Photograph by Andrea Gibson

Photograph

By Andrea Gibson

I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
and when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
and postcards saying
wish you were here
I wish you were here
autumn is the hardest season
the leaves are all falling
and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground
and the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
new leaves will come around in the spring
but you can't tell trees those things
they're like me they just stand there
and don't listen
I wish you were here
I've been missing you like crazy
I've been hazy eyed
staring at the bottom of my glass again
thinking of that time when it was so full
it was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
or sticking straws into the center of the sun
and sipping like icarus would forever kiss
the bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover
I know we never meant to hurt each other
now the sky clicks from black to blue
and dusk looks like a bruise
I've been wrapping one night stands
around my body like wedding bands
but none of them fit in the morning
they just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
and all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
all the wishes in the world would come true
do you remember
do you remember the night I told you
I've never seen anything more perfect than
than snow falling in the glow of a street light
electricity bowing to nature
mind bowing to heartbeat
this is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
and think of playgrounds
where outcasts who stutter
beneath braces and bruises and acne
are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you
so wherever you are I hope you're happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing you life
I hope there's a kite in your hand
that's flying all the way up to orion
and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you're smiling
like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth
cause I might be naked and lonely
shaking branches for bones
but I'm still time zones away
from who I was the day before we met
you were the first mile
where my heart broke a sweat
and I wish you were here
I wish you'd never left
but mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best

From:  Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

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Andrea Gibson is an amazing, award winning poet.  If you've never seen her perform, I highly recommend you look her up on Youtube performing her poetry.  She's a hurricane with words, a force to be reckoned with and one of my favorite new poets.  I own this book, "Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns" and it's awesome and inspiring.  I also have 2 CD's of her performing her poetry:  "When the Bough Breaks" and "Bullets and Windchimes" and they're fabulous.  She's unlike any other poet I've read or heard. 

Here's a quote I read that describes her perfectly:    "Andrea Gibson does not just show up to pluck your heart strings. She sticks around to tune them. If being floored is new to you, ya might wanna grab a cushion. Whatever the opposite of fooling someone is, Andrea Gibson does that. Beware of the highway in her grace and the crowbar in her verse." --Buddy Wakefield

It's bitter cold here again in swamp country with more rain on the way.  Stay warm and read a great book of poetry today.  I'm gonna do just that.  Blessings!

~Marion~

"Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay."  ~William Styron

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"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep." ~Salman Rushdie

February Winter Reflections

I caught Gir getting a drink of water in my bird bath.  Luckily, no birds around.

\

Our flag and some leaves reflecting in my wagon full of rainwater.

Same wagon of water from a different view reflecting trees and blue sky.

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"The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public."  ~Phyllis Diller

Love & Blessings,

~Marion

SAINTS ROCKED THE SUPER BOWL! 31 - 17!!! Yeah, BABY!!!!

WE DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Laissez les bontemps roulez!!!!!  (Let the good times roll!)

Drew Brees, our surgical-precision throwing quarterback and MVP.

We RULED that game!

WHOOOOOO DAAAAAAT?!

 God bless the New Orleans Saints!!

~Marion, one overjoyed Saints fan!!!

Ex-Boyfriends by Kim Addonizio

Ex-Boyfriends
by Kim Addonizio

They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they're drunk, or finally get sober,

they're passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,
your good dogs or bad boys, and they're over
you now. one writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They're getting married

and want you to be the first to know,
or they've been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don't miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes
where they're buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,
propped on an elbow, giving you a look
of fascination, a look that says I can't believe

I've found you. It's the same way
your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,
before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark
broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs
of headlights from the freeway's passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,
hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,
following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

From: What Is This Thing Called Love

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Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen


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It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme

My February Flowers: Violets and Orchids: Earth's Poetry

This is my lovely, shy African Violet.  I got it before Christmas and lo, and behold, it's still alive and thriving!  The secret:  rainwater and ignoring it.  It likes to dry out between waterings.  I have it in my kitchen window which gets indirect sunlight and I also have a florescent light above it.  So far, so good.  (I've killed many of these delicate flowers, but I think this one's going to make it.)

This lovely, spotted lady is my very first Orchid ever.  Ray gave it to me before Christmas and I thought, "Oh, no!  I've never, ever had a real Orchid!"  I took this photo today.  It's not only kept all of its blooms, but also has new buds on top.  The secret:  rainwater and only watering it every ten days or so.  It does not like to be either wet or dry.  If I use the central heat much, I mist the leaves with rainwater more often.  The Orchids love filtered light, not direct sunlight, AND they love my cool house and a ceiling fan blowing to stir the air.  (I learned about the fan online and it works.) I already knew about the rainwater.  I began collecting and using rainwater on all my plants years ago and it works better than any chemical fertilizer.  It's like.....well.....magic!

This yellow baby is new.  I picked her out along with the pink one below for my Valentine's Day present.  It has a tiny flower, about half the size of the other Orchids. 

Oh, the color of this one makes me want to cry it's so beautiful!  It's just the most amazing, delicate pink I've ever seen.  We found these Orchids in the gardent department at Lowe's.  They only had a few left today.

This is one of my December Orchids.  The cats broke the flower stem off, but it's already growing new leaves, so I think it'll survive and thrive, too.  They don't grow in soil, but in a mixture of bark, perlite, coconut husks and chunky peat moss.  Thankfully, it comes in a bag all mixed up already.  I'm going to repot them as soon as the flowers fade.

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And last, but not least, Geaux Saints and WHO DAT RULES!  I've never seen so many New Orleans Saints tee shirts, jerseys and flags as I did today.  I sure hope we win the game tomorrow!

Blessings,

~Marion~

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"The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size."  ~Gertrude S. Wister

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"A flower's appeal is in its contradictions - so delicate in form yet strong in fragrance, so small in size yet big in beauty, so short in life yet long on effect." ~Adabella Radici

Entrance by Dana Gioia and Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke

Moon & Tree by Marion

"Interrogations at Noon" by Dana Gioia

Entrance
By Dana Gioia

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(After Rilke)

from: Interrogations at Noon, 2001

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Entrance
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Whovever you are: step out in to the evening
out of your living room, where everything is so known;
your house stands as the last thing before great space:
Whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their fatigue can just barely
free themselves from the worn-out thresholds,
very slowly, lift a single black tree
and place it against the sky, slender and alone.
With this you have made the world. And it is large
and like a word that is still ripening in silence.
And, just as your will grasps their meaning,
they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes . . .

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I always enjoy reading poems that other poets have written, inspired by another poet's poem.  (Did that make sense?)  This poem by Ms. Gioia is one of my favorites. 

It's a dreary, rainy day here in the swamps, but we're all looking forward to seeing our New Orleans Saints play in the Super Bowl on Sunday.  The entire state has gone Saints crazy.  It's fabulous and fun.  I'm in a winter funk.  I think I need to color my hair and get it trimmed to cheer me up. 

I'd like to ask you all to pray for my precious friend, Renee, today.  She lost her beloved mother after a long battle with cancer. 

Love & Blessings,

~*~Marion~*~

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"For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?" ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet", On Death

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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. ~Mark Twain

Poetry Visits By Marion, Inspired by Visceral Realism

I've said this a hundred times or more, but reading only leads to more reading.  After reading the magnificent tome "2666" by the late, great Roberto Bolaño, I had to read his earlier book, "The Savage Detectives".  Here's the blurb from  Publisher's Weekly:


"This novel—the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) here beautifully translated by Wimmer—will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer. In early 1970s Mexico City, young poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter ego and a regular in his fiction) and Ulises Lima start a small, erratically militant literary movement, the Visceral Realists, named for another, semimythical group started in the 1920s by the nearly forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero. The book opens with 17 year-old Juan García Madero's precocious, deadpan notebook entries, dated 1975, chronicling his initiation into the movement. The long middle section—written, like George Plimpton's Edie, as a set of anxiously vivid testimonies from friends, lovers, bystanders and a great many enemies—tracks Belano and Lima as they travel the globe from 1975 to the mid-1990s. There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to the Latin American literary scene, and one needn't be an insider to get the jokes: they're all in Bolaño's masterful shifts in tone, captured with precision by Wimmer. The book's moving final section flashes back to 1976, as Belano, Lima and García Madero search for Cesárea Tinajero, with a young hooker named Lupe in tow. Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad and uncontainable."
 
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I was intrigued by the terms Visceral Realism and couldn't find a definition online that satisfied me, so I went to my old trusted and true Webster's Dictionary and got the literal definitions.  I'm still not exactly sure what they mean (I'm still in the first third of the book), but it did clear up a few things for me.   

Visceral - (1)  felt in or as if in the viscera:  deep  (2)  not intellectual; instinctive, unreasoning  (3)  dealing with crude or elemental emotions: earthy

Realism - (1)  Concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary  (2)  A doctrine that universals exist outside the mind,  (3) fidelity in art and literature to nature or to real life and to accurate representation without idealization.

I have NO idea where the poem below came from, but after reading a chapter of this book, it demanded to be written.  Take what you will from it.   ~Marion

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Poetry Visits
by Marion

I open the book and begin reading
about visceral realism poetry.
I doze and I dream---
Poetry becomes my lover,
a skilled and beautiful
man.  He took my hand,
put down my book
(careful to mark my page)
and led me to his soft, down-filled bed.
He slowly took off all of my clothes,
my inhibitions shedding with each piece.
I was unashamed or shy.
I lie naked on his
cloud-soft sheets.
Poetry slowly undressed, carelessly
dropping his clothes on the scarred wood floor. 
He lay his furry, firm, naked body
fully on top of me.
We touched toe to toe,
chest to chest, lips to lips.

Poetry's kiss was the kiss of life:
the sun, the moon, the stars, and
every single planet was in his
soft, slow, sensuously moving lips on mine.
He poured words into my hot mouth, as our
wet lips parted.  I tasted each exquisite letter
as it dripped onto my tongue from his.
The letters tangled as our tongues danced.
I felt the swallowed letters forming
words inside me.
Without ever uttering a single sound,
Poetry took my soul and married it
to his with one
lingering kiss.

Later, much later,

we lay side by side for hours---
our literary bliss sated,
then slept.

I awoke and wrote this poem.


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