In Ghost House - A Fine Collection

The Books I Read in Autumn

 

for Kathy, Jeanne, Mike, Chip, Marty, Paul, Josh

They were all mysteries, flesh

and blood; contemporary, all cutting edge.

None were made from a false scaffold.

Each spine listened in the morning light.

No page played the know it all.

The plots meandered the way I like.

Someone sat at a prairie sickbed.

Love came on hard and sexy. Another love

got funny with a gun, and bones. Intermittent

were the chapters of forgiveness. Horses, Paris,

 cactus, windows, swaddled babies, tyrants. Each

 story knew it’s perfect article, a or the. Each

 loved its “S”es and was possessive, sibilant

 and strange. Such a book becoming plural 

gets my full attention. Seven minds


together in a small adobe room 


remain this year's best of best.
  .
 

 

 

 

Accidental Collaboration

All my poems and poetry projects grow out of collaboration.

My first book of poems, was a collection of companion poems written with the poet, Judith Tate O'Brien. We threw out seed words to each other each Monday when we met to write together. At first, we simply considered these practice poems. Eventually, some of them became a shared chapbook. This kind of collaboration is intentional, ritualized, and requires the push and pull of two different voices and styles.

There is another kind of creative activity I call accidental collaboration. Some image or story falls into my secret pencil case and starts to write itself. This has happened a lot over the years with my grandchildren. They are just walking seeds for creativity. Sometimes their sparks are so bright there is no poem that can contain it. That's fine. There are written poems and lived poems. We all know that.

The accidental collaboration can happen anywhere, even on the often banal landscape of social media. A few months ago I was captured by the beauty of a friend's photograph of a slice of moon which appeared to be balanced on a wire making our common neighborhood street appear magical and mysterious.

I thought: what's going on up there?  I wrote the following poem and post it here with the image and permission of Mary Catherine Reynolds, my accidental collaborator.

  

Moon on the Line

 

Look, a mid-June rocking curve of moon

seemingly balanced on a wire, electric,

like an Oklahoma neon light.

 

Did you see the cowgirl, old Calamity

Jane, fringe-frayed, but still brazenly

brave, smiling at the open door?

 

She’s retired her Remington and runs

a tiny joint up there on Western Ave.

called Janie’s Moon on the Line

 

and if timing’s right, and the bar band’s

loud, we sing along here down below

to tunes we used to know.

(June, 2018)