Poetry Saturday: Mary Oliver

I’m Feeling Fabulous, Possibly Too Much So. But I Love It.

It’s spring and Mockingbird is teaching himself
new ways to celebrate.
If you can imagine that — that gutsy talker.
And the sky is painting itself a brand-new
robust blue
plenty of which is spilling onto the pond.
I don’t weigh very much, but right now
I weigh nothing.
And my mind is, I guess you would say, compounded.
Our voice is saying, Ah, it’s Mockingbird.
Another voice is saying, the pond never looked
this blue before.
Another voice says, there couldn’t be a more
splendid world, and here I am
existing in it.
I think, just for the joy of it, I’ll fly.
I believe I could.

And yet another voice says, Can we come down
from the clouds now?
And some other voice answers, Okay.
But only for a while.

Mary Oliver has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her poetry.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Thinking About Everlark

It is Friday.

Self is pondering her fan fiction.

Unless you’ve been lost in space for four years, you know that she ships Everlark. And only Everlark.

Her readers — self has no idea who they are, because this is fan fiction. Everyone goes by an alias.

She loves when someone leaves a comment and says: Hey, are you going to update this story? It’s been years!

This morning, she’s re-reading a story by Ronja (who is Swedish, self thinks)

684 days ago, a reader left Ronja this comment:

Por favor, ni de casualidad que me puedo morir de tristeza.

Though self’s Spanish is a bit rusty, she thinks she can figure out the gist.

That’s because Ronja has Peeta engaged to someone else.

In self’s newest fan fic, Peeta is a serial killer. Or at least, a suspected serial killer. And Katniss is a detective (with a few secrets of her own), and her partner is Gale. And just so you know, self frequently gets comments like this on her own fic:

Jesus, can’t your Peeta catch a break?

Well, no, he cannot.

LOL

Bodies pop up all over San Francisco.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

Quote of the Day: Mahmoud Darwish

• No spectators at chasm’s door, and no one is neutral here.

— Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish

 

“Appetites” (The Café Irreal, Issue 31)

Bakery, Kanlaon City, Negros Occidental, The Philippines

• When she was a toddler, cook cut everything into tiny morsels so that the girl’s mouth would not stretch and become wide and ugly. The girl ate only the sweetest pastries, only the smallest and most tender eggplants. Cook herself grew these in a corner of the garden, which every summer sprouted with little trees with purple-tinged leaves.

— “Appetites,” published in The Café Irreal, Issue 31

Quote of the Day: BRAZILLIONAIRES, Chapter 8

Never in self’s wildest dreams did she imagine she could go as far as p. 207 of a book about Brazillionaires, but here she is. She did, briefly, consider giving up, but Cuadros is a very dogged and thorough writer and well, she’s pretty sure she’ll never read a book like this again, so what the hey.

Quote from Jorge Paulo Lemann, worth an estimated $20 billion, according to Alex Cuadros:

Brazil is full of people who think equality is great. I think equality is great, too, just that it doesn’t work. Equality of opportunity, yes. But equality for equality’s sake . . . People are not equal.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

Quote of the Day: Associated Press

It’s about football.

Headline: KANSAS CITY ENJOYS BIGGEST COMEBACK IN TEAM HISTORY

filed by Associated Press, 12 September 2016

The writing below is an exercise in concision:

It took Kansas City 10 plays to march 75 yards in overtime. Smith finished it with his plunge from the 2-yard line, keeping the ball rather than pitch when the smallest of creases opened.

And that is how to let readers know — in two sentences — how a play went down.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

Other Edges

In which self pays homage to other WordPress blogs whose interpretations of The Daily Post Photo Challenge (EDGE) are inspiring:

• Ain’t Mine No More, for her photograph of penguins in Prague
• The Armchair Sommelier, for that shot of a stormy sky over the Brooklyn Bridge
• Still Thinking, for that shot looking down at the Urubamba River from the heights of Machu Picchu
• Roaming About, for the shots of The Precipice Trail and Champlain Mountain in Maine’s Acadia National Park
• The Storyteller’s Abode, for her dramatic pictures of people on the edge of a cliff in Tintagel, Cornwall, United Kingdom (King Uther Pendragon — name sound familiar? If not, you need to brush up on your King Arthur lore!)
• Netdancer’s Musings, for the photograph of London’s Tower Bridge on a rainy night

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

Me Katniss, You Peeta

A cross-over fic in which Katniss is Jane, a forlorn human stuck in the jungle with apes. Nevertheless, her thought process is in English, and grammatical English at that.

Peeta enters the picture (Katniss refers to him as “the Peeta creature”) with a tiresome mate named “the Delly.” Apparently, Delly recently had a bout of the fever, so she and Peeta went to the jungle to recuperate, which is where the Peeta encounters Katniss.

Faster than you can say tiddlywinks, Katniss is taken to London by the Peeta, and ensconced in a palatial home. The following conversation ensues (Katniss can already speak English!)

Katniss:  If you are civilly joined, why haven’t you tried procreation? Isn’t that the humans’ goal in life? To create more?

Peeta (hesitantly): Sure. But Delly and I want to take it slow. At a sloth’s pace, if you will.

Katniss: How long have you been joined?

Peeta: Four years.

Katniss: Wow. Some sloths are moving faster than you, I hate to say.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Mourning for Isotope, edited by Christopher Cokinos

Filipinos once had an ancient written language. If I were to show you what the marks look like on a piece of paper,they would look like a series of waves. Like the eye of the Pharaoh I saw in my old high school history books.

— from self’s hybrid essay/memoir/short story The Lost Language, published in Isotope

Isotope was a literary journal based in Utah State. When that university began to make steep budget cuts, the magazine lost the heart of its funding. In 2009, editor Chris Cokinos issued an appeal for support. Terrain.org posted it.

Alas, Isotope lost the fight. Self mourned. It was the only literary journal of its kind, combining science writing and creative writing, a place that joined physicists and playwrights, biologists and memoir writers, and created an exciting new kind of community.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

 

Doppelganger

A few years ago, self received a puzzling phone call from United.

“Ma’am,” the caller said when self answered the phone. “Are you xxxxxxx?”

“Yes,” self said.

“We have your Bible. It got wedged into a crevice at the baggage carousel. Can we have your address so we can mail it to you?”

Self said, “I don’t own a Bible.”

The United guy said, “But it has your name on it.”

Self was having a moment.

“But that can’t be mine.”

Even if self owned a Bible (She does recall having one), she wouldn’t bring it with her on a trip.

But the guy kept insisting it was self’s, because it had her name on it. She actually came very close to believing that she did own a Bible, that she wrote her name on the front of it, that she lost it at SFO because it got wedged in a baggage carousel . . . was she losing her mind?

She doesn’t recall receiving any sort of Bible via snail mail. If it arrived, then where is it? Because after a conversation like that, you can bet she was looking out for it.

Just a few minutes ago, she remembered this call. And an explanation finally finally occurs to her: There must have been another woman with her exact same name on a United flight that day.

Yes, that’s it. That’s the most likely explanation. The Doppelganger explanation.

Dear blog readers: What. Are. The. Odds???

So now she can say she had her very own Haruki Murakami/magical realism moment.

The other she (the doppelganger) carried the Bible around with her. Got off at SFO several years ago. Lost this Bible at the baggage carousel. So it had to have been out of her bag.

Can you imagine someone holding a Bible in her hand at a baggage carousel? First of all, don’t you need two hands to pull off your suitcase? But maybe this woman was traveling with others, so she didn’t have to worry? If that were the case, and she didn’t have to pull her luggage off the carousel, why was she just standing around with the — (Self, can you quit with the de-construction? Because this post is getting very loooong!)

It’s crisis time for the Democrats, Hillary was just diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia, which is actually much more serious than viral pneumonia, and here you are worrying about strangers losing their Bibles?

And isn’t Trump such a lucky son-of-a-gun? His whole election campaign was a high-stakes gamble. He just went for it. And now the only thing standing between him and the presidency is Hillary. And this is such a crazy scenario that self can’t even.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.