I am writing. Honest, I am! –This is what I tell myself. I have dribs and dots and bits of ideas, crumbs, atoms, iotas, shards and dabs of images and sentence-starters and such. The writer feels stuffed full of goodies; but the work schedule has “het up” (as my great-grandmother used to say), and the weather shows hints of warming (so there is seed starting I must set up).

~

Perhaps 150 steps too many
or too steep a descent or the sun too hot,
not enough water to sip maybe just too old now
for such exertion viewing the falls of Rio Olo
Fisgas de Ermelo where the chestnut leaves
provide a bit of shade

~

interstices. pine’s seeds.
its imbricate bracts, reptilian.
interlaced. at each base
the offer of replication.

~

…fat possum eating our birdseed two hours past dusk
in the faint light–what’s left of the moon’s crescent
and what the neighbors’ lamps cast up the hill
dimming everyone’s view of the stars. One dry oak leaf
skims the slate. Tumbles onto the lawn. Not unlike
the gray and white omnivore whose naked tail, sinuous,
wraps the step after the rest of it has slipped
away from the sunflower seed, into the dark.

~

Not anywhere near to poetry, yet bookmarks for what I may yet compose.

~

Meanwhile, I have been reading William Gass and thinking about the roles of listing (ah, specifics and details!) in prose, poetry, and in fiction, and the uses and limits of wordplay (which can be off-putting to some readers) and allusions and dialect or arcane or jargon words. Seamus Heaney–so good with the occasional archaic Irish term! Robert Macfarlane, giving me the beautiful word “clarty” which, during the muddy months of 2018, so often applied. Can I keep them in my vocabulary? Dare I use them in poems?

~

Found poem, from a dictionary of geological terms:

Lateral Moraine

Ridge-like moraine carried on and
deposited at the side margin
of a valley glacier.

Composed chiefly of rock fragments
derived from valley walls
by glacial abrasion and plucking,

or colluvial accumulation
from adjacent slopes.

~
Well, it’s something like a poem.

photo: jane selverstone