Wasps on the feeder:

hummingbird at my red shirt.

I hear the sound of their tails before I see them. That moment: The year has turned. Days are shorter, shrinking toward the longest night. The landscape, no longer bright green, has matured.

Seedheads of blue grama curl

when the peaches are ready.

Soon it will be time to plant cool-season crops again.

I started small, filling the small spaces with buffalograss, planting side-oats grama, mountain mahogany, but I wanted a native meadow. Out came the garden beds. Out came the turf. In went the butterfly garden, only to die in the drought that turned the century. I may put a vegetable garden in its place.

Scattering yarrow seeds years ago, I didn’t imagine the weeding I do now, the struggle with the invasive roots.

Five species of penstemon out of three hundred.

I’ve just started.

Pedestrians and cyclists passed us going both directions, not looking up. If they noticed at all, they thought the light was made by humans, not storms.

Listening to police radio via the iPhone, we felt enchanted by the distant voices calling to “triage these cars” out of the flood. By a simple freak of nature and the human response.

Did it have something

to do with the Divine

chocolate we ate?

At last we had enough. But the city wasn’t quite ready to let us go. Driving toward the highway, we saw Cherry Creek had drowned the sidewalks that hem it in. “Class V rapids in Denver,” Todd joked, and stopped in a parking lot. I tripped down there to take a photo and surprised two men sitting on the wall. We eyed each other until I raised the camera, not in their direction.

On Facebook we note the storm.

Is nothing strictly interior now?

What if “Bite me!” summoned a pride of lions? Would they approach, one after another, and delicately nip away?

What exactly would “Fuck off!” mean?

I follow her to the bathroom, admire her sideways as I enter the marble stalls. Mentally rewrite the scene in which I ride down the driveway in Kansas City, fall on my ass after two seconds, never climb on top of a skateboard again.

She wore a studded belt low across her skinny hips. On the bus, I was just reading the summer 2008 issue of Ms., the article about body image. I was that skinny once and I wouldn’t mind being that skinny again.

I think of it as a matter of determination, not poor body image. A matter of how many huge salads I can eat before I have to splurge. Can I eat enough raw food to get down to 125 pounds again? Just for the thrill of being back there before I turn 50?

Deprivation is so last century—
it’s what we eat, not how much.

The inn next door has been put up for sale: too much for one man to cook and wait tables and check in guests and clean, 7 days a week. We slept there one night: Will it be the same when we return?

First night: Cradled by
the most comfortable bed in our travels.

In Antonito, a struggling town in the San Luis Valley, we board a bus for Chama. In Chama, we board a narrow-gauge train for Antonito. This small circle part of the larger loop of this trip. The train tracks almost circle back on themselves so the steel wheels can climb steel rails laid on a steep grade.

Leaning out of the open car,
my camera over the drop.

My feet barely sink into the sand dunes, hardened by the wind across the San Luis Valley. We pose at the first ridge, dunes unfolding beyond.

A father descends the dune on a pink snowboard.
His son spirals down.

I admit, my native meadow isn’t viable. It requires more work than the rest of the yard combined.

Intimacy:
the sap of salsify, hawkweed, thistle
marks my wrists

I feel burdened by things happening far away. My eighty-something father is piling up debt, and all I manage to do from here is worry while my brothers and sisters do all the work.

Pledges, taxes, loans, credit cards:
He’s generous, my sister says

In the garden at least, I can imagine progress by the end of the summer.

I interrupted him to photograph the chocolates on the counter—

—two free truffles—
I’ll email him about the website review

There’s construction on 15th Street, two lanes blocked off. I wait for 6 SUVs, don’t expect the Honda going the other direction.

More dangers await at Shoemaker Plaza: Canada geese suddenly ravenous for chocolate; sun melting artisan chocolates into featureless blobs; toddlers carelessly whacking them as they stumble by.

Pear hazelnut:
the Platte chills dogs and children
in the shallows

Rice grass is my first indulgence: even a tulip has nothing on a cloud of seeds shivering in summer. Then Penstemon pinifolius with red flowers. I already have the yellow; I have 6 Penstemon species out of 300. The woman I ask for help tells me she has no native ground covers, but I find pussytoes and sedums.

Maybe I should work here.

Every summer I say:
I will finish the yard this year.

“Thanks,” I said. “My pen has run out.”

Ballpoint pen at a green fair:
indispensable, unrecyclable.

I confessed I’d wandered from booth to booth, unable to take notes, looking for a likely pen to steal. But that just seemed so tacky, I told her, still writing.

She urged me to take hers.

Smooth: old pen lids cover thermometers
so they won’t break.

We started slow, we 20 women come to train. To raise our voices, 1 hour. To stop letting them get too close, 2 hours. I did the first role-play.

One woman brought her babysitter, a Marine with sculpted eyebrows. Was there no self-defense in the armed forces?

Two years of Krav Maga for me; two other women were current students. It didn’t matter. All of us grew equally aggressive, especially the one having a flashback at the end.

But will we remember?

Krav Maga

Tattooed.

But it was the girls carrying sticks I noticed, skidding along the edges of the crowd, holding hands, dragging each other down to the floor to sit and discuss—whatever could be shouted over the wall of sound.

A girl catching what a man throws—
Is that love, or baseball?

Outside the park still damp from the first rain this year on the plains. I pray for more.

In the vegetable garden I have begun to lay mulch. First the greens: weeds and kitchen scraps. Then the winter-frozen leaves and pine needles.  Then repeat: one layer after another, until I’ve used them all up, until it’s deep enough to support a seedling.

The energy of spring

will soon give way to the pall of summer heat.

All I know now is, there are never enough tulips. And never for long.

The world outside is wet from snowmelt.

Downstairs, neither of us gets the fire roaring. The smell of office paper smoldering makes me sniff. We eat goat cheese and artichoke leaves while I poke newspaper between the logs. A knot on one of the logs smokes steadily. Then a small flame appears.

There are seven logs left.

It is snowing again.
I cover the one daffodil not frozen.

All Friday the snow two feet deep on the deck beckoned me.

After dark, I opened the garage door and cut the crust of snow. Thrusting it into the yard, I made my way north across the deck.

Drought keeps the grass
asleep too long.
Snowmelt awakens it.

Too warm for gloves or a hat. Water trickles through gutters hidden under snow.

Spring blooms: daffodils
under a bucket
just cresting the snowdrift.

I had no other plans.

I’ve been editing all weekend. The world beyond my window is far away; my eyes want to close.

Somewhere in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and Endymion series, the once-human creatures that fill the void of space declare themselves: “We will adapt. We will fill the universe with life from end to end.”

I have never found anything better than an alley to focus the mind.  They call to me the way a remnant patch of suburban woods called when I was a child.

What’s in there? What’s at the end?

Have you ever encountered her and not wanted to explain?

It was a narrow green room, a mirror to my left, benches to my right, silk flowers that could fool you. She came out from the back and looked at me, waiting for me to ask her to make an arrangement. In search of the gallery her floral shop had replaced, I couldn’t switch gears. There was nothing I wanted there, not then.

Have you ever closed a door and wanted to go right back in?

Behind Cherokee Row:
a parking lot, bank letter on the sidewalk.

I blink at my Excel file of Action Steps. How to make it easier to read? Organization begets reorganization!

White tulips decurve
the vase: its green lining flakes
into the water

Can anything match a reddening Midwestern oak, several stories tall?

The cypress in Louisiana could observe themselves in their mirror, the bayou, if they had eyes.

After 21 years, I still sometimes prefer the mountains from afar, as I saw them on the plane from New Orleans, a zigzag of white.

The cold follows us:
frost in Louisiana,
corn snow on our deck

]]> http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-homecoming/feed/ 3 http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-north-shore-of-lake-pontchartrain-fontainebleau-state-park/ http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-north-shore-of-lake-pontchartrain-fontainebleau-state-park/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:14:18 +0000 Beth http://bethpartin.com/?p=995 Continue reading →]]> I can see downtown New Orleans across the lake. On Wednesday I’ll drive the causeway bridge, longest over water in the world, but now I’m on the boardwalk, while the approaching children vibrate the dock. They giggle behind me like bubbles. They turn the viewer down, to look at a trash pile in the marsh; up, at the clouds, the plane, the sun.

Doesn’t it burn your eyes?

Another tries it. Did it burn?

Let’s go, one says. The eldest keeps shushing them. The old woman is birding. The redheaded boy rides off.

I watch their bright T-shirts moving away.

Some fish keeps jumping
over and over. Common
moorhens behind reeds.

The couple seeks a brown pelican; I point it out to them. Their first visit here since Hurricane Katrina. The woman is still mourning. Live oaks survived, their branches drooping to the ground and rooting, but many others did not. Two years of cleanup: now time to replant.

A family
encircles an oak. Do their hands
all meet? I can’t tell.

I spend all my days
working at home: why protest
this large hotel suite?

Across the highway, ungainly pines, half-needled, only at the top, march along, forever behind the cars and trucks. No pine beetle rust on them, unlike near Denver. There’s supposed to be a special ozone here, the rich air of Covington.

So close, unable
to see. Behind glass, mourning
the outside world.

Joy: My hair is curly in Louisiana.

The rooms face an interior courtyard, partly occupied by a CPR class. Each student, ensconced on the floor, has a device to keep her as far away from Annie’s mouth germs as possible. Annie is inanimate, but who knows what she picked up along the way?

Tomorrow Todd will become an Annie of sorts, the Annie of balance tests.

The doctor’s advice:

Eat a light lunch.

No liquor, no medication.

I believed him, having lost Rufus last year to the fox trotting through the park, or the pair of coyotes casing my yard early one morning, or a pack of raccoons. My neighbor cleaned up his guts before she knew what they were. My husband and I took the bloody gravel and buried it with the disco green collar Rufus had lost in the yard.

Now I content myself with the neighbor’s cat who spends his days here and his nights elsewhere.

When I see him through my door on these winter evenings, I think of his front claws that Rufus lacked, the fences he could climb. I hope, when I don’t let him in, he returns to his owners and paws at their door.

Drifts so hard, I leave
no prints on the snow beneath
the bird feeders.

Two giant pink bunnies deflate,

puddling onto the floor.

She asked him to recite “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.”

He said he’d never been able to commit that one to memory. He said he could recite Yeats and Keats all night.

She said sometimes it’s too terrifying to have a full Emily Dickinson poem inside you.

Caught by one poet mopping up champagne,

the only one pouring it.

Denver’s Parade of Lights was quaint and small, as the woman from New York predicted. I liked her, but I liked the parade less, arrived late, couldn’t snap a picture without a quarter of some old woman’s head in it, couldn’t see the whole of the fairy-blue pirate ship. I chased it via the streets not blocked off.

Eight-deep crowd:

fairy-light floats around the corner

and disappears

Market Street Station was nearly empty. Ah ha! I could be the first in line for the B. I claimed my spot by Gate 8’s double doors, sitting cross-legged, eating mints covered in dark chocolate. I had never been first on a bus in my life. A boy joined me, also seated. Three women clustered to my left, although the line had already formed to my right. I glared at them, defending my position.

The bus pulled up, and the driver dismounted, declaring, “I’m just coming in, folks.” Puzzled, we maintained our positions, me against the three women. I would be first! Then another driver announced, “Gate 7!” A Denver-sized rush ensued. The three women reached the door and turned around, one looking smug.

Dad, baby in backpack,

declines my seat with extra legroom,

stands.

Yesterday, we traveled for 13 hours. The Sunday after Thanksgiving: in Denver and Chicago, new snow. Friends left behind, grading in Chattanooga; mother-in-law at one gate whom we couldn’t persuade to use our guest bedroom.

I’m on East Coast time now, detoxing from a week of southern food and wine.

And now my mind is muddled, can’t light on a good subject for this poem.

A man and a woman from Denver Health Medical Center appear. The man confronts the drunk, raising his voice to him about a knife. He tells the drunk he is intoxicated, and the drunk replies, “I am not.” The other man says he would have to disagree. The woman also asks the guy about a knife. They make him stand up and walk him off. The cop packs up his bag and jacket.

REI is closed, and it may be dangerous to sit down here by myself, but I am nothing if not happy.

I can see the dial of the clock tower on the 16th Street Mall. I can see “Qwest” in blue at the top of one tall building.

Joe Nacchio was the only telecom executive who didn’t sell us out. He ran Qwest until 2002, and in 2007 he was convicted of insider trading. In 2008, his conviction was overturned.

He says the government retaliated against his refusal to cooperate with warrantless wiretapping.

I say, I have no love for take-no-prisoners CEOs.

But I am grateful to him.

When I was young, I wanted to leave my family, had to go as far away as possible. I was going to explore. Now I think of my thirty-year voluntary separation from them and wonder if it’s time to wander home.

I’ve been retracing my steps this past month, pacing a neighborhood, circling and returning to locations I’ve already visited. And I find new corners in them.

Maybe the city of my childhood also has a new face to show me?

The plumes of fountain in City Park Lake shoot up and arch northwest, misting the paddle boaters far away. Trees wear their leaves around their feet, like a dancer who’s lost her slip but won’t stop dancing to hitch it up.

So I followed him to the museum.

From here, the world appears to be open to anything. That which closes us in is transparent, and we feel comforted by the space between us and other things.

Now I await his return from adventures with dinosaurs.

***

After writing haibun on Mondays for two months now, I discovered I was making an embarrassing mistake. Instead of having the haiku at the end of the haibun run 5-7-5, I’ve been writing them 7-5-7. I knew that haiku were not supposed to exceed 17 syllables, but somehow I wrote a bunch of 19-syllable ones without noticing. Then I read this post on Editorial Ass‘s site and thought, “Oops!”

Not that haiku have to be 17 syllables. Or three lines. I’ve seen them in Frogpond written as one line, or stacked, or in the typical three-line structure but with fewer than 17 syllables.

Maybe I should go through the most recent issue and see how many were 19.

But I’m not sure I’m that much of a hero.

Not a tourist either.

Some days, I’m simply absent. When I should be tending my relations. I stop and think, I meant to call ___ months ago. What happened?

When I pick up the phone, rapt in the warmth of her voice, I’m also not there—I’m in Scotland twenty-five years ago, cradled by a feather bed. She’s in the next room.

I’ve arrived here again. Faced with a deadline, racing to get there. Dozens of pages short.

]]> http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-deadline/feed/ 0 http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-teacher/ http://bethpartin.com/monhaibun-teacher/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:14:07 +0000 Beth http://bethpartin.com/?p=481 Continue reading →]]>

We sat surrounding Dorianne Laux, up a twisty stair in a room at the top of the Tivoli. She was warm. We were worried, for our poems would be critiqued in the next three hours, and no one yet knew how it would happen.

I answered the call to adventure weeks before, via email. And when I stood at the bus stop in the rain, my guide stopped for me and took me with her. But when we reached the city, I wanted to navigate alone. I ate a large, mango-magical salad and made my way to the dark brick tower that was the Tivoli and climbed.

We took her tests: a memory, recited as if from within it, no matter how long ago. A poem about an object that mystified us. And then she grappled with us.

We hadn’t expected roughness with a smile. We’d expected poems on paper handed back marked up. But she held our poems in one fist—later, as we would discover, hardly marked at all—and told us where they wanted to go and how we were holding them back. More spit and vinegar, please. As if they were our children and we’d raised them to say nothing at all if they couldn’t say something nice.

Clouds clump over the mountains, as they have all summer. Will they deliver this time? Will I wake tomorrow to sugar-coated mountains?

I almost didn’t get there. “Zamia?” said the bus driver. “Never heard of it.” But the man with the unplaceable accent led me there. Trouble was, the houses were too big for a cohousing development. I trudged to the other side of Broadway, down Yellow Pine, up the street by the park, until the couple and a dog, faces obscured by dusk, showed me where to go.

I joined the group in the common house, filled a glass with water, but passed on the wine. Last time, I’d drunk a glass of wine before the reading and nodded off in the second row. I sat in the back, gaining a great view of everyone’s hair.

All I remember of the first reader, a man, is this description: funny. All I remember of the second reader, a woman, is a father and daughter canoeing the Missouri, following the trail of Lewis and Clark. All I remember of the third reader, a man, is this line: We want America back! And that was enough, for a while.

All I remember of the fourth reader, a woman, is this description: boredom. And the word chrysanthemums. And possibly iris. Her voice slow in that sleep-inducing rhythm of some read poetry, while I watched the dancer’s strong face. I didn’t want her to lull me to sleep, and there was wonderful hair all around me: coarse and long and brown, wavy and white and neck-length, dark and curly.

Saturday was a day of quiet loneliness, the Boulder Reservoir deserted by people and, mostly, by sun. Even the lifeguard had time to chat, and a man with an Italian accent accosted me about the movie that night. I wasn’t there for the movie but to grasp summer and keep it under my arm, remembering childhood holidays at Lake Tapawingo where the evening air and water stayed warm past Labor Day. I waded into the shallows; even the water was withdrawing, the solstice only a week away.

Two boys built their own lake and canals right next to the beach. Their father watched, then buried one up to his neck after the lake breached. I christen the boys Gustav and Ike as I drive to Walden Ponds, still in search of the perfect body of water.

A little girl foots her scooter across the Platte River bridge. “Don’t get too far ahead,” her mother calls, as the scooter swings toward the edge of the sidewalk. The girl’s driving leg beats a steady rhythm as trucks rumble by, the river flows below, bottle-brown over white shreds of trash. There are no fish.

***

If you’re looking for things to do this week, check out this calendar or this one.

Exhibit Darfur sounds particularly cool.

Here’s a list of free events.

Bristlecone pines twist for strength at the top. Micro-landscapes shifting every few feet, spongy grasses to willow carr to scatterings of violet flowers, smaller than my thumbnail, the tallest of the tundra. Cairns point to nothing.

We drove from home to Windy Ridge to Windy Point, and home, to see 1,000-year-old trees. We are not there yet.

One, blown over, sliced, and carved, still roots in two places. Nearby, the phone line ends, as if nothing more can be said.