My Gorgeous Somewhere

No Self in Other

A walk along Mill Creek this morning revealed chokeberries, elderberries, blackberries, cherries and apples.

Nothing like getting a free cremation offer in the mail.

I used to think the whole of my life was about writing. Now I know the whole of my writing is about life.

There is no self in other.

My advice to women: Worry about the size of your heart, not the size of your ass.

I was all exclamation points. He was all commas.

Having a state poet laureate is like having a politician in office who actually cares about her work and the constituents she represents.

I hate the fact that the erosion of our privacy is both embodied in and concealed by the innocuous and mildly aspirational term “sharing.” It isn’t sharing; it’s taking. We haven’t given; we’ve been taken. What we had we no longer have; we’ve been had.

Today I braid the garlic.

Desire, Need and Love

Gmail just suggested I change “bodhisattvas” to “bedsheets.” Really, Gmail? My sentence would have read: Bedsheets were placed on this earth, in throngs, for a reason—out of hope, desire, need and love.

I am the day.

This advice is from a wiki entry on how to take erotic photos of yourself, but it works for writing a poem as well: If you don’t like these results, try again in a different room or outfit.

I just had a phonological breakdown / emergency.

Me: I am married to you for a reason. My Husband: I don’t think that’s actually true.

These days, I always smell like sweet onions.

No matter what I wear, I always wind up looking like a soft turnip.

When a cherry fell into my bra on tonight’s glean, I probably shouldn’t have joked about having a third nipple.

I visited with eight alpaca this evening.

Let go and let good.

Liquor and Weapons

Today, I mistook a piece of sushi for an old philosopher.

Oh my God, I love the dirt. I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. I am crying because I love the dirt so much.

I frittered away the afternoon apologizing to the cows.

Here in Eastern Washington, we like our liquor and our weapons concealed.

I feel like the neighbor’s chickens are heckling me.

Hayden smells like one part puppy, one part pineapple chunk, one part grandma, and one part cheese cracker.

My dog wants a dog. This is just like the time my robot wanted a robot.

Dogs: Lots of energy in the morning, lazy most of the day, excitable in the evening, lazy again until bedtime, wild burst of energy right at bedtime, sound asleep until morning. Me: Lots of energy in the morning, lazy most of the day, excitable in the evening, lazy again until bedtime, wild burst of energy right at bedtime, sound asleep until morning.

It makes me sad to think that when I die, there will be nobody left on this earth who remembers, loves and misses my father. I want to live a long life so my love for him will remain in my heart as long as possible.

Digging in the dirt turns me into an emotional, fragile weirdo.

The people in the weekend rental next door are being loud, so I am playing theremin music to drown them out.

Sometimes I am not somewhere until I am no longer there.

I can tell this day is going to be bigger than me, and that’s a good feeling.

I wake today with an awareness that we are not one country. We are many, with many hearts and minds. And some of those minds are closed, some of those hearts shut down.

We talk a lot about keeping our minds busy, but we also need to work at keeping our hearts busy.

When someone starts threatening you, you know you’re onto something that matters. Nobody makes threats unless there’s something to be lost, exposed or both.

What my new and old neighborhoods have in common: children’s laughter, kindness and love.

I found my hair twin at Walmart, which tells you a lot about my hair.

The next time I want to cast aspersions, I will cast a handful of wildflower seeds instead.

A Delicate Balance

Today I am grateful for the kindness of our neighbors, the beauty of the earth and sky, and for sharing a home with a man and a dog I deeply love.

We rarely find happiness in the pursuit of what we think will make us happy.

My heart lives in the past. My mind lives in the future. It is only my soul that lives in the present.

Be the change you want to see in yourself.

You can’t replace yesterday’s lost nutrients today.

I am a delicate balance of Benadryl and caffeine.

I don’t like Walla Walla because I fit in; I like it precisely because I don’t fit in.

The challenge is to think with our hearts and feel with our minds.

If I can love one being as much as I do, imagine my capacity for loving the entire world of beings.

My first language is silence.

Gestures and Nods

The greatest disappointment of my life thus far is learning that we are as isolated in our joy as we are in our sorrow.

Sometimes the kindness thing we can do for one another is remain silent.

I write poems so people I love can come with me into places and experiences I love.

There is a difference between bringing people you love along with you in a poem and trying to do so in real life. The former is improbable; the latter impossible.

Everything said publicly is now said through indirection, secretly—through gestures and nods.

Eternity isn’t something we are deluded into believing. It’s something that, over the course of our lives, we are disciplined out of believing.

The End of Times is perhaps the only way we can justify leaving something as beautiful as the earth behind. Why not shift the responsibility for that misfortune to God? We need a great story to justify such a great loss.

The truth is, without knowing it, I used to admit only the concept of a God who wanted us all to be rich. And because so many of us are poor, I didn’t think there could be a God. That’s how deeply rooted capitalism is within me. That’s how—even though I am the ninety-nine percent, I do the work of the one percent—the work of striving, of failing, of blaming the failures of a system on myself and others who don’t control that system or even understand its inner workings, of blaming God for not being a capitalist who works by way of greed and exclusion.

I had no life before poetry. I had nothing. I was lost.

In my case, it doesn’t matter how gifted the life is. Without poetry, it’s impossible to see the gifts—the way a frog will die even if surrounded by flies, if those flies are not moving. The frog is simply not programmed to “see” flies that don’t move. Poetry, for me, makes things move, sets the gifts of the world, the gift of the world itself, in motion.

Things to do in Walla Walla: 1. Write a book of poems, 2. Grow out your hair.

I think the best marriage in a poem would be Charles Wright and Steven Wright.

Thinking for yourself is always a good thing. Thinking for someone else is never a good thing.

I like the letters to the editor in the local paper. They help me figure out who to avoid.

Tonight as I left the Farm Labor Home, one of the kids I teach ran behind my car, waving goodbye to me under the waxing gibbous moon.

Before we talk about sharing wealth, we need to ask ourselves where that wealth came from—who suffered or died, what lands and habitats were stolen, destroyed or altered beyond recognition—for that wealth to have been amassed in the first place. I don’t know about you, but there is wealth in this country, in this world, that I don’t want any part of.

Removing producers from this country—largely situating workers overseas, over there, beyond our boundaries—also removes the very body that could make a difference, that could rise up and make a difference.

The Chosen Life

I knew before moving to Eastern Washington that the land—by which I mean the soil, the air, the water, the flora and the fauna—as well as many of the people here, including native people, had suffered and were still suffering deeply.

The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues.

I knew this side of the state had taken in or had foisted on it some of the worst industries imaginable, from personal and industrial waste to toxic waste.

I knew unthinkable things were being done to animals in one of the country’s largest meat processing plants, that its walls housed extreme suffering.

The river was being poisoned. I knew that. I knew the ground was contaminated by the radioactive slurry left behind and improperly stored at the Hanford Site and that the ground water was also contaminated.

I knew all this and I came here not in spite of these realities but because of them. I’d been living in the Seattle Bubble for too long, going about my daily business without issues such as these entering my consciousness, let alone being at the forefront of my consciousness. I led a relatively easy life, one in which I believed that if I earned a certain salary every year, if I had a certain type of living situation, if I had this or that material object, then I could extend my sense of happiness indefinitely.

But I always knew that was no life, and that the “happiness” I sought out, relied on and through which I defined myself was as flimsy as the plastic cover that stretches over a swimming pool in the winter months. It was easy to break through that “happiness” and fall into the depths, into frigid water that could kill.

I lived for something more. I craved something more. I wanted to connect in a deeper way with the world. I tried to bring that about—to create some kind of transformation—in my writing. I attempted to write myself and those I loved into spaces of myth and healing. Writing poems also altered my consciousness temporarily by giving me the feeling, the fleeting feeling, of transcendence.

The poems were only clues, though. I realize that now. They were clues and little addictions. You can’t live from the high of one poem to the next any more than you can say you are living on a higher plane because you chain smoke cigarettes all day. The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues. Yet they might become enough of a trail to keep you headed in the right direction, which is toward a life in which you place your faith in something and then act from that position—in the interest of other, of community, of the infinite within and without.

Moving to Eastern Washington was the best decision my husband and I have made in our adults lives, other than finding our way to one another in 1995. Coming here set me on a path whose end I cannot see, but I do know it’s a long journey—a life’s journey and one worth taking. It is here that I have learned true love in all senses of the word, including a true love of place. Though this place is not my home, the land has welcomed me and taken me in. It has led me down its paths and back roads, so I could see its scars and wounds. I have seen those wounds up close, and I worry that they are fatal. I worry that the land I have come to know and cherish is dying, and that is a grief I cannot tolerate.

I have no choice but to act. I must act in any and every way possible on behalf of both the land and the people. I must commit my life to this. And the poems will never tell the whole story. They will only be clues to the life I have chosen, the one I am leading.

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.