Safe Return

I just misread While people often post photos of daily minutiae such as food as White people often post photos of daily minutiae such as food.

Percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani says his compositions exist in “ma time.” Maybe I am living in ma time now.

All my poems are love poems for the poets whose poems I love.

I’ve woken again to a great love.

Language is always going to be taken hostage by those who choose to do the worst with it. If we give up on it, on language, on its safe return, we might as well give up on ourselves—because that’s what the surrender amounts to.

If dogs are a reflection of their owners, then I must be awesome.

We talk a lot about audience, but what about anti-audience—the readers we want to dislike our work? The ones we write not for, but against?

I used to think Richard Hugo was hardcore for driving to his “triggering towns” to find his writing. But I am way more hardcore: I moved to my triggering town. But I didn’t just find my writing here. I found myself. I found faith. I found love and its vastness. And I found my way back to land.

I am not obsessive-compulsive. I am expressive-compulsive.

As soon as you fill someone else’s heart with the love that you feel, you have been reincarnated in that person.

Cold Sun

The cold sun of fall woke me early. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes I believe I can do more waking than sleeping. Other times I admit the truth: More goes on in my life when I sleep than when I am awake.

Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up. This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I have a small window, not in the main bedroom but in a closet whose door I keep ajar because I like to see some of what’s in there, but not everything. I like to see the bookcase, the yellow one, and the clear containers full of poems (mine, those of friends and strangers). I accumulated the paper back when the world was paper, when I thought thin sheets organized alphabetically could help me tame, or at least take part in, the world.

The window is positioned high on the wall, right below the home’s eave. It’s only purpose, I believe, was to let cool air in before there was air conditioning. Now it’s stuck shut, like most of the windows in the home. It didn’t do anything all summer, didn’t seem to do anything. But two days ago, when the cold sun of fall was created anew this season, the small window, the small high window, took its opportunity and caught that light. The sun is lower now. Low and clear. The eave can’t hold light back, and so it comes in, thanks to the window—not in a stream but as a single rectangle, a slot, which lands on my face, framing my eyes. The rest of the room remains in relative darkness.

There couldn’t be a more direct wake-up call. So I woke. What was I supposed to do? I can’t remember last night’s dreams. That must mean things are going OK. The dreams come—lucid dreams, night terrors, false awakenings, the half-dreams of hypnagogia, out-of-body dreams in which my dream self hovers over me threatening to float through the wall and stay on the other side forever, long long endless long dreams in which I obsessively play out scenes from my life—when things are not going OK.

We can’t wipe someone off with a towel in this poem. It’s so boring, I tell the children at Farm Labor Homes. Poems are fun, exciting, they don’t do what we expect them to do. I watch as a look floods their eyes the way ink does when it’s injected into water. A crazy look. “Chicken noodle soup,” one of the kids exclaims, jumping out of her seat. The others lean into the table, waiting for my reaction, expectant.

They get it, they get it, I think, relieved. Yes, I squeal. Now that’s more like it. I complete the line of the poem we are writing together: And then the girl who fell / in mud gets wiped off with / chicken noodle soup.

They all laugh. They laugh and laugh and beg to write another poem. I tell them that they made this, emphasizing the word “they.” It’s a poem and they made it. I try to tell them how important this moment is, but they are too busy laughing and grabbing the poem so they can read it again.

My chihuahua was overcome last night, as she sometimes is, with what I can only interpret as joy. She ran as fast as she could through the living and dining rooms, making the same lazy circle around the seating. Every time she hit the wood floors, she fell: hip into floor, side against floor, legs behind her, crisscrossed. Her nails made a “schrwish schrwish schrwish schrwihsch” that would have frightened someone who didn’t know what was going on. “Schrwish schrwish thump.” “Schrwish schrwish thump.” The thumps are the falling, obviously.

I love how my dog slips, and how she gets back up, her joy intact. Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up.

This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I remember my dream, the one I had last night. He and I lived in a basement apartment that had never been fully converted. Concrete walls painted red. Low ceilings. No real plumbing, only a drain in the middle of the space into which everything—bath water, kitchen sink—flowed.

What happened next? He left. We had just moved in when he moved out. Left me there. Took everything. I didn’t have a bed. I would lie on the floor each night and think about how we used to lie in the bed together, with sheets and pillows and a gentle breeze coming from somewhere. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t living in a house; I was living in a cell and always had been, even when he was with me.

I wanted my home. I mean my mother’s home. I cursed him for not letting me move into it when I had the chance. What I really wanted was her. I went outside, dug in the dirt. I was looking for her, meant to bring her back the way one might bring a radish back from the garden.

Then he appeared. He held me and I screamed.

I just looked outside. Evidence of first frost—a thin semi-frozen mat over grass. Sun and window woke me early to see this.

All summer I thought the summer sun was clear. It wasn’t. It was overdoing it, trying to impress. Fall sun. That’s where the real light is at. When you have sun without heat, you’ve got something special.

I don’t live alone, though we all live alone in some ways. I live with a man who is a great love, a great love who moves inside the great love of the world.

The Edge

Today, we saw the edge of a controlled burn, red flames against char.

Today in Dayton, pieces of charred wheat fell from the sky, thin as paper, dark as night.

Hanford joke: The waste is a terrible thing to mind.

I believe the land wishes it could talk, and I believe it speaks through us if we let it.

Today, the sun comes and goes like a thought never quite completed. (Or a lover always hurrying away to be with anyone but you.)

What I feel when I read poems is something like love—a waterfall suddenly inside me, every drop longing for the source which brought it into being, longing for the great, ordinary mind that saw fit to put those words on the page.

Offered today on the Walla Walla Freecycle list: A bag full of UNUSED condoms.

Our dog has informed us that her new nickname is Nom Chompsky. 

Nom Chompsky says: You never need an argument for the use of peanut butter, you need an argument against it. 

Nom Chompsky says: Unlimited use of peanut butter has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Nom Chompsky. 

Nom Chompsky says: You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms with a mouth full of peanut butter.

Those who are exceptional are not the gifted; they are the gift.

Meditation without proper form is merely breathing. Poetry without proper form is merely prose.

Time is different out here. I can’t keep up with anyone, let alone who I was trying to be.

Just misread Fun with Homophones as Fun with Homophobes.

I think I might be done with Facebook.

Being (mostly) inactive on Facebook for the past week has taught me nothing about my relationship with Facebook. It has, however, given me time to think about my relationship with my work, my writing, my spirituality, and even my life. It’s amazing what emerges when we don’t fill every available moment with something, with anything, that keeps us from fully thinking and feeling.

Instead of the option that allows users to omit “Games” their friends play, we should have the option of omitting “Head Games” our friends play.

I might not be able to make a living here, but I can certainly make a life here. That’s the beauty of this place, the beauty and the wonder of it.

When a trapdoor closes, an actual door opens.

Stop trading what you have for what you want.

I’ve lost my will to die.

For a long time, I thought I was Hindemith, but it turns out I am Satie.

Poetry shouldn’t explain anything. It should explain everything.

The best advice my mother ever gave me was, Don’t step in shit. The second-best advice she ever gave me was, Don’t touch a dog on the butt.

This town is all ears and mouths.

I am 819 words into this essay, and I forgot the point I am trying to make.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Rub cheese all over your throat and mouth.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Paint a beehive automotive white and wear it like a lampshade on your head.

Last night I dreamed your name meant, Be a skull that roaches enter through the eye sockets.

For me, the key to figuring out what to say to adults was figuring out what to say to children.

I am a force. A weak force, like a potato battery, but still a force.

One year. One open heart. Boom. Starts now.

Sometimes we don’t have room for love. We have to make room.

I’ve never been one to follow paths. Instead, I build them.

Sometimes we have to be erased to be redrawn.

For me, poetry is more about understanding than aesthetics.

Dyslexia: A label created by people who don’t understand dyslexia.

I long for the land in rural areas and the people in urban areas.

I love therefore I am.

What I’m saying is that Eastern Washington is an expression of human existence, really, in the landscape. — Dana Guthrie Martin, in a voice mail to Andre Tan dated Jan. 23, 2011

More on Eastern Washington: You feel something strange about your existence and your safety, out here, but it’s also quite beautiful. And I really think that’s the way life is. — Dana Guthrie Martin, in a voice mail to Andre Tan dated Jan. 23, 2011

There are only a few important things to say. That’s why people who say only important things tend to repeat themselves.