This weekend was like 3 seasons all at once — Friday was fall, Saturday was winter, and today, finally, was spring. What possesses that mercurial Mother Nature sometimes? The truth is — even though it felt crazy bundling up in foul weather gear in April — I like when the natural world keeps me on my toes.
It’s a reminder:
No complacency.
No boredom.
No habits or ruts.
It’s all new, surprising and awe-inspiring, this wild world…
To build a stick house,
to trust the simplicity
of wood, air and light
Artist Ellsworth Kelly’s final work of art is a permanent installation recently unveiled at the Blanton Museum in Austin. It is a piece about shape and color, aesthetic and spirit, modernity and history. I really love it…
On a cloudy day
light and color are subtle.
I don’t mind that.
We entertained this weekend — my mom and dad, cousins on my dad’s side, cousins on my husband’s side Thus the late posting here, because what I felt able to do was scribble my poems in my journal — and that’s all. But now I’ll take a moment to share. From Friday:
Oh, seriously?
Some folks will do anything
to get attention.
Our challenge this month was to read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ONE ART and to each use a line from it in a poem of our own. I love this villanelle, and not just because once, as a kid, I lost three parkas in a single winter. It’s just typical Bishop in that it’s elegant and so you don’t realize until after you finish reading it that it hit you right in the gut.
I chose to use the line “some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent” and then, instead of focusing on the losing of things I somehow veered toward gratitude and that whole notion of not appreciating what we have until it’s gone.
I’d like another week to play around with this, revise it, read it aloud, but alas. Here goes…
Some Realms After Bishop’s One Art
By Liz Garton Scanlon
There was a time
when everything was mine –
some realms I owned,
two rivers, a continent
the beasts and boats,
the sunlight and the stones.
But I never noticed,
I never named it all
or wrote it down
until it slipped away –
every bit of it – like water.
I was left with a dry cup
It was one of those days where I sort of ran from one thing to another from start to finish, so it wasn’t until bedtime, when I took my dog out, that I had a haiku moment. Some days are like that. It’s never too late.
I can’t see a thing
walking in this thick blackness
It is beautiful
It’s my birthday. Anti-climatic, since last year was one of those end-in-a-zero years. (I’m realizing I don’t mind anti-climatic every now and again.) Anyway, not only was the birthday anti-climatic, but it’s on a Wednesday. And I found myself at a conference. In Dallas. I mean, a really really great conference full of really really great librarians but still. You know what I mean.
And yet, it all feels fine and right. Here I am, 51, in the middle of an ordinary week in April, one daughter out of the nest, another teetering on the edge, my husband making sure the dog gets walked and he gets new brakes in his truck. And I’m at a conference talking to librarians about my most recent books about trees. Yes, more than one book about trees. I could write a hundred books about trees. I know, that would be overkill. So instead, how about a haiku? You’ll humor me, since it’s my birthday. I know you will…
Cypress throwing roots
like straws or steadfast embrace
like ropes for rescue
Traveling “for work” can feel like a chore sometimes, but really it’s an adventure. That’s what occurs to me this morning, waking up in another strange place on a Tuesday morning. It’s an adventure, whether I’m at the La Quinta in Beaumont or some grand old hotel in Dallas. It is an adventure of new people, ideas, sounds and surprises. It is an adventure of exploration and extroversion. It is an adventure….
There’s nowhere to go
but up, that’s what they all say
but I like it here
One thing I really love about haiku is that the subject matter doesn’t have to be grand or monumental. There are perfect haiku written about dust motes and spiders and dew drops. They are little poems that can capture little moments quite beautifully.
But this isn’t that kind of haiku. This one actually is grand and monumental. Not a dust mote to be seen. This one is about coffee.
Doctors recommend
naming appreciations:
Coffee, My Coffee!
Guess what?
This is my tenth year of writing daily haiku during the month of April.
Ten years!! That’s a long, happy time to keep up a practice.
And here we go again… on this morning after a full moon, this April Fool’s Day, this Easter.
What better time for a fresh start?
Eggs masquerading
as sky or sea or bright blooms
this day of rebirth
This month’s it’s an ekphrastic poem — a photo I took in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs this winter. I had in mind a formal response but it didn’t happen. In fact, nothing happened. I got caught up in revising a novel and working on picture books and learning how to do sudoku puzzles.
And suddenly I remembered, oh, right, a poem! Darn!
You’ll see that it is itself a meditation on that.
This Poem is Excellent Practice
by Liz Garton Scanlon
My friend Laura says
every bad poem
is excellent practice
like summiting a peak when the sky
suddenly cracks wide open,
your hair stands on end and you turn
back, race the rain, slip below tree line,
call it a day. Excellent practice.
Like a raptor diving for a mouse
and missing, coming up hungry
and surprised. Excellent practice.
Like a rock deciding, after millennia,
to topple from its spot, to crash
to the valley floor and shatter
into all the tiny pieces but instead
coming to rest, suspended in limbo,
unfinished for millennia more.
Yes,
what excellent practice.
My sisters did a better job than I this month!
Go see their poems here:
