Correspondance (act again alice)

act again alice although always another anything art between body certain
character come course does else even everything experience first form
gertrude get give go going great having hemingway herself however kind
know let life little lives living look looking love makes making may mean
might must nothing now object often others own painting part people perhaps
picasso place play point portrait question quite rather read reading really
relation right say see seems sense simply sister something sort space
stein story take tell things think three time toklas two understand upon
want woman women words work world writes writing yes

Notes
"Correspondance (act again alice)" is a found poem, generated by a word counting and assessment program that Amazon.com ran through my book, Passtionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, in 2007. The words here are the 100 most frequently used words in a book that consists of 118,844 words distributed into 5,093 sentences.  The program also suggests that the book weighs in at 5,093 words per ounce, useful perhaps if you want to know what the cost of posting it might be. Would it sink if you put it in a bottle and sent it out to sea?  I don't know. Perhaps.

Photos are of a message in a bottle that washed up on our shore two years after it had been dropped in the water of of the shore of PEI. Some messages do arrive--somewhere.

Voice Memo. Night.

It is 4 in the morning.
You blink.
Now it is not any more. It is 4:12 or 4:14 or 4:16.
The present is always rolling away
like wind in the trees
like tears
like breath
like life.

Note
The photograph was taken at night, while anchored off of Nanaimo, BC.

Voice Memo/ Walking Poetry

 

Exercise

Go for a walk.

Using the voice memo function on your cell phone, record what you see as you walk along.

Write it down when you get home.

Arrange what you've written in a way that pleases you.

Anniversary

A new year:
old wine
new cake
rain.

I remember our first walk through the woods as if it were two hours ago:
it was dusk
an orange sun slipped behind the sugar bush.
A snowy owl
ghostly pale  silent
coursed overhead.

Wondrous, you say,

Abendteuer.

Strange to think, when the ice came,
how those trees did shatter.
As for us, we are still here,

adventuring.

Waiting

Waiting.
When will your letter arrive?

Given Wind (A Meditation on Time)

[In which time + wind makes apples fall]

A month passes. More. The wind, and we, rattle the branches, and the apples fall. At dusk the yard is full of deer grazing between the trees. In the morning, the apples are gone.

We shake down more. Crows come, poke holes in the greenest ones, carry away the smallest orbs.

A storm passes over us, and then another. Rain pelts the trees; the wind shakes down more fruit; the deer come, then go.

Early November.  One last apple clings to the tree: out of reach, stubborn, rotten.

Wind, in two acts

Notes [In which something blows in from elsewhere and shakes the branches]

I have been feeling aimless, as if something is amiss.  All autumn I am in arrears--not home enough, overwhelmed by work, often late--time won't stretch any further no matter how much I tug. A friend writes to ask for a few of my poems, and I spend a few hours compiling them, stripping away the images, gathering just the words. Pages and pages of words, but is this enough? Some of them please me. I wake in the night--I have forgotten a few. As I work with the words, new poems compose themselves from fragments, chatter in the margins. If only I had another day to work on them, but there is no time for that--I must soon send them off to walk and chatter on their own.

Still, the exercise wakes me, makes me realize that in this busy season I've utterly abandoned any cultivation of my own work, my practices, the making of words and images. No wonder I feel so pressed upon, so breathless, as if living is just a matter of racing from chore to chore. How can I change that? Another message lands in my inbox: November is NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. I decided to give myself a challenge: I will post one small thing every day, mostly photographs.  Is this craziness? Clearly I need another assignment--surely that will stop the sensation of breathlessness, the feeling that I am forever out of time! Still, it's not all folly. In the business of making, sometimes you need a gust from another quadrant to blow in and shake things up. This month then, is for scattering leaves.

But not just any leaves. I give myself a second challenge: this month I will try to think about how a photograph or series of them may comprise a poem. Here then, wind, in two acts. There will be more.