Katie Bowler

Me.

Same person who just lost her tags and categories with an upgrade.

Tags, of course, being the reason I migrated my old blog here to begin with.

Sigh.

Most of the weekend has been spent enjoying our new home rather than doing anything. Last night, for example, I took to the back deck to watch the sunset. Sophie stuck her head out the door and I told her to look at the sky, which prompted her to yell, Audrey, hurry. Your favorite color is in the sky!

Pink, of course.

The biggest relief of the weekend was the drafting of two new poems. I have been largely non-productive in this arena since arriving here, suddenly having no plethora of homelessness, abandoned houses, and general mayhem to write about. I mean, really, what else is there? Would I ever write a happy poem about the spider who lives on the porch? Or the fireflies in the backyard? So far, the answer is no. But I have finally found inspiration in place. I thought it might come from the hills with white fences, or the loblolly pines. So far, the answer is no there too. It has come from events in the neighborhood (emergency vehicles, of course) and lively office meetings (see previous post).

+ + + +

I have to travel back to Louisiana this week to read “State Street” at the Louisiana State Archives. Such mixed feelings. Excitement about seeing this exhibit come together after helping with it for a year and a half. Excited about being a part of such an important exhibit. Excited about seeing my family and friends. Not looking forward to the general environment, and don’t know how I’ll feel about staying in my old house, which has been populated with my brother’s girlfriend’s furniture while she is in between apartments. Reminds me of the time I got rid of nearly everything I owned to drive around the country for a year. When I arrived in Louisiana again, nearly six months into the trip, I stopped in Baton Rouge to see my sister in a play. The curtain rose and there was the stage — each of the props my old things. And then the spotlight shone on the actress entering the stage: my sister, who walked out wearing one of my old discarded dresses.

Cicadas

Roaches

Ticks

Lyme disease

Ticks

Flies

Bullfrogs

Sports

Humans

Did I mention ticks?

The morning is cool, probably in the sixties, and the scenery outside still lacks full contrast because the sun is only peeking over the us. As far as “us” is concerned, everyone else is asleep and I haven’t had my coffee. I am sitting on the porch while the birds tell each other goodmorning, and the air is so cool that I’ve left the front door open next to me to cool the house too.

A few days ago I was in a meeting at work –

I am hardly awake enough to type. I keep making errors. You don’t see them, but I do. I am dutifully fixing them for you.

– and heated discussion ensued. People were deeply engrossed in the topic at hand and how it related to them. The topic: nearly irrelevent, at least if the world were on the brink of ending, or recently had and everyone was still there anyway.

When I described the heated argument – without mention of topic, mentioning merely only human attachment to the topic — last night to my poetry friends at Linda’s, they asked if I wanted to just jump up and yell that this was just not a big deal and didn’t we all just see that we could find a solution? What the hell was going on here? And I said that, indeed, that thought had occurred to me too, briefly, but the one that I found more baffling reminded me the night that Berto Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. For Life Is Beautiful, no less! In his limited English but full excitement, he jumped from chair to chair – over people, he in his tuxedo and they in their fancy dresses – yelling, “I kiss you! I kiss you! I kiss you!”

Oh, to be back on earth with humans and their superficial attachments!

I thought this moment would come with horror. It has come with a deep sigh of relief.

Never too late to read the Fall 2005 issue of the Georgia Review, and in it Michael Collier’s work. Each haunting, one to share:

SUMMER ANNIVERSARY

It was the night before the anniversary
of your death and the dream I had
was not of you but of a neighbor
who the day before had undergone some tests.

He stood in his yard holding a rake
the size of a palm frond.
The grass was brown and the leaves
on all the trees hung as they do in summer,

patiently, not concerned they’ll fall.
It was the night before the anniversary
of your death and my neighbor with the rake
had not yet heard the results of his tests

and so he wanted to be ready for the leaves.
He wanted to apologize as well for being
in my dream. He said, “It’s not like me
to die.” “You’re not dying,” I told him,

“you’re only in my dream.” Then he disappeared.
But the rake he’d held stood by itself,
and the grass, now green, grew quickly
up the rake and sculpted a creature

whose wings stretched over me to catch
the falling leaves, for all at once
it was autumn and the sky let loose
its winter fox and then its hound,

though neither moved, and so the space between them
grew, slowly at first, until it was at the speed
of the world, unseen, spinning like time itself,
pushing apart lover and beloved.

- Michael Collier
The Georgia Review, Vol. LIX, No. 3, Fall 2005, p. 454.