Sherry Chandler

Well, I blew that. I wrote 38 consecutive 100 word posts and then I crashed. I plead illness. I was in a fog more than one way yesterday and Sunday, and last night’s troubled dream had hubby and me trapped in my parents’ house by some primitive manlike creatures with eviscerated bodies all around and no sign of my parents.

We really do need to impeach the Bushistas.

I’ll claim one of my two remaining lives and start over tomorrow. But first I have to restore my poor mangled poem. It is one of my favorite creations and I am chagrined that I mistreated it so. You can still read the full version where it was originally published, at the Other Voices International Project. While you’re over there, check them out. I was published in Volume 19. They’re up to volume 32 now with an international cast of poets writing in English from the big names to the small. Some I see that I recognize are Billy Collins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorianne Laux, but it’s among the names that I don’t recognize that I like to wander. Much treasure.

My poor poem in its intended state:

Behind the Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

Originally published at the New Voices International Project

Strange dreams haunt this spring. One night my son woke me, a bit freaked because I was crying out in my sleep. I spent all last night writing code that, when posted, would reveal the Bush administration’s perfidy. That would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Historically, cats have featured in a lot of my troubled dreams. Once, when my twins were crawling age, I dreamed I was walking down a bank beside my grandfather’s barn, one child cradled on each arm, when they morphed into wildcats, leapt out of my grasp, and ran like lightning for the thicket.

A red state with bluegrass that, over the last week or so, has turned lush emerald green and grown ankle high. Such is Kentucky. Spring, at last, is putting on its party duds. Yesterday as I walked, woolgathering, across the campus of the medical compound where I work, a man in a maintenance worker’s uniform called out “Get a whiff of that tree. It smells wonderful!” An ornamental in full bloom beside the walk, the tree was glorious and sweet. But just as sweet that spring of a joy so bursting it had to be shared with any passing stranger.

Three women singing close harmony is one of life’s sweetest consolations. Like the Andrews Sisters, Patty, Maxine, and LaVerne. Somehow I always think of them in uniform, entertaining the troops. Maybe it’s because their very best known song is “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” but they were known as the “Sweethearts of the Armed Forces Radio Service.” However, their careers spanned from about 1925 (Patty was 7 when they started) to the 1970s. “Rum and Coca Cola” was at the top of the charts on the day I was born. I found this toy at Blue Girl in a Red State.

Accept — well — consider: just as life has its twins, its symmetries, two eyes, two hands, day and night, hot and cold, life and death, so also it has its triplets, its asymmetries. The nose makes a triangle on the face, brow to chin makes a triangle, shoulders to pelvis. When we place our two feet wide on the ground, we make a triangle with the earth, a stable stance. The nature of God is triple: father, son, holy ghost (father, mother, child). The nature of the Goddess is triple: virgin, mother, crone. The Fibonacci sequence contains both two and three.

Calamity Jane, photo from Wikimedia Commons.

James Lee Burke writes mysteries about a Cajun named Robicheaux whose life is beset by calamity. Mary Jane Cannary-Burke is better known as Calamity Jane (1852-1903). Barack Obama may have been better served by comparing Hillary Clinton to Jane than to Annie Oakley (1860-1926). Jane, though involved in exploits enough for a woman of her time, was not averse to exaggeration. Annie not only made good on her brags but also became a considerable philanthropist for women’s issues. She offered to raise a company of “lady sharpshooters” to serve in the Spanish American War but William McKinley did not accept.

Asked to pick something as simple as a favorite color, I am apt to be catapulted off the Bridge of Death by the Old Man from Scene 24. About books I am as fickle as Gin (see comment to previous post). I can’t even claim to be serially monogamous because there’s genre to be considered. In mysteries alone, I have run through Agatha Christy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, John D. McDonald, Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Edith Pargeter, Martha Grimes, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, and now I’m looking to James Lee Burke.

Zane Grey was one person who wrote 90 books. Lance Mannion speaks of 2,500 people who chose one book, their favorite. No surprises: the Bible, Gone With the Wind. Lance is having none of it. We’re not a nation of readers, he says, we’re a nation of liars. Where are the Oprah picks, the mysteries, the bodice-rippers, and the westerns? (Well, I might argue for GWTW as a sort of ur bodice-ripper, but then it’s far from my favorite book.) “But here’s the thing,” says Lance:

Most real readers, men and women, don’t have favorite books. They have favorite authors.

Zane Grey! The name just sings cowboy. Certainly moreso than Pearl Zane Gray, the name his Quaker mother gave him in Zanesville, Ohio. Dropping the Pearl is obvious, but the subtle changing of the American “a” for the English “e” is a master stroke. He played minor league baseball but never made the big time. His father paid off a paternity suit in the 1890s for $133.40. Eventually he settled down to practice dentistry, as had his father, but he was so bored with extracting teeth that he began to spend his evenings writing. He wrote more than 90 books.