Chimera Song Mosaic
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Lucy and Lars were rolling in it, not really even squinting their big, brown eyes. Lucy especially collapsed in the grass and lolled round, refusing to move, while Lars and I checked the new growth on the plants. Most exciting to report is that the Mulberry continues to make those highly sweet plump berries with stubborn green twig attachments (are they not quite ready to be plucked?), the water lily, hardy and dependable, will offer two (!) small flowers this week to hover over the tiny red pads, the Hong Kong Orchid has one sprout that seems to appear from nowhere--it has positively erupted from a bare place on the stalk, and the Purple Orchid makes many fast-growing and bright leaved shoots, promising that it has decided to live after all.
Lucy's black fur was scorching hot when I touched it! She grins so much when she is outside! So I left her there to come inside to blog, with Lars trailing me, the old goat.
Then I found more stuff: a scintillating poem from the desert! I love the second part about the "I" and the mother, and the fact that there is discovered "counterfeit" art. Maybe all art is counterfeit. Poetry too.
My only contribution to all this is that we revive Strawberry Shortcake's "berry" (as in "berry nice") and perhaps also the term, "bull corn" (as in "Bull corn!").
I woke up so late today because last night I was surprised by my very own surprise party, hosted by my good buddy Jen and attended by all (leider, not all!) of my Valley friends, who are my closet friends now because I have been living in the Valley for four and a half years, and on days like this, I really can want to stay.
But always in the back of my mind is the grating knowledge of what I am missing. For instance, this Tuesday (March 23rd), Brazos Bookstore in Houston is hosting a fabulous reading by Greywolf Press, featuring Nick Flynn and Matthea Harvey, among others. Do I need to say this? I wish I could go! I'm going to have to be embittered about this as I attend workshop on Tuesday. And I have yet to write my poem for workshop. And the papers I have to grade! They poison everything--even this: the sun; the garden; the loving friends--until I get them done, 20 hours of actual grading time from now. Should I write my poem first, or grade 20 essays? If I write the poem, I will be in a happy state, whether it's useful to me or not, and I won't bring myself to begin grading until 5 pm or so. If I grade the essays first, I will relieve a lot of this tension that has kept me at the shattered edge all week, and when I finish, I will feel an odd mixture of disappointment, regret, pride, and relaxation--I think this is all contained in relief--and I won't be able to write a poem in this drained state. The two minds--the critical and the creative--don't mix on the same shift.
