Laced

It's almost March with snow on the way.

Been around the world

I've been to some amazing places cities villages temples
homes never imagined I'd be welcomed to some though
I don't speak the language I learned thank you.
Cam On/Aw koon/xie-xie syeh-syeh. Again and again.

Happy birthday

Some favorites from where I'm at these days where women on bikes and motor bikes in rice fields villages the city selling fruit carrying flowers singing the names of their children their lovers under their breath whisper to carry on another year and another as they do hum shout   

“Fire in the Lake comes from the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, and it is the image of revolution. This image, like all of the others in the Book of Changes, is almost as old as China itself; for Vietnamese it forms the mental picture of change within the society.”

—Excerpt from Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald

September

Thank goodness for corn and September.

full again

It's a bit too blurry the supermoon photo but you get the idea.
In other news I've assembled/perhaps finished at least for now
the MS. Work on it still to be done. Order. Sequence. Tweaks.
And of course the work of getting it actually published. Still.
The completion is something for now.

So this

I'm re-reading in that I'm returning to past places and here's
one in the outback of Montana.  Oh and then this happened
meaning a poem published, which is newsworthy.

You Take the Diaphragm Out and the Body Opens Like a Book

solstice

Summer Solstice

BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

From Alice Oswald’s MEMORIAL: A Version of Homer’s Iliad

The first to die was PROTESILAUS

A focused man who hurried to darkness

With forty black ships leaving the land behind

Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs

Where the grass gives growth to everything

Pyrasus   Iton   Pteleus   Antron

He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore

There was his house half-built

His wife rushed out clawing her face

Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother

Took over command but that was long ago

He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years

Like a wind-murmur

Begins a rumour of waves

One long note getting louder

The water breathes a deep sigh

Like a land-ripple

When the west wind runs through a field

Wishing and searching

Nothing to be found

The corn-stalks shake their green heads

The first to die from New York State was Petty Officer

3^rd Class Benjamin Johnson

Twenty-one of Rochester

Drowned in the Persian Gulf

When the ship they boarded

Which had been smuggling Iraqi oil sank

Michael J. Jakes   Scott N. Germosen   Peter Tycz

And more since 2001 some 297

And more nearly 7,000 women and men

Like a wind-murmur

Begins a rumour of waves

One long note getting louder

The water breathes a deep sigh

Like a land-ripple

When the west wind runs through a field

Wishing and searching

Nothing to be found

The corn-stalks shake their green heads