April
doves
in the dead
spruce
May
Blue clematis bells; their white tongues.
Woke early, slept, woke, slept — finally up at 11:00. The angelique
tulips are open; lilacs are showing their color. Just now, at mid-day,
there’s a soft breeze in the garden. I am living in realms of sleep,
half-conscious, beneath rustling leaves.
While sitting in the garden with Kris, a kestral flew in, landed in
the dogwood, flew out. After recovering from her shock, Kris said, "I
suddenly felt like a rodent."
I cut my nails in the garden, L. having told me that ants have some
use for the clippings, calcium, perhaps? I wait and I wait, but the
ants don’t come.
Alice Notley in The American Poetry Review, May/June 2004:
I think the poet becomes more and more of a shaman, getting
older, in the sense that so much happens to one, and there’s nothing
left but the poetry function, which is a healing, ecstatic function, as
much as it is anything else.
The LifeFlight helicopter flies over, very low, very fast; there is no time to waste.
. . . I find it more and more difficult to think about anything but the
war, and to write about anything at all. In some ways I am more shaken
by Abu Ghraib than I was by 9-11, when the city my brother loved was so
devastated. Again I am preoccupied with the problem of — not so much
why bad things happen to good people — as how good people can do, and
endorse, evil. And the reminder that righteous conviction is no
safeguard . . . I live my sheltered life in a shroud of guilt, of
dis-ease. Am I more terrorized by those who hate me, or by what is done
in my name? Or by the fear of what I could do, set down, as these young
soldiers were, in a place of fear?
Dream: I am in some sort of religious community. I am struggling with
something that is troubling me. The women ask me, "Have you tried
praying?" I confess that I have not. They throw themselves onto the
ground, face-down; this is their posture of prayer. I say, "How about
if I do it my own way?" and I get down on my knees.
Small Losses: Rainbow Wonder
January 01999 – May 02004
quiet Sunday morning
the empty
birdcage
This past week I’ve felt like that cartoon character that walks
around with a cloud over his head — seems that everything I touch,
breaks. Including my computer.
But now I’m back online, and trying to find, again, gratitude.
The first blue morning in six days. In drought country, it is bad form
to complain about rain — and I don’t — but surely I can be forgiven
for welcoming the sun?
At the end of a long, dim day I sit in my rain-
drenched garden and am suddenly overcome with happiness — for absolutely no reason.
I seem to be riding emotional waves lately. Relationships can be so . . . difficult.
Anger, especially, with all its relatives: judgement, self-pity,
despair. But also, sometimes: clarity, resolution, action. Always that
fear, though, that it will overcome me; overwhelm others — that, once
roused, it will consume us all.
Richard Julian Brogan
b. May 30, 1951
d. October 4, 1986
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