Poetry Reading

One inky black night in December,

the 11th day, falling on a Friday

We gathered round a table brightly lit from above

In a mostly dark, mostly empty, rambling old school.

Not 13, as a coven, nor 12, as disciples,

But 11 of us, men and women sharing only a keen love of words.

We sat unmoving for over an hour

Faces turned to the pages before us

Poring over One Poem comprising six stanzas,

nine lines each, covering two pages

No rhyme nor reason

than the same number 

of syllables on

equivalent lines

of each verse all told.

But even that did not hold the ballet of a Sonnet

- first two lines of 14, three of 9s, a six, a seven,

but no elevens.

Each person spoke once, a few, more than that,

some, quite often.

Moving line by line through astounding pastoral visions,

Plumbing the depths and heights

Everyone notices different treasures, connections,

delights but never dismay,

Dylan Thomas once crafted Fern Hill

Placing words in order of perfection

We read of Gold and Green and Time and him

the like never seen before or since.

One poem, the magic flashed and glimmered.

We left, back into the dark night, forever changed.

And now - here's the poem followed by a portrait of my nephew Quinn, on his birthday, which I think perfectly illustrates it:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves 

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns 

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I as huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Our of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

ASKED for a STORY on DESSERTS

     When I first moved to England I discovered a popular cake here was called Spotted Dick and as I had an Uncle Dick, straight away began to send items with this name on it to him.   Eventually, I found out that one can buy some varieties of cakes here, in a can, just like a can of pineapple slices or mushroom soup, so I determined to send one of these to him.  I went to my local supermarket and hunted all over the place for one of these cakes in a can, which I had seen before, with no luck.   I finally had to ask a shop assistant for help and at first, he was perplexed about what I was asking for and we struggled in our communication for some time.   We finally reached the point where he figured out that I what I wanted was a 'pudding in a tin' - and with that, he promptly set off to show me exactly where they were to be found.  (hint, not with the canned fruit and veg).   In England, pudding is the generic term for all desserts, including cakes and ice creams and donuts and meringues - not just the sweet, thick, custard-like dish that it is in the states.

     I attempted to make a glorious chocolate cake for one daughter, a couple of years after moving to England, which is when I discovered a few processes were somewhat different than my home-economic classes in high school had taught me.  One was the frosting part and another was a big difference in HOW things are measured, which has taken me another ten years to figure out.   I was going to take this memento of love to her class at school, in the afternoon, on her birthday, which happens to be the day now established as Earth Day, the 22nd of April.  Americans, having come up with the commemoration, have been enthusiastically creating big festivities around it for some years now and we got in on a couple of years of this before moving here.   So, after dropping the girls off to school that morning, I started off making the cake.  I'd worked my way through a very different recipe for frosting, involving cooking and separating and mixing, before discovering I was missing an ingredient, so after setting this aside I ran to town to buy it.  At this time, I discovered I was low on petrol so I stopped off at the station to fill up and then had driven halfway home before remembering I hadn't paid!!   I whipped the car around and returned to the station, only to discover I'd placed my wallet (called purse, in UK) on top of the car while filling it - and drove off with it still there.  The clerks had it all on their CCTV camera and were lovely towards me considering I'd been caught stealing.   But now I couldn't pay so I gave them my information, with promise to return with money later, and returned home in a right state about it.  I began working on the cake again - and discovered the frosting had become as hard as a rock.  I didn't remember my old butter/powdered sugar recipes doing that.   I could not get it to soften, in any way and I no longer had the ingredients, nor the will to start over.  I was struggling to glop it on somehow anyway - this cake had extra eggs, sour cream, chocolate chips, whatever I could think of to make it very rich - and it was becoming a terrible, choppy looking mess when the phone rang and a nice policeman told me he had my wallet, ready for me to pick up.   I couldn't understand how they'd tracked me because I didn't have any id, such as phone numbers or addresses in it, but thank goodness.   It turned out that as I had made a turn around a median island in a roundabout, which was covered with a floral display and happened to have a gardener working on it at that moment - my wallet had flown off the car, right in front of him and he had turned it in.  (pretty good, for an Earth Day event, actually).   My grieving despair turned into delight and I decided I had to take this big, dark brown mess of a cake to my daughter's class as I had promised.   So I marched in, announced it was a "Mud cake" in honour of Earth Day and everyone was happy.   Apparently it tasted so good that people wanted the recipe!   Made.With.Love.  despite all else.

     It was about ten years before I dared to try again.   A couple of years ago, I decided to try making a cake for my youngest daughter, before it was too late and she'd be gone from her childhood home forever.  I had just obtained a book of birthday cake recipes - mainly for it's symbolic, drool inducing, eye candy, never thinking I'd actually create from it and told her to choose one for me to make.  She chose a stunning - actually, they are all stunning - angel food cake which was a swirl of multiple colours in the pink, yellow, orange range.  Probably called Sunrise Angel Delight - no, that couldn't be - Angel Delight is another English pudding concoction, I think.   So I gulped and arranged with a friend who lived clear on the other side of town to borrow her oven, as I'd done before and gathered the ingredients.  What I didn't do, what I should have done, was to make the whole thing at her house, along with the baking.  I set to work, whipping into a viable condition - 18 egg whites (successfully separated out of maybe 20 or 22) - the number of which made my head spin.  I then carefully divided it out into 3 or 4 parts which were even more carefully coloured before being swirled delicately back together and gently set into the pan.   Then, rather than immediately putting into a hot oven, as directed - I drove five miles through congested town traffic to my friend's house and then waited to warm up the oven before baking it.  I would not recommend this method.  The cake, starting with great promise, sadly melted down during the lengthy interim and came out rather flat and dense.  It was still beautiful though and tasted wonderful, showing us the essence of what could have been, so I managed to be a 'good mom', in the end, although a bit flushed and scattered.  Again, Made.With.Love.

     

Yarndale and Wispy Tales

The other day I posted the following paragraph on Facebook, trying to share a picture with words, of some sights I'd just seen.  I don't know if many even bothered to read it because it is kind of long for a post, especially when one liners and quick quips or pictures, or links if someone has the time, are more the norm, but I did get 4 likes.  No one bothered to comment on the question I posed, which yes, was only an attempt to share something I found entertaining and more rhetorical than answerable.  In my attempts to become a writer again, I have several quests.  I want to know why some people are able to pose questions which get many responses (a talent I don't seem to have).  I want to know what makes for something so compelling it draws a reader in and makes them feel better for having spent the time.  I want to know what I'm writing for or trying to convey.   I spent the long drive home the day I went to this festival I'm describing, concocting sentences and scenes I wanted to write about, but most of it disappeared into the ether.  I wonder if others can 'see' what I saw on this occasion.  

    ' I went to a big festival called Yarndale, which ended up being held in a huge barnlike structure, lined with concrete flooring and metal bar fencing corralling open spaces, opened up to make room for almost 200 stands of yarn and felt and spinning wheels and creativity and women in rows of awkward fold up chairs, where they sat hunched over with determined looks on their faces, knitting, with needles flashing in and out of small lumps of yarn. Interspersing the stands of colour and fuzzy skeins and crocheted blankets, were a few huge Angora bunnies, handsome, trimmed rams and some alpacas with adorably cute faces. There was also a field right next to the barn, full of sheep, in case we hadn't got the point of Yarn origin. I'd asked Dave if he wanted to drive me there, not to drag him through such a thing, but because the drive is nice and there are other sights he could go to nearby. He declined. When I came out, after a few hours, I was bemused to see a handful of men sitting on the lawn out front. Most of them were accompanied by a white, fluffy dog, of varying sizes and breeds. And I wondered if my husband WOULD have been willing to come if we owned such a dog. Is there a connection?'

     After I'd written that paragraph, I went to eat some breakfast and while doing so, indulge in my regular practice of reading the Sunday Times News and Review section, as I do.  And as keeps happening lately, serendipitously had another one of my universe appointed writing tutorials pop up.  I read an article by Oliver Sacks, a doctor who recently died, who was talking about how he came to write his first book, Awakenings, which was made into a movie with Robin Williams.  Apparently his parents were also both doctors and storytellers and this fragment jumped out at me.... " My parents' sense of wonder at the vagaries of life, their combination of a clinical and a narrative cast of mind, was transmitted with great force to all of us.  My own impulse to chronicle and describe seems to have come directly from them..."    He went on to describe his writing style - which reminded me of my own - too much wordiness, explosive exuberance in overabundant prose,  needs extensive pruning and editing - and how he flailed around for some time, trying to figure out what his story was, even though he had extensive material to write about.  Yep.  He also was put in touch with an editor whom he worked closely with from the beginning - handing over sheafs of pages as they were typed up - who extensively helped him throughout and even more so when his mother died and he fell apart over that loss.   I know I have people like this in my life already - I've had one friend - a university creative writing professor - who has been supportive in many ways for years now and would definitely help me in a big writing venture.  In fact, I really liked an analogy she came up with the other day - especially as I love doing a good puzzle... 

  "Not liking today's writing very much, but I'm figuring out that writing a novel is like putting together a 50,000-piece puzzle. You have to do a lot of picking up, sorting out, throwing back into the pile, waiting for a match to rise out of the  mess, referring back to the big picture, rejecting, retrying, rearranging, repeating, having faith that of course it will come right in the end and letting the bad days just sort of morph into the better ones. I have to be certain to take my vitamins and get in my exercise, otherwise I lose my temper and break doors. Tip for the day:  don't forget the self who conceived this work at its best; don't give in to the lesser selves who sometimes forge forward with shameful inferior strokes."  

    There are others whom I could hire, as well.  Oliver Sacks couldn't physically write at first, due to an injury and hired a shorthand typist to whom he dictated and he found her expressions, as she'd take notes, to be helpful in urging him on.  In this day and age of technology and aids - we don't have access or need (?!?!) for such people anymore - have to make up such an audience in other ways.  And I guess this is what I was attempting to get, by posting the above on FB.

      So in closing this writing meditation, I'll just describe another scene I had at the Yarndale festival, as continued exercise.   I only knew about Yarndale from having run across a mention of it several months before and putting it on my calendar then.    As the day approached, I had nothing else going on, the weather was gorgeously perfect, must-go-out-and-do-something vibes in the air and there it was.  So I looked up how to get there and off I went, by myself.  What should have been at most a 1 1/2 hour drive ended up being over 2 hours, of course, as is almost always the way in traveling in England.   I was delighted to see many yellow signs directing me to the site, as I got close, saving me mucking around with maps and such.  And was directed into a back field, behind a big college campus (Craven College? hopefully not a reference to student's attitudes?!), to park.  I didn't even know which direction to walk in after parking but an attendant pointed the way and I set off, literally over dale and hill, around and behind and then down some steep steps, dug into the hillside - with a young woman who had parked right next to me, following closely.   At the first mysterious juncture of which way to go?, she took over the lead and we walked the rest of the way to the entrance, chatting companionably.  We were amused to discover we were both foreigners, deep in this English Yorkshire countryside.   I found out she was French, currently married to an Englishman, living in Lancashire, with two children.  I was also surprised when she guessed that I was from northern California - 'the Bay Area', no less - because she had spent time in Sonoma in her past, and had a best friend from there.  NOBODY ever guesses where I'm from that accurately, from my accent.  She was also fascinating in that she'd met her English husband in Indonesia, so far away from both of their homes - and then we arrived.  No more stories.  Can I be your friend?  Not even a name.

9/11 in 2015

     I'm being led to watch some anniversaries of things that happened to me thirteen years ago and the present year.  It has been with growing fascination and delight that I'm watching this pattern unfold and in this story, I'm writing about the 11th of September - or 9/11, as it is commonly known these days.
     Thirteen years ago, 9/11 was one year after the airplane trauma that hit the US, killing thousands and holding the world suspended in disbelief, while watching the events play out over several hours.  That year before, 2001, I was alone all day, except for a quick run to a post office to post some packages to people in the US, at which time I heard the news on the car radio and ran back home to sit glued to the tv for the rest of the day.  I had lived for a little over a year, in a little cottage in a foreign country, England, in a tiny village surrounded by fields, but still felt like a stranger, like I didn't belong.  I only left the tv that day to make the school run to pick up my three girls who were luckily, still all at the same school.  Other parents reached out to me with comments of shock, as I ran through, eager to touch an American at such a time.
     I discovered the next year - and for five more years after that - that I would encounter something on the anniversary of that horrifying day, that held elements of 9/11/01, but with diminishing negatives and growing delights.  For example, on the sixth year after 9/11/01, the large flying machine I saw that day was a huge swan blocking both lanes of the little road, near my house, which runs between two small lakes.  I was the only one who dared to get out of the car at the head of a lengthening queue both ways, to shoo the stationary, majestic white bird along, which it meekly did.  I also had two encounters with policemen that made me happy and showed they can be in place at times, to prevent or deal with danger as it erupts.  
    The 11th of September, 13 years ago, found me in a very different place than my isolated country cottage.  I had received an invitation to a workshop in London, out of the blue, from an unknown organisation and to this day I still have no idea how they got my name, nor have I ever received such a thing again.  It was for a hands on training of a healing technique, over three days in September and I got a green light to attend, even though it was all very expensive.  With the cost of the course, the train to get there and back, the hotel and food in London, it cost close to £800 altogether.  When I arrived at my cheap hotel to check in, I was told my room had flooded and sent by taxi to a sister hotel which turned out to be a beautiful boutique hotel with all kinds of amenities not found in the one I'd booked, no extra charge.  The second day of the course fell on 11 September and so I found myself in a class of about 10 people, being taught by two Americans who had flown over from Virginia.  We were being shown techniques of healing various ailments and then disrobing and smearing olive oil all over each other in different ways.  It struck me suddenly that, rather than being alone - today I was with two Americans, even though we were still in a foreign country, outside the US.  When I went to dinner, alone in a restaurant, I happened to sit near two American businessmen who were telling each other domestic stories about their kid's high school football games and wive's decorating plans.  After dinner, I wandered empty streets, until I found an open coffee shop where, after buying a hot chocolate, I plunked myself down at the otherwise empty chairs and tables out front.  A couple of men entered the shop, greeting me as they went in and then returning to sit near me and initiating conversation with me (this is very unusual in UK).  So it wasn't surprising to find out they were also Americans, who sold aeronautic software to the airline industry.  I'd somehow ended up being surrounded, all day, with friendly, pragmatic Americans, concerned mainly with normal, simple things of life.  As opposed to being isolated the year before, watching such people being battered to death by some middle-eastern types.
     I finally made my way to my upgraded deluxe hotel room, which was a delight but I didn't feel I belonged in and yes, thought long on all the little same but turned around strands throughout the day, which reflected in some ways, the events of the year before.  Americans, being in England, airplanes, people in a city, but also healings, simple domestic concerns, changes for the better, exotic city life rather than isolated country cottage.

How is your writing coming along?

Last night I went to one of the writing groups I've recently joined, in an effort to stimulate the writing back into my life - along with some social life.   We were given an exercise to do for about twenty minutes, with the prompt to write a poem answering the question above - considering the past month or so.  I got confused and started listing things that had gone on in the past few weeks of my life, before finally twigging this wasn't what the poem needed to be.  The poem finally flowed out in the last five minutes we had of the exercise.  But first, I shall share, the list I'd put together, partly as an excuse for why there has been no writing in this past month.
   - I've had my 22 year old daughter, freshly graduated from a university on the other side of the world from me, here for the last couple of weeks,  giving me an unusual constant companion.  She leaves later this week to go back to the other side of the world to start a new life.
   - I've gone to Cardiff - down the A49, six hour drive, back the M5/6 three hour drive - to hang out for a couple of days with an old friend I met in California 18 years ago, who was visiting Wales with her mother.  We had an interesting time wandering around the Cardiff area - saw a ruined abbey that Wordsworth wrote a poem about once upon a time and then an unruined Cathedral which had been bombed in WWII, but rebuilt.  The next day we had some laughs going through the Dr. Who Experience after which I posted some selfies of me with monsters on FB - but I'm afraid most of my American contacts had no idea what that was about (but the few who do - REALLY did)
  - found out I'd won first or second prize in a writing contest I'd entered, on a lark, mainly to support the people who were running it, along with the homeless shelter the contest was sponsoring.  My flash story is now mounted in a gallery in Warrington and there will be a prize giving party next week I'm to attend.  
   - the 13 year pattern I'm observing is ticking along.  The friend I went to see in Cardiff was last here, same time of year, 13 years ago as well.  We were both on the verge of a big transition then and seem to be again.
   - had another vivid Robbie Williams Dream.  Haven't had those for years, like I did so much in the last half of last decade.
    - went to a new writing group filled with little old ladies who have been meeting once a week for 25 years to write madly for about an hour on a topic, then share with each other the results.  Am excited about continuing on with this for as long they'll have me.
   - finished a waistcoat I've been making, which is very pretty - and too small for me.
  - was invited to accompany my older daughter, to a seminar this Thursday, on Innovative Solutions for Urban Flooding.  She's a civil engineer, I'm not.  I declined.
   - re-booted this blog site which I started 9 years ago but have never really done anything with.

but finally, the poem:
  
    How have I been doing, you ask?
    How long do you have?
    There are the people I give a tight grin and say 'fine', that's all.
    And then there are the few to whom I chatter without taking a breath, until I do.
    It's always different.
    Every week a new theme, a new task,
    Observations get noted or not,
    Serendipities, patterns, books to read, shows to watch, beauty imbibed,
    Feelings, thoughts, musings, distractions galore,
    Work with the hands, do a chore or two,
    It's coming, it's coming, I'll let you know.