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Monthly Archives: December 2014

cairn1

The photo was taken on Sedona’s Bell Rock some time ago. At lower left is the shadow of the wayfarer’s head. In the midground is a cairn, a trail marker of stones cylinderized with baling wire. From each cairn not the beginning nor end the wayfarer ought to be able to see the cairn preceding and the cairn following. As long as there is a cairn in sight, then, the wayfarer is never lost; and, indeed, at upper right the wayfarer sees the next cairn on the journey.

There have been 676 posts in the two years of this blog, whose anniversary is today. Once Sam Shepard was asked how many plays he had written, and his answer was “Too damn many.” I saw his Fool for Love at a Phoenix-local theater about twenty years ago. It was good and weird.

I am going to use the love I have for making posts in this blog to incentivize the completion of a manuscript I started, with editorial help from award-winning poet David Chorlton, more than a year ago. I will be limiting my blog posts to one a week until the manuscript is finished.

After I finish the manuscript (working title: Natural Distractions), I’ll resume regular posting until the end of the year. Then I’ll finish the second manuscript I’ve got hanging fire, for a children’s book with the working title Sizegirl and Cloudboy. Again, I’ll be one-a-weeking this blog till that ms. is in the rearview mirror.

Somewhere in there should be Volume II of LIVES of the Eminent Poets of Greater Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve done at least as many poet page/profiles as I did for Volume I–declaring victory and bundling it all up has been long overdue. Disorganization has been the bugaboo of my creative existence.

In addition to, and aside from, all that, my realio trulio creative heart’s desire is making large-scale versions of the best of my pages. I hope to do at least one such in time for entry into the Glendale Arts Council’s juried show I enter every year.

That about sums up Where To, conceptually anyway. Please wish me luck and wherewithal, dear Reader!

i walked up the gravel to quail run
toward where quail run becomes rio mesa

the glory of the verde valley spread before me
showing autumn’s startling trees on the rock backdrop of orangey reds

and then the land found my mind and offered a trade
i would be the land and the land would be me long as we could take it

thinking it was a mind game i said sure
and suddenly i was the valley

and since i was all the eyes of the valley i could be everywhere
looking above through a cooper’s hawk or on the jackrabbit ground

and being the ground as well and the rocks i the valley had such flex and heft
i the valley absorbed sunshine drew in cee-oh-two exhaled oxygen
slid fractionally on my tectonics blew my wind over my red rocks and swirled magic dust
clipclopped my delicate fawn’s hooves across beaverhead flats and
ran my fawn over
with a drunken trucker’s truck

and this made me aware of the ugly unaware i contained
the shove-aside dark human trolls planning and executing atrocities on my soil
the petrochemical seepage the pushpushpush dig and gouge and dump

and it was too much at once and with a jolt i was back in my body
and the land was back in itself

and i found that the land had left me a message not quite translatable
but including you must remember and find another way

Yesterday’s post included a page in progress, the double acrostic for which is “Reversals Rehearsal.” By sheer happenstance I put the page in a notepad from four years ago, and found to my amused startlement that back in August of 2010 I’d also done a reversal-oriented acrostic, “Rotarepo Reversal Lasrever Operator.” Here they are together, first the Then page and then the Just-Now (I finished “Reversals Rehearsal” less than three hours ago).

001

002Visually the first page seems more tepid and timid than the second one. On the other hand, the second page is more sloppy and jungly than the first one.

Here is the first one’s acrostic:

Rotorepo Reversal Lasrever Operator

Ravel played–fearlessly–upon the cello
Odd glides, and gearless, like a wheeling rap
Tor/Reveals & revs and Engine with a swelled toe
Anticipating fervor from the captor
Rejoindings are from spicy to vanilla
Ecstaticburgh to Dullsville Ajo, AZ to Monserrat
Processes under the aegis of Symmetry go
Oscillantly; the bulrushes wave in the mirror

Here’s the other:

Reversals Rehearsal

Roly-poly M E C H A N I S M S make the world go rounder
Even when you’re plummeting before you hit the ground you’re
Va–RRROOOOMED aloft as gear & motor sync & then enmesh
Exogenous as a woman wearing a caleche
ROUND the buswheels ROUND the corner ROUND the Sports Arena
Schwarzchild radii describe where relatives go tweener
As the whirling world revolves a visual précis
Lets lay & learned folk alike infer a starry sea
Sometimes celestial events turn starmass hyperreal

Curious that both poems involved a revving engine. The “rev” in Reversal, perhaps?