden, but now they are covered with snow again.

Snowing

We've been "passed over" by the snowstorms that crippled the Northeast over Christmas and through most of January, but the latest storm hit us.

Only eight inches... not so bad.

Heavy, wet snow - very beautiful.

I think of the first two stanzas of an old poem I learned as a child:

The First Snowfall

by James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

Found the iPod !

After three days of obsessive searching, it turned up. Under the bed. What does this say about the state of my scrambled brains?

I'm so relieved. I'm also very happy to be able to finish listening to Henning Mankell's Wallander

novel, One Step Behind. It's a page turner... what should I call that when I am listening to it? It's a Swedish police procedural; the hero, Kurt Wallander, is a dynamic character, and the plot is gripping. This is the fifth Wallander novel I've read/listened to.

I Lost my iPod this afternoon...

What a sense of loss. I had it in my skirt pocket - stupid - shallow pocket - and somewhere between my office at school and the car, it slid out.

I've looked everywhere... including going back over to the Mount to retrace my steps, and all through the car with a flashlight, but to no avail.

If some student has picked it up, I hope they turn it in. When they see the type of music stored on it,they will know that it belongs to an old coot:

Christmas music from Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.... Joan Baez in Concert... The Beatles... Fleetwood Mac... whole books like The Help, and several Wallander murder mysteries, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince... podcasts of music from the Taize Community... clearly not your

undergrad's choice of stuff!

Photos of birds and flowers and gardens and Cape May...

I realize how attached I have become to this little machine.

Telling myself I can live without it...

Zick Dough Hits the Spot!

To the left you see a Titmouse chowing down on the Zick Dough I have stuffed into the top of the suet feeder on my windowsill.

Zick Dough is a concoction devised by Julie Zickafoose, one of my favorite naturalists and bloggers. It's made of melted peanut butter and lard mixed together with oats, flour, cornmeal, and Chick Starter. The birds love it.

I have had great entertainment watching them go for it.
I keep waiting for a Bluebird or a Robin to find it.

January in Emmitsburg

Some new poems

In the weeks of resting up, I have been writing. Getting another manuscript together. I think this one will be called Incremental Losses. If that's not too mordant.

Here are two new poems:

What you don’t know won’t hurt you

What you don’t know won’t hurt you

I said as I cleaned my dirty glass

Then you will see what will happen

Said the old woman, shaking her head.

I said as I cleaned my dirty glass

It’s time to get my vision checked.

Said the old woman, shaking her head,

It’s only been five years, after all.

It’s time to get my vision checked

Watch the blurry doctor shake his head

It’s only been five years, after all.

Plenty of time for an eye to go blind.

Watch the other doctor shake her head,

The woman-trouble doctor with bad news:

Plenty of time for a tumor to grow wild

Beyond its house and spread out to the yard.

The woman-trouble doctor with bad news:

It’s only been ten years since your last test:

Beyond its house it’s spread out to the yard.

Then you will see what will happen.

It’s only been ten years since your last test

Said the woman-trouble doctor, shaking her head.

Five years blur and ten years blood ignored.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you.

A Sudden Fear gripped me

Big black wore a roman collar

loud haranguing voice gripped my plackey heart

griped about my mistakes

groped in my head for control, contrition,

grouped its army of righteousness around me…

My clotted heart murmers an incantation:

Fear far fair fewer fever

sudden sodden

Would that a bucket of water would melt you…

Would that saying your secret name

Like Rumpelstiltskin

would force you to flee

from my memory

Where have I been?

I kept wondering why I was so tired... and then I began to get short of breath when climbing the hill from the parking lot at school to my office... and then I could not get warm... and then I was so itchy...
Finally I went to my doctor and she had some blood drawn. Turns out I have severe anemia from bleeding from radiation damage from the cancer treatment. My hemoglobin was 7 -- 13 is normal. Two days later I passed out in the hall at home and scared everybody, so I had an ambulance ride to the hospital... hemoglobin level down to 6.9. So they kept me overnight and gave me two pints of blood.
So the hemoglobin went up to 11, and I felt much better.
The doctor told me I had to take it really really easy, and eat spinach and red meat, and take iron pills... all of which I have been doing since these misadventures in December.
It was the most peaceful and quiet Christmas I ever had.

I'm better, but the hemo still isn't up to where it needs to be.
But school starts on Monday, and I will be happily back in the classroom, teaching Freshman Seminar, Mod Civ, and Women of Faith.

This tree is naked now

but less than a month ago, it was shimmering.

More on my reading life

I ask my first year students to write about their reading life in one of their first journal entries.
Their responses tell me about the lovers of reading, and those who hate to read - and who, consequently, are in for a hard time in college.

Of my own reading life... I have always loved to read. Right from the beginning. I wrote a poem about those first words in first grade:

Pick it up and read,

sang the child's voice beyond the wall.
The first word was SAID.
Three children -
a boy and two girls,
played with a dog and a cat.
White children with brown hair
whose plain names excited me
to hear in the air from my own mouth.

I had trouble telling
through from thought,
though from thorough.

My father picked me up at school.
We walked by the statue of Saint Agnes,
through the cement arch
from schoolyard to street.
I thought about knowing how to read SAID
though, by itself, it was lying alone in a corner,
but put it behind someone,
and it opens its mouth to a thorough coverage
of the news of the day.

I remember my delight at learning to read. I've been reading rather indiscriminately ever since.

When I got to college, I was sorry I had had such minimal guidance in choice of books, and consequently, such a dearth of classics under my belt. I have made up for lost time since then,in my years teaching literature.

In the past two years, I have discovered and come to love the book blogs and podcasts I can get on my iPod. One of my favorites is Books on the Nightstand.

My Reading Life

A number of my Facebook friends have been posting this list. I decided to examine my own reading life to see how many I have read.

The question:

"Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here (Does anyone REALLY believe this statement??). Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. "

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible ( over the years, in small pieces)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( maybe not all the histories)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell


22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis


37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert


53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens


82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas


98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Mom died

the night of October 6. She was 95, and was very debilitated, but she still knew me. I was glad that I was able to drive down to Baltimore and be with her. I had never been with anyone at their moment of death, and it was both intimate and mysterious.

She and I certainly had our ups and downs over the years, especially when I was in my teens and twenties, but in these last fifteen years, all of that was put away.

There was so much about her as a person that I never knew. She was orphaned in childhood, and would never talk about her first twenty years. Only when I was in my twenties did I learn that her father was raised Amish... and only in the last four years did I learn ( from my cousins)

that I have a small army of Amish second cousins. So many questions I wished I had asked her

when she still had her memory.