A Kindess Poem to Start Your Weekend

One of the techniques I want to use for circumabulating this idea of kindness is writing poems. I teach creative writing workshops and so have a storehouse of "techniques" for helping the conscious mind jump past the obvious. One of those is magnetic poetry--a technique that often helps me find relationships and ideas that would never occur to me using a more linear writing approach.

I've collected A LOT of word magnets through the years, and I keep them organized in muffin tins by initial letters. Often as a warm-up exercise in my own, personal writing time, I choose a letter to start with, scoop out a handful of words and search through the pile for words that strike me. This gives me the advantage of alliteration up front, and I build my poem around it.

With this series on kindness, I want to go through the alphabet eventually (though Q and V may give me problems when I get there!), so today I pulled out words beginning with A. Here's what I came up with:

At Peniel

Jacob Wrestling the Angel of God
by Jacob Baumgartner

by Susan Lawson

Dark angel or animal?
Kindness, like all things, is always both.

Ask ask ask and the answer
always comes back ache.

Picture a wing limp from struggle.
Feel the shoulder dis-

locate, the hope for flight
flee. Hear weary I am

so weary

as the only prayer.

Only when all fight is gone
will the animal dare draw near.

Almost it whispers
Almost another, almost a way.

Fog settling into frost
makes a restless bed yet

a whole race depends on
a dream of two brothers.

See one limp toward the other.
See the other receive him.

Dark angel or animal?
Which is whom?

Kindness like all things
is always both.


Something to ponder over the weekend...Happy Friday!

Writers pull from the grab bag Memory

The ancient Greeks had it right when they personified memory, in the form of the goddess Mnemosyne, as the mother of the muses--those mythical beings who whisper inspiration into the ears of writers, visual artists and performing artists. Creativity is certainly Memory's child.

When experienced writers tell aspiring ones, Write what you know, they don't necessarily mean that what we write should be literal or fact-based. They mean for us to dip into the grab bag full of experiences each of us has lived. They mean memories wait there for us to pull out onto a page in some new way. They mean that no memory should be thought unworthy of use if it helps us say what we need to say. 

In my garden is a stone I bought at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C. It has the word Remember cut into its speckled surface. Its message, to me anyway, is that remembering serves us well whether the memories are good or bad or just there, with no judgment attached, because each of us sees and experiences something uniquely. No two people have the exact same experience, and no two people write about similar experiences in the same way.

I brought this rock inside last Saturday before my writers arrived and cleaned the cobwebs and dirt from it. Then we passed it around as a sort of cool talisman on a hot day as we each read a stanza of the poem In the Lebanese Mountains by Nadia Tueni. We talked a bit about the poem--how Tueni's use of sensory language and unexpected imagery made us feel as if we, too, were in the faraway place she described. The prompt I then gave them was to evoke a place they knew from memory, and whether they wrote it in the form of poetry or prose, to repeat the word remember, as Tueni does.

No surprise that each writer came up with something completely different. Here's what I wrote...

Remembering Young
by Susan Lawson

Remember the dance of daylight savings time?
     No school
          Staying up long after
               the sun went to bed

Catching fireflies in mayonnaise jars
     Holes dads punched with screwdrivers
          into screw-top lids
               Bits of grass added

to ease our consciences until tomorrow
     Thinking we could keep
          the moment alive
              if we ran fast enough.

Remember the gaggle of parents watching from the patio?
     Cigarettes in one hand
          Scotch in the other
               The clink of ice in crystal glasses

The silvery smoke trail that curled into the darkness
     on wrinkles of laughter
          Tips of gentle embers
               we could spot

from the vacant lot next door, summer’s homing beacon.
     Remember them
          always on guard,
               or pretending to be?

They found safety in numbers, just like us.
     How we knew a hush meant
          not for little ears 
               How we hid in the lilac bushes

to hear the dirty joke we wouldn’t understand and
     were overcome
          by scent.
               Remember them

perched in those folding aluminum lawn chairs?
     Plastic webs that
          stretched and frayed
               and then collapsed.

Remember dirty bare feet against starched white sheets?
     Parents who seemed so old then, and now
          I am older still
               remembering us young.

Here is Tueni's poem as it appears in the anthology This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye:

In the Lebanese Mountains
by Nadia Tueni (translated by Samuel Hazo)

Remember—the noise of moonlight
when the summer night collides with a peak
and traps the wind
in the rocky caves of the mountains of Lebanon.

Remember—a town on a sheer cliff
set like a tear on the rim of an eyelid;
one discovers there a pomegranate tree
and rivers more sonorous
than a piano.

Remember—the grapevine under the fig tree,
the cracked oak that September waters,
fountains and muleteers,
the sun dissolving in the river currents.

Remember—basil and apple tree,
mulberry syrup and almond groves.
Each girl was a swallow then
whose eyes moved like a gondola
swung from a hazel branch.

Remember—the hermit and goatherd,
paths that rise to the edge of a cloud,
the chant of Islam, crusaders’ castles,
and wild bells ringing through July.

Remember—each one, everyone,
storyteller, prophet and bakers,
the words of the feast and the words of the storm,
the sea shining like a medal in the landscape.

Remember—the child’s recollection
of a secret kingdom just our age.
We did not know how to read the omens
in those dead birds in the bottoms of their cages,
in the mountains of Lebanon.

Lessons of the Garden

"Cease looking for flowers. 
There blooms a garden in your own home." 
- Rumi

The prompt at my Saturday morning group June 22 was a poem called "The Lesson of Texas" by Cheryl Parsons Darnell, anthologized in a book called Wounded Healers (Rachel Naomi Remen, editor, Wounded Healers Press, 1994).*

We had just talked about various kinds of imagery--simile, metaphor, extended metaphor, personification and allusion. I used the poem as an example of extended metaphor, and we talked about its multiple layers of meaning.

I asked my group of writers to pen their own poem, story or essay on "The Lesson of ____," filling in the blank with whatever they chose and writing something that had more than one layer of meaning. I also asked them to use repetition of at least one phrase or sentence throughout their piece. Darnell repeats "do not surprise you" and "I grew up in Texas."

Here is what I wrote:

The Lesson of the Garden
by Susan Lawson

A girl’s got to be half-
way through her life
to call herself a gardener
and mean it.

She’s got to be halfway
through her life
to give herself the go-ahead
to dig in the earth and know
her own dirt for its true nature—
sand’s grit or clay’s muck,
so much rock up top
the plants cook
or so much rock below
the roots give up because
they can’t push through.

A girl’s got to be halfway through
her life before she learns
how to turn what she’s stuck with
into the fluffy crumbs called loam.
She’s got to be ready to make
a lot of mistakes before
anything
worthwhile
comes together
because that’s how gardeners learn.
She’s got to resign herself to watching
innocents planted in the wrong place die
while interlopers over-run
an unsuspecting lawn.

A girl’s got to be halfway through her life
to recognize a good tool when she sees it—
the spade with the hardwood back
and relentless bite, the deep-brimmed hat that
shades her face, the clippers that make
short work of the thickest brush. She’s
got to be halfway through her life to respect
the contributions of all creatures—
worms for their composting,
ants for their fearlessness,
birds for their willingness to sing
while spreading seed—because,
let’s face it, she's going to hose off
a lot of bird and bug shit in her time.

So much so

she needs to

keep her eyes on

the prize of

cool water
on bare toes
at a hot day’s
end and
the righteous
slap of
wet soles
on concrete.

I said
to call herself a gardener
she’d have to mean it.

A girl’s got to be halfway through her life
before she learns
not to get in the way of
what nature sets in motion
for reasons all its own—
the raccoon who empties a duck nest
of its eggs, the drake who seems
to stalk and rape his mate,
the bony mallard wing cast off
by a hawk who’s had his fill.
She’s got to be halfway through her life
before she sees past ugliness
all the way to beauty.

I’ve heard people say that
life began in a garden and then—
like some kind of calamity came along
in the shape of a girl and spoiled
it all. But I am a girl half-
way through my life and I say
Look around and I mean it:
We make a garden 

wherever we be.

* Thanks to Amy Lyles Wilson for sharing this prompt with me.

All Open All

Sometimes the simplest writing prompts are the best. And sometimes--probably quite often--prompts are all around us in nature.

At my Saturday morning writing group June 15, we met on my patio, and I plucked a prompt from my tropical hibiscus patio tree.

We passed the seven-inch diameter, deep coral bloom from hand to hand, and each of us--all women this week--took a turn at tucking it over one of our ears, like we were posing for Gauguin to paint our portrait.

This particular bloom lasts only one day; tomorrow a different bud will open and this one will shrivel up.

When the bloom reached me, I turned it over and discovered a sort of gaily striped beach umbrella as the coral seemed spun out from a lemony cream. There is no fragrance, but the lush bloom is openly sexual-looking, inviting; not surprising since all flowers are reproductive organs and their beauty is meant to attract pollinators. Butterflies and hummingbirds tend toward the red end of the color spectrum, while bees prefer blues.

But attraction has its place in creative endeavors, as well as procreative ones, and that's what the bloom makes me think of every time I look at it. It's why I buy one most summers! Here's what I wrote...


All Open All

I want to be all open like
a tropical hibiscus bloom

spread wide to take in each day
like it was my only one.

I want to live inside the color coral
like flame burning but not consuming

an invitation but not a trap.
A flower is all sex--

all legs spread wide
all orgasm all setting seed.

I want to be a sower.
I want to be sown.

I want to watch the harvest
from inside the root.

I want to send up bloom
after bloom after bloom--

each day every day a gift
that opens a dying world.


I think it's important to mention a little horticulture (and put my master gardening training to use): To pick a flower does not destroy the plant or cut short a bloom's life. In the case of hibiscus, you can actually prolong the flower's beauty for several days if you float it in a bowl of water. (And it makes a gorgeous centerpiece too!)

You see, a plant is all about producing seed to ensure its future, and seed is the fruit of a pollinated flower, which only ripens as the bloom dies. Left on the plant, flowers may turn to seed quite rapidly and stop blooming. So picking off withered blooms isn't just about aesthetics; it actually encourages the plant to produce more flowers.

We unintentionally cut short the plant's beauty-giving ability by not picking, in the same way we miss out on something very special in our human lives by not giving, by not risking, by not being open.

Here's wishing all of you the courage to be all open all.

Face to face with a fox

I wrote about my face-to-face encounter with a fox in my suburban back yard for the first time several years back in a writers' group that met in my home.

It was just a few days after I heard one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, speak at Clowes Hall through the Butler University Visiting Writers Series. Oliver often writes about nature, and hearing her inspired me to try to write about my fox.

Since then, I've written about this encounter on several different occasions, always trying to "get it right" and figure out what he meant for me, in much the same way the poet Lucille Clifton did in her poems about fox sightings. Her fox was female; I felt sure mine was male. Don't ask me why, but at the time I felt as if he came for me, to show me something, though I didn't know what. He was beautiful enough to write about in and of himself without making him into a metaphor, but I never gave up on the idea to do so.

I hadn't thought about that fox in a while but woke up today with the thought that he meant grief. I laid in bed awake for a half-hour while this new version spun itself inside my head before I decided to get up earlier than I'd wanted to and write it down. The poem seemed to want little punctuation, so I tried to construct it in the manner of W. S. Merwin, whose perfected lines make punctuation superfluous in showing the reader how the poem should be read.

Anyway, here's what I came up with...

The Fox

...who bounds toward me so silently
across the intersections of
sleepy suburban backyards that

the down on the back of my neck pricks up and
whispy arm hairs snap to rigid attention as if to shout
turn your head and I do.

...who skids to a halt where grass meets gravel garden path
where my body waits in shoshin and locks eyes
with something dark and wild and other.

...is so like grief--

smaller than I thought he would be and
patient as he seems to cede me the shortcut 

with his careful circle of the garden perimeter

then stops across the street
and waits
and watches while

this fresh prey who
doesn’t know she’s caught in his
makeshift snare

presses hands over heart

as if to capture the gift of
its pounding.

My experience this morning also called to mind a poem by Ted Hughes entitled The Thought-Fox, assigned reading in a long-ago graduate class. The professor contended that Hughes' "thought-fox" was just as real as a flesh-and-blood fox, and that in writing about it Hughes gave it a distinct life. That's what I wanted to do with my fox. Hughes got the idea for his poem from a dream. (Listen to him discuss the dream and read his poem here.)

I think I've come close this time to conveying what my fox meant, though I have a ways to go before I can give Hughes, Merwin, Clifton or Oliver a run for their poetic money.

Jot down a few of your own "up close and personal" encounters with nature and/or wildlife. Go ahead and write about them, whether or not you think you already know their "inside" meanings. But pull the experience out of your writer's bag of tricks again and again and see if time gifts you with new insight.

Enter the world of the surreal

Photographer Diane Arbus focused on traditionally marginal or disenfranchised populations--circus performers, nudists, the transgendered, the mentally retarded, dwarfs, giants--people whose everyday normality might be regarded by some as ugly or surreal. 

A print of Diane Arbus' Tattooed Man at a 
Carnival, Maryland 1970, sold for $50,400.

She always shot in black and white and generally composed her photos square in shape. She believed the camera could be "a little bit harsh, a little bit cold," but its scrutiny revealed facts: the difference between what people want others to see and what they really see. 

Consequently, her photos make excellent prompts for writing exercises. Techniques I've suggested in other blog posts about photos work here as well: Begin with what's in the photo itself, then write toward what's "beyond the frame." Plug her name into any search engine and come up with enough surreal photo prompts to keep you going for the rest of the year, or buy one of the books listed at the end of this post.

Writers at my March 9 group selected an Arbus photo to write about from a display on my kitchen table. The photo I chose is pictured here, and the poem I wrote that day appears below.

The resulting poem, story or essay should still "work" for the reader without the photo that inspired it. Does my poem pass that test? Here is a link to another poem I wrote based on two Arbus photos.

Tattooed Man

I carry with me this man
written on, drawn on
by all the world, whose
balding head sports
the smoking skull of shame

(you carry him too).

Eagles and bats, fists and stars,

tridents and roses, nets and thistles—

he gives his whole body over to

the needle and ink of

rapprochement.

So many colors of pens, so
many designs signed by those
who haven’t understood us.

Sometimes this those is

ourselves.

His eyes lock onto the road ahead
and never blink. He takes on what

others throw and makes

a master work only he can see—

always changing,

always changed. 

 

See beyond the photo's borders

PROMPT: Choose a photo from your personal collection that you have a strong emotional reaction or attachment to. Write first about what's IN the picture, then about what's beyond its borders, that only you see and know, then move back to the photo for some new insight into its contents.

I used this prompt in the Jan. 19 meeting of my Saturday writing group. First, we read The Invention of Dragons by the late Sandford (Sandy) Lyne and noted how this wonderful writer and teacher of children did the very same thing. Click on the poem title so you can read it too and on the poet's name for more information about him.

The poem I wrote while my group was writing is posted below. The inspiration for it is the photo at right. I waited a month to post this because today is my mother's birthday. If she were alive, she'd be 86. I still miss you, mom, will always love you and know now how much you loved me.

What I especially like about Lyne's poem is that we don't have the actual photograph that inspired the poem, but we can still "see" it. Does my poem stand up to that scrutiny? Does yours?

Susan 2 mos.

Wilma, 29 years,
holds her baby girl up to the glass.

Wilma smiles broadly.
Susan squints and looks down.

The glare hurts her eyes.
It’s the first day of school for her

two big brothers. They wave

bye and board the bus but are

invisible from this angle.
The world outside is

reflected in the storm door
that stands between them.

Wilma and Susan have clouds
for hair, and a hill in the distance

furrows their brows. They have
a whole future together ahead of them

to ruin, to rise to, to remember, someday.
This daughter will disappoint her mother.

This mother will fail her daughter but
not in all ways. The end will

bring them together again. It’s all
right there—

reflected in the glass
that stood between them

a whole world.

The Wolf is the Thing

PROMPT: Close your eyes and listen to the recordings of wolves at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, IN, near Lafayette. Let your mind wander. What thoughts, images, feelings present themselves to you? When I visited Wolf Park several years ago, I purchased a CD of these howls in the gift shop and used them as an audio prompt at a workshop. Stories emerged with widely varied themes-everything from peace and safety to fear and loneliness. What would happen if you let yourself really howl? I drew on my understanding of the wolf in dream imagery as the animal in us who cannot be ignored, who holds our heart's desire and wrote this...

Called

The wolf is the thing, you know—

that beast brooding in the switchbacks 

of every body's gut. 

He's the one we think will eat us up 

if we let him howl
who turns out to be 

the one who eats us up 

when we don’t.

Let him howl.

The Eyes (and Noses) Have It!

PROMPT: This poem had its origin in a strong image--rain and wind in spring making a shower of petals from flowering trees, which then collected in drifts where the sidewalk met the grass--and a strong, nearly over-powering scent. I sometimes ask writers to each contribute a strong image or scent to a list, then each writer can choose to write about his/her own suggestion or one someone else made. If you try this prompt, let the image, or smell, or both, take you to a new place, as in my poem the narrator moves from nature outside to a person inside. The "you" of the poem didn't literally smell like the apple blossoms, but the feeling evoked by the embrace and the unique smells accompanying it created the same sort of headiness--a figurative similarity. 

The Morning After

Rain stole the last of the apple blossoms

yesterday afternoon. I watched

still darker clouds gather overhead as

wind waltzed the petals from tree

to the grasses’ greedy arms.

Soon the wind grew jealous and

pitched the petals to the desert of sidewalk where

when it would not reign its temper in

grass gathered the petals to itself in drifts

like a fence in winter will snow.

I staggered up the straight path to my front door

so punch-drunk with the breeze that I 

thought I saw Krishna dance before the cow maidens,  

luring them with the music of his flute

toward the sheltered spot

under the tree.

The morning after was when

you stepped from the shower and held me.

And the scent of soap and damp

where my nightgown met your skin was

the same.

Writing from Sandpaper

PROMPT: A well-worn scrap of sandpaper. Often I put out a collection of objects for writers to choose from, but this particular object is apt to draw a very different response from each person. It reminded me of my husband, whose shop I confiscated it from, and the many things he's made for me--including dinner!

Writing from Sandpaper

His smell whiffs from

the bracken of grit     halted

on this scratched scrap.

It’s the part of him that's

buff and press and snow—

his pattern as it smooths its way

into my tables

     my shelves

          my chairs.

Into a cabinet of earrings singing secrets.
Into an island where herbs chiffonade

in time with the melting sun.

Smooth, so smooth this shaven skin

limber with sweat and callous:

his, mine, this life.

Beneath the Roar of the Grinder...

PROMPT: A sound and the emotional response it calls forth in the writer. The sound I chose was a coffee grinder, but others may work better for you--a tea kettle whistling, an alarm clock or clock chime, a train whistle, footsteps on stairs or a sidewalk, a knock on a door, a dripping faucet or hose, splashing in a pool, rain. I usually suggest several but allow writers to choose one of their own. Or you could go around the writing table and ask each person to contribute one to create a list of sounds all can draw from. Write in the direction of uncovering something new about yourself; see if a metaphoric quality emerges. Concentration on one of the senses may make you more aware of other sensory data as you write. For instance, my example begins with sound but appeals to sight, taste, smell and feeling as well. My title also serves double-duty as first line of the poem, but it's not necessary for yours to do that.

Beneath the Roar of the Grinder…

Beneath the shoosh
     and splutter
          of scalded
               spit-out water…

Beneath the
     schmush of the scoop
          like the child’s
               tin-painted shovel in sand…

Is the coffee 

dark and bitter

like me:

Pressed from a hard shell.

Perfume of first light.

Three Times of Snow

PROMPT: The title is the prompt, and the weather today may work to stimulate your creative juices. But you could really substitute any weather: three times of sun, three times of rain, three times of wind. Or change "times" to "kinds." Or switch out the idea of weather for another noun, like "mothers" or "houses," "yards" or "jobs," "cats" or "husbands." The possibilities are, literally, endless. I actually wrote this poem in summer, at a workshop I led in my home several years ago, which goes to show it may be easier to romanticize winter when it's 90-degrees outside. You decide!


Three Times of Snow

First there’s the dancing snow (probably in November but after
Thanksgiving): big flakes that light on my outstretched tongue
or melt on still-warm earth.

Then there’s the driving snow (usually in January but always firmly
in the New Year): sharp crystals that blow me inside by the fire
and turn my thoughts to cocoa, tomato soup, grilled cheese.

Finally there’s the packing snow (which could come any time but
I cross my fingers and wish for): to build forts and mold grenades to lob at
my brother’s head. And when he runs inside, cheeks red, to tattle

this       is the snow I lie down in       and spread my wings.

Between the Lines

PROMPT: Choose a poem you think will work well as a prompt. At the E. 38th St. IMCPL branch in late October 2011, we started with "Fire" by Joy Harjo from her book What Moon Drove Me to This? Cross out every other line (it doesn't matter whether you start with the first or second line) and write lines of your own to fit with the remaining original lines. Then, cross out the remaining lines of the original poem and write more lines of your own to go with those you already wrote so that what you end up with is a poem that's wholly yours. 


Here's what I wrote...

Between the Lines

No one hears
a voice unspoken.
Each person must walk into
the timbre of her own breath.
Every One must dance into
the beauty of her own resonance--
flirting, flitting from word to word to word
like lovers wrestling in the damp night.
A body must journey into its deepest throat
no matter what the cost. See--
the cancer cut from inside my neck
was not the end but a new start. My voice
goes on and on even as I sleep
like water rippling in moonlight.
My dreams, my pen become a tongue
for those weary of talk. I am become
a breeze that bristles dry autumn leaves
to ground. I mulch the earth's madness
with whatever laughter or tears
I launch into the darkness.

Self-Portrait

PROMPT: Photos by Diane Arbus. Click on the link to view some. Here's the poem I wrote...

After two photographs by Diane Arbus:
"Self-Portrait, Pregnant, NYC, 1945" and

"Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival"

When I sit down to write I am
the photographer who has stepped from
behind her camera and
undressed. This is why each time the film

moves forward and the shutter clicks
it is called exposure.

We see in the mirror
on the back of a bedroom door
the bed draped in mid-century chenille
which flows away like the sea and
escapes the blank apartment walls.

She is pregnant with her first child.
She took the photo
to send to her absent husband.
The child will be a girl.

When she snapped the one of
the carnival woman swallowing the sword
was she making a plea for
an unimpeded voice or
watching her own death:
the straight path from heart to mouth
with no sudden woundings?

The woman without color spreads her arms wide
as if in ecstatic praise, as if in bloom.
A weathered tent billows darkly against her back.
Wind tugs at the guy wires. Her tiered
& scalloped skirt sways left as she leans right.
See me, her body seems to say, from a chest so full.
See me   --  Click!

See me open.

PS: Follow the link to find out more about photographer Diane Arbus on Artsy.

Leave-Taking

What roads do the leaves go down

when summer's through with them 

and autumn blows their worry from its bosom 

like a shot sun's gush?

I have listened to leaves trade secrets with

the stone from the lake's bed and 

the moss from the rock's ancient frown. 

Skim or swim, says one. 

Don't let go, says the other.

But leaf song never misses its take:

Laugh and spend, it advices. 

Laugh and spend.


PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!)

First Snow

By first light 

winter whispered itself white

onto the green grass like 

a woman whose beauty 

withers so soon and

as  you watch.

Something died in me today--

drowned in a sky of silent soup.

Do not search for it,

only sleep--

sleep and dream of 

sour springs and blood summers 

and shadows of cold words still-

born eggs like wishes broken 

in the growl of this fall storm.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!) 

Ladybugs

What secret of winter-to-come
makes them wander through my windows
in time for frost's curfew?

This house's hot smile fools me too sometimes.
Here, sun is a fiction that
warms our frantic sleep and
withers the easy play of fall.

Water is hard to come by then
and I find them waxed
still and stiff in the shadow of drink
like some climber who
judged his seasons wrong.

PROMPT: Magnetic word tiles selected on the basis of what appealed to me that day. (I have LOTS!) 

The Seven Wonders of the World

PROMPT: The title, of course! What are the seven wonders of YOUR world? Here are mine...

1.
The night sky:
The moon in all its phases,
even dark and seeming absent,
but watched by me
and a full complement of stars
shivering together
against a cold, clear night.

2.
The smells of what my garden holds:
rosemary or lavender needles
crushed between moving hands,
dirt when it opens it mouth to taste a new plant
and mulch fresh from the nursery's steaming pile
on a foggy summer morning
in our old red pickup.

3.
Birds: Percher or predator
because we need both.
I love their beauty, their
self-containment, their
song and chatter,
their grace and their determination
to live another day.

4.

Hands in all their friendships:
A husband's chapped ones as they cup a wife's wrinkling ones.
Knuckles as rings travel over them
like a loft in a country road.
Cat paws that tap, tap, tap,
each time more insistently to say,
"Look at me! Pet me!I'm important!"

5.
Eyes: Either ones that change color like my husband's--
gray to green to blue and back--
or ones that overfill with tears too often
like mine
sometimes.

6.
Heartbeats:
The thrum beneath cat purrs
as breasts heave and sigh devotion.
My own, which I feel in my palm
as it rests between pillow and ear.
Either one will carry me of a night
toward my dreams.

7.
Those dreams: Fierce and absurd,
confusing and demanding,
fanciful and transporting like
the night sky and
the moon in all its phases,
even dark and seeming absent.

We are a full complement of stars
shivering together
against a cold, clear night.

Wedding Day

Skies socked in clouds so bloated and gray they
looked like a week-old corpse.

Forty-mile-per-hour winds that made for
horizontal rain. It stung like a jealous friend.

And when the temperature kept falling,
snow peppered through

spooky flashes of sun.
All this in May, the month of flowers.

I wondered what it all meant for our life together.
An aunt told me luck

for we'd had a little bit of everything all day,
like my uncle and her.

I remember dogwoods through the window
clutching so tightly to their branches no petals were lost.

I remember cold outside but warm in:
Twenty years later: it's the same.

My aunt was right.

PROMPT: What's the most amazing weather you've ever experienced?

For a Misidentified Woman

Her eyes come through the flecks in the emulsion
like a child's grown wide in twilight
gazing through a haze of fireflies and fog.

Maybe there was something to
the plain dark way of dressing then
and the hair slicked-down and drawn
tightly back.

And the quiet stance against the chair--
one hand folded across the other wrist,
one hand dangling a fan.

A woman who pauses to look,
who doesn't distract,
who though she can't see all
refuses to see what isn't there
and won't avert her gaze.

PROMPT: Photo postcards from a Library of Congress collection. Find various collections online at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/. Sometimes I have people choose 1, 3 or 5; sometimes I have them pass 1 or 2 to the left and 1 or 2 to the right so that they end up what something they didn't expect. They can then choose to write about just one or all.