Magpie Tales 13: Gladiolas

THANK YOU TO ALL MY MAGPIE TALES FRIENDS, AS WELL AS OTHER VISITORS TO MY BLOG. I'LL BE TAKING A BREAK FROM THE BLOG OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, I SO I WON'T BE ABLE TO GO BLOG-HOPPING. FAMILY OBLIGATIONS CALL, AS WELL AS A NEW MANUSCRIPT ON WHICH I'M WORKING. I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE A LOVELY MAY!

(Magpie Tales)

Gladiolas


Or glads, as we called them,
their spikes shooting up every summer
in my grandmother’s garden.
Finally a wife with a small plot
of ground, I planted my own,
pushed the tubers down
deep. Wiped my hands on my jeans.
Waited two months. They bloomed.

Bending over their folds of magenta
and scarlet, I raked my left cornea
over the stub left behind by my scissors.
I stood with bouquet in arms, Oh,
this means nothing, nothing at all,
but the world had become blurred
and stayed that way. One week. Another,
until I was forced to admit I could not change

this other world no longer sharpened
by edges. It floated like what lies
beneath a pond’s surface. It shimmered.
The skin of my eye had been sheared
by the wound of a cut blossom,
liquid of Lorca’s doomed verde.
No help but to let the eye doctor
scrape off the crud of that old skin
and let the new grow back again.

Aren’t you glad, my eye blinked,
once the bandage came off,
that again you can see how
the stamens hang quivering,
the hand reaching out for the stalk?

This poem first appeared in Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day 2009, Ash Creek, Press. For more about this publication, go to www.poemeleon.org. To order the chapbook, go to www.citylightsnc.com.

POET OF THE DAY: PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT

I met Penelope Scambly Schott over 30 years ago at the same conference where I met Isabel Zuber. She was a Jersey girl, and I was a rural mountain girl by way of S. Georgia. Despite our regional differences, (or maybe because of them?) we became good friends and have stayed in touch ever since. Last summer I spent a glorious week with her in Portland, Oregon, where we collaborated on our chapbook Aretha's Hat. More about that later. The poem below is from her new book.

(Penelope and Lilly)

Incidental Music for the 6:00 pm News

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Cowbells collect the evening. We are pulled

to the bare kitchen bulb like large moths,

while milking-shed cats curl into straw.

At a rosewood table in a paneled room

middle-aged men in wide leather chairs

sip twenty-year-old single-malt scotch.

Under the white kitchen light

clover honey melts into biscuits;

nobody is starving; nobody weeps.PO

The men in their nail-studded armchairs

caress their knuckles and nod their chins,

quite certain they have never been wrong.

The chorus of cowbells ka-bong rattle-rattle,

the chorus of crystal shot glasses set down,

chorus of moths beating powdered wings,

while out by the bins behind the Club

a woman who stole one sharpened pencil

is carving this song into her skin.

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of a novel, six previous poetry books, and five chapbooks. Her poetry books include three historical verse narratives, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman, The Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy, and A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth (Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 2008), as well as three lyric collections, The Perfect Mother (Violet Reed Hass Prize, 1994), Baiting the Void (Orphic Prize, 2005), and May the Generations Die in the Right Order. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and residencies at The Fine Arts Work Center, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. Penelope lives in Portland, Oregon where she hikes, grades papers, paints, and spoils her family, especially her dog, Lily Schott Sweetdog.

Congratulations to Penelope, winner of the 2009 Sarah Lantz Memorial Poetry Book Prize from CALYX.

MY NEW CHAPBOOK HAS ARRIVED

Shortly after Inauguration Day, my friend Penelope Scambly Schott (Portland, Oregon) and I began a poetic collaboration about the event, thinking we could probably do better with inaugural poems than the official Inaugural Poet. After our initial poems linked pretty closely to the inauguration, we spiraled off in some interesting directions, circling back again at the end to President Obama and that memorable day. Here are some images from the chapbook, which by the way, was printed by Ash Creek Press in Portland and is hand-sewn by the poets. You may order directly from me: P.O. Box 489, Cullowhee, NC 28723. Cost is $10.00, with 2.00 for postage. Thanks!

BACK FROM OREGON

(On top of the world, wearing my Asheville Wordfest tee. You can barely see Mt. Sain Helen's in the distance.)

-----------------
Back home. And so much to do! More cabbage to do something with (sauerkraut? freezing? eating cabbage non-stop?), beets, more chard. Not to mention a house that needs cleaning, clothes that need washing, dogs ---well, we know about dogs. All 4 of them need their flea treatments, a little ear-work, and brushing, brushing, brushing.

Let me begin to tell a little about my trip to Portland, Oregon first, though. Woman's work is never done, but the memories of travel can begin to fade, faster and faster with age.

I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest. My good friend and poet Penelope Scambly Schott had been begging me to come visit her for years, but I always had other commitments, other excuses for staying home. This summer I didn't, so I booked a flight.

I dreaded the long flight, of course. And of course my flight was delayed. There had been a huge storm in Atlanta the night before, wreaking havoc with schedules, so we had to wait on the runway before being allowed to lift off for Atlanta. On the plane I met a delightful woman in a delightful hat who has returning to San Francisco after a week of visiting a friend in Asheville. We were both carrying different issues of The SUN and discovered that we were both poets. She was worried about missing her flight, with good reason. I hope she made it.

The plane to Portland took us over a lot of this country. When I looked up at the computerized flight path on the little screen above my seat, I realized we were passing over the Colorado Rockies, so I pulled out my digital camera. I'll be posting some of those photos next time. Meanwhile, here I am above on THE summit, to which I climbed with my friend's hiking group. They call this summit axis mundi, and I can understand why. From it one can see five peaks, including Mt. Hood, Adams, Rainier, and St. Helen's.



(If you look closely, you can see Mt. St. Helen's and Mt. Rainier.)



(Mt. Saint Helen's)



(Mount Hood)

Penelope Scambly Schott

(Penelope Scambly Schott)

❉ I met Penelope Schott in the summer of 1977 at a writers' workshop in Critz, VA, where A.R. Ammons was the workshop leader. We have been friends ever since. Penelope then lived in New Jersey; she now lives in Portland, Oregon. She's an avid hiker, as the photo suggests. Penelope's earlier books include The Pest Maiden, A Is For Anne, and Baiting the Void. May the Generations Die in the Right Order may be ordered from Main Street Rag Books. (mainstreetrag.com)


❉ What’s Inside



When I opened the box
and took out the bag

when I unfolded the top of the bag
and reached in past my wrist

when I unfurled my fingers
and poked toward the bottom of the bag

when I stroked something
that almost felt like fur

it was my dead father’s springy white hair
it was my yellow dog’s silky coat

it was the channeled mink coat of the lady
who used to live downstairs

it was the silk-lined ermine muff
from when I was a princess

it was the damp taste of my yellow pigtail
wound around a puffy red thumb

it was one howl in a chorus
on this treeless hill

it was the tufted and variegated pelt
I am sprouting in my sleep



❉ What the Bed Knows



I am a bed in a busy house of loss,
frost in the yard and inside the house.

Today I am married to the lamp shade:
we cast our hot eye on the damp head

of a solitary woman dreaming of lions,
whiskers purring, fur on the quilt, not

this wide, cold sheet. No silence
ever wider than death, no absence

more complete. The languor of grief
astounds her. Her fingers are weak,

and she holds sadness like a handful
of loose gravel,

not knowing how to set it down.