Even in Florida
it gets cold enough
this time of year
that the leaves are pulled away
from their trees
with the acorns and pinecones
to explore the world alone.
The trees are left
with Spanish moss
as their only garments.
elderly left naked,
except for the gray in their hair.
The wandering leaves
make a cushion for my barefeet
as the lake fills my thoughts.
The water comes lower than ever now
and the lake looks still, tired.
I
This autumn wind is gold tinted
from the dust, remains
of a dry summer floating
in the air, pulled
into my nostrils, and settling
(for) on windows that have not been
opened in months.
Or maybe the wind is
doing his own interpretation
of the yellow wilting leaves
of trees happily surrendering
to sleep, well-earned, long awaited;
for these aspens have not slept in months.
But it cannot be –
the wind does not sleep and
he does not happily surrender.
II
The leaves are tossed
in a migrating gust
letting go to dance in a breeze
that could take them anywhere.
Let go, for even the ground is better
than someone else’s limbs.
How can these fair-haired leaves
dance freely if someone else
is spinning them?
Say goodbye to your tree.
The restless wind is calling you.
Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/vbenedetti/ on flickr for the photo! Grazie!
So, in my constant search for new and ever more inventive ways to procrastinate on my writing, I stumbled across this little tool:
The Internet Anagram Server (a.k.a. I, Rearrangement Servant) will, for sure, provide you with hours on end of dilly-dallying that is not writing.
It can also, however, provide you with some really interesting word combinations that make for the start of a really interesting piece of writing.
Put your name, or your character’s name, or your dog’s name, or whatever into the Anagram Server and see what kind of unusual word strands you get. Can you make them make sense in a piece of writing?
My own name brings up some pretty great combinations, such as:
Barely Crayon Jamming
Cry, Glimmer Joy Banana
Join Almanac Berry Gym (which I’m sure exists somewhere in New England)
Jar Me My Cannibal Orgy
and (my roommate’s personal favorite) Bare Clammy Ninja Orgy
Make sure to use the advanced options, which will allow you to make anagrams with words you particularly like. One of my favorite words was Magical and I will admit to also putting Orgy into the “required words” slot.
Anyone come up with anything good?
Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartmaguire/ for the photo! Thanks!
Hidden beneath an alluvial sunset
and longtail-tossed waves,
she gives herself to the Mother Water,
sinking into riverweed and muck.
Bejeweled with leeches and crabs,
her hair is tangled with water
hyacinth roots and as their leaves
become sails, pulled by the wind, so she too goes.
Rice barges swollen with freight
pass overhead;
the riverbed darkens and glows,
darkens and glows.
Her lotus-leaf eyes emanate green dew
as her fingers flit up and back
telling the story of fountains and gusts
through the silted sweet-water.
The rocking hulls of boats above
tap out the rhythm of the Grand Duke’s dance.
Openbill storks sing along as the dusky light
begins to fill with vapor and lightning.
As the percussion quickens,
so does her nymphish undulation.
Her hand runs over a freshwater ray,
lightening its warrior’s load.
The River of Kings is stirring
and the air becomes thick.
The lines between waves
and falling droplets blur.
She spins her epic daily dance,
mesmerizing gods and algae alike.
Her shimmies scatter wriggling bubbles
eroding the cares of heroes and prawn.
The downpour erupts
into an orchestra,
whistling through frangipanis
and strumming succulent vines.
She careens with water monitors
as her bracelets chime and her silky skirts rise.
She fingers orchids floating
on the co-centric ripples of the Chao Praya.
Mangosteens drop
and dragon fruit roar.
The cacophony of the monsoon
coaxes pregnant trees to bear their fruit.
Banana flowers quake in the wind
and watch as her forehead crests.
The freshet pulls her upward
and her eyes meet with mangoes.
Veils rise into wings.
Air and water merge.
She is the estuary below.
She is the storm above.
Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/7147684@N03/ for the photo!
It never did rain.
The ferns waited,
their spines hooked
over themselves as they knelt,
trembling and praying
that the sky
would not be afraid
to open up
to them and weep.
They lined themselves in rows,
a whole parrish
clinging to an oak
which could not resist
the pull
of a soft bed.
The resurrection ferns
held their spored breaths,
waiting for the day when
the oak would itself rise.
They repeated their visions
amongst themselves:
the oak will ascend and lead and guide,
pull himself free
of the nails of gravity
and escape death
for he is more than a man.
Yet all kings fall
and the ferns may wander,
seek out their own
source of water.
Or they may be still
kneeling, praying, waiting
for a rain that doesn’t fall.
Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanaia/ for the beautiful photo!
It was a small splash, the first time the Chao Phraya River touched her skin. It collected itself, making a rivulet, its own tiny clone, and slithered from her shoulder, down her back. It was easy enough to brush off at the time; her attention was focused on ochre-colored robes of tan-colored monks and the smell of sewage. The busy-ness of Bangkok is enough to distract even the most worldly of travelers. It would caress her often while she tried to wrap her mind around the city. She often mistook its gentle droplets for her own sweat. Little by little it seeped into her clothes. The algae would get invisibly caked in her hair. Bathing only made it worse, since it was the same snake that came out of the faucet, running in tiny streams down her legs and nesting in her drain, just waiting for the next time she would stand above it. It brought all of Thailand into her room. The sweat from the bathing mother. The piss of the Ko Kret buffalo. The decomposing rice leaves. The acrid saliva of Asian Open-Billed Storks. The ashes of incense from Wat Pai Lom. The river left them on her eyelashes, resting on the shelf of her belly button and curled in the ques of her pubic hair. In less than two weeks time, she was drowning in it, tangled in water hyacinth.
The combination of water hyacinth and wet heat left me with dreams of the Amazon. Before long, each day was laced with ayahuasca. My stomach ached for and wretched with the newness of each experience. My appetite left me completely, and food became just another beautiful band in the rainbow of the life around me. Piranhas nibbled my toes as I walked down streets dusty with the resin of car exhaust, curry-laced smoke, and incense cinders. Vipers strung themselves from telephone poles and carried the secrets of the city from Klongsan to Phra Pinklao. The sky let loose a constant rain of wet sunshine. Even at night, nothing was dry. The moist fervor of the city covered my body, making it a struggle to keep my hips still.
In the end, it was the weight of everything which finally drove me mad. Every blanket was too heavy to sleep under. Just thinking became dangerous because one could get smothered under the weight of a simple idea. Each thought that went into the air collected condensation and dust, becoming more and more tangible and visible, until it finally dropped to the ground in a puddle and actually existed.
Here’s a little bit of inspiration for today.
One of my favorite Ted Talks of all time:
How many lives can you live?
A poem by Sarah Kay
There are only plants today. The mosquitoes were blown away early. Love bugs hold each other in hiding. Dragonflies think themselves into sticks. Even the ants are gone. A lone chameleon bobs on the mango tree, tapping out a prophecy in morse code.
The birds of paradise are fluttering, flapping furiously to keep watch. Their shocking reds and oranges fly like flares heralding the coming of the wind. The grass is shivering, even though it is already May. Frangipani leaves begin to poke their heads out of stiff branches. They are still not convinced the time has come. They expected to be welcomed with showers and lightning — a thunderous cry to expose themselves. But they know they have been waiting too long. The angel’s trumpets have been calling, sending long fluted noted which start green and fresh and explode in screeching upside-down pink. The sounds coax the palms to dance, a primitive hallucination of a trance, a dance to tempt the clouds. Australian pines cry out as they sway, painfully praising the wind that moves them. The bougainvilleas are silent.
The mother mango listens and alone is still. She is weighted by the pregnancy of dozens of offspring, ready to feed. Her tiny flowers quiver and the beat of the shaman lizard plays on. Clouds move more quickly, as if gathering round to hear. The wind becomes more forceful, swaying the mangoes lasciviously. The angel’s trumpets begin to wail; the frangipanis gawk unashamed; the palms quicken to a frenzied dance; birds of paradise hold tightly to their stalks; Australian pines scream “halleluiahs” to the wind.
And just as suddenly it ends. A small patch of silent azure breaks over the tree, baptizing and cooling her. The chameleon hugs the trunk, exhausted by the omens. And slowly, as if gravity is lazy, thousands of white mango flowers drift to the ground. Floating like snow, winking like stars, swirling like Sufis. Hundreds of daughters never grown. Millions of mouths never fed.
We
bathed
in amber
last night
getting stuck
with mosquitoes
under an orange sheen
which made things
not illuminated, but
notdark.
So, surrounded
by a personal 11 pm we sat
under a lampshade of notdark
and tried to get our feelings
out.
Even sitting back to back,
empty bookends, we held orange
light between us
a sinister glow.
I could see that nothing hid beneath its gleam,
no beady-eyed monsters lurked
in the harvest colored bushes,
but I could also see only shapes,
as if my eyes were taking silent hours
to adjust to the light on Crescent Road.
That tiny orange kept me from being
moon on a lamppost scared and kept me from seeing
you.
The Decomposition of Eden
I want to show you this place, behind banyans and honey-suckle. Backed into a mess of uncharacteristically sultry vinestreesgrassleaves, its wide open mouth gapes, screaming at us to enter and laughing with our delight at the same time. It is submerged further than friendly waving palms, because it knows that everyone will settle for that idea of tropical. But not us. As we kick through the grassy blades, mosquitoes splash out of the ground like water, as if we were full-grown children, splashing through puddles of winged humidity. But we are not children, and our intentions are not innocent. The fertility of decay seeps into our nostrils and seems to fill our heads with life. Crooked vines and banyan roots hang down on all sides of us, lightning striking the ground. The light is just right now, at dusk, to stab the canopy with a flaming sword of sunshine, orange and opening, pricking a gurgle of water. The river runs past us, the father of the Euphrates, and you are surprised it is there, in hushed hiding. You notice the fruit immediately, a flurry of fructifying vegetation. Mangoes, oranges, papayas, and star fruit stretch out, seemingly seeping nectar just for us. We eat: they are not forbidden.
I want to show you this place, which is not without its threats. As the light begins to dim, the vines begin to slither. They reach for us while we look the other way and hiss at us when we turn around to catch them. They crisscross, making spun spider webs of foliage, and we have to be careful not to walk into them. This can only be accomplished by finding a verdant seat. There are no thistles or thorns, nothing to prickle our feet and grip our clothes, but we do not notice this absence. We shed the coats of skins we have been wearing for so long. The bugs gather round, hesitating, spying, folding into flurries. The mosquitoes attach themselves to your skin, and I realize I am jealous of the way they are clinging to you. The trees swell, transformed and concealed by the checkerboard gleam descending on their branches and leaves. It is difficult to tell in this glow which of the flowers are honeysuckle and which are angel’s trumpets. It’s a risky mistake to make, but the honeysuckle is tempting.
I want to show you this place where it seems like we could be alone. It is a room of suspended banyan root walls and a tent covering of leaves. The thick of tree trunks closes like an envelope, keeping people from reading us. We cannot see anyone through these walls and ceilings, so no one can see us, we reason. The horseflies come close to spy on us, coming out slowly from behind leaves and up from resting places in untouched grass. They flood in quietly, undulating, making sure we do not hear them before continuing closer to our breathing bubble. They tiptoed the whole way, I am sure. We did not notice them. To sit inside, our heads and shoulders framed by these viney gums, is to understand how our ancestors could think that they had found a place even God could not see them. His many eyes, kaleidoscoped like the flies’, can’t be felt by tingling flesh, like the eyes of humans. We pull blankets of leaves over our nakedness anyway. It has become habit, by now, to cover up and blaming fingers protrude oppositely from each of us when we have a stab at the reasons for it.
I wanted to show you this place to end the arguments and it happens soon enough. It does not take much time until we no longer realize that we are naked, and ashamed blamed digits fall to our sides. It has become too moderate for the mosquitoes, and they give up for the night, following the sun’s example. The grass cools the bruises on our heels and we become snake-like and god-like at once. More snake-like looking, squirming in earth with our belly doomed to the dirt. But we are close enough that our ribs melt together, every other rib of yours falling between two ribs of mine, and like that, we sleep.
I want to show you this place, where we can fall asleep rib to rib, where we are fooled into believing that horseflies and God cannot see us, where the honeysuckle and angel’s trumpets get muddled, and where deterioration is the formula to renew life.