August 9: Signs

Signs fascinate me with their often unwitting poetic potential. Wherever I'm driving I pay attention to signs--decorative to crude, whimsical to downright weird. For a while I kept a running list of names of hair salons, which seem particularly prone to awful puns. Driving today on Route 17 I was inspired by one particular sign for a bottle redemption center, seen shortly before the sign for S & M Radiator.
 
"Rapid Redemption"--
Is grace really as easy
as returning cans?

Posted with Blogsy

August 8: Dirt roads

This past weekend up at Baxter my husband and I were talking about how one of the reasons mountains are such sacred spaces is because they have the power to create their own weather. As I was driving down the long, winding dirt road to my sister and brother-in-law's camp tonight, I was struck with this similar thought:

A dirt road creates
its own weather: dust storms flare
behind every car.

August 7: Nostalgia

My husband asked me yesterday if I ever have nostalgic thoughts. What poet could honestly answer "no"? This time of year, as the start of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference approaches in the Green Mountains of Vermont, my thoughts often drift to the eight summers that I attended the conference, seven of them as part of the administrative "social" staff. I was in my twenties. Those two weeks spent with fellow poets, many of whom became close friends, living, breathing, eating, talking, writing, listening to, and reading poetry, surrounded by inspiring, well-known poets and other writers, in an idyllic mountain setting, were truly a highlight of my young life. We stayed up late, drank too much, danced in the barn, frolicked through hay fields, wished on falling stars while huddled around a bonfire, caught fireflies, skinny-dipped, and, most of all, were fueled by excellent lectures, readings, and workshops that kept me going as a poet for the rest of the year. Ah, those August days (and nights) on the mountain...

Kissing in a field--
what could be more innocent
on a summer night?

August 4, 5, & 6: Baxter State Park

Spent three days in Baxter State Park, primarily at South Branch Pond Campground in the northeast corner of the park, so that I could lead a session on journaling and haiku for the ten cool kids in the Maine Youth Wilderness Leadership Program. As preparation for my session, I wrote a few myself to share so that they could see how they themselves might be inspired by the breathtaking natural surroundings. (And because I wanted them to focus on the concept of capturing a moment in a creative way, rather than the traditional syllabic structure, the following haiku do not follow the strict syllabic form as the other haiku I've written here do.)

In addition to (literally) soaking up the beauty of the pond, surrounding mountains, and lush woods of northern Maine, we hiked a six-mile trail following Howe Brook up a cleft of Traveler Mountain. This mossy, cobbled stream wends its way through water-carved pools and potholes, cascading over smooth ledges and down steep shelves--a perfect place for trailside swimming on a hot day. Frogs sang us to sleep, and the waning gibbous moon lit the trees outside our lean-to all night long.

South Branch Pond, looking south

Already August
and only now
my first swim of the summer.

Mountains embrace the pond--
wide, pebbled bowl,
tiny swimmers within.

These two fishing loons,
almost as loud
as the splashing swimmers.

Two loons surface near shore,
calmly ignore us all.
They own this pond.

Drumming across the pond,
a single woodpecker--
how loud!

A white noise machine,
wind drowns out
all human voices.

One of the many falls and pools of Howe Brook.

August 3: Squid

The cat, who was previously very occupied with licking her catnip mouse in the living room, jumped up and dashed into the kitchen meowing querulously, as if she knew that my husband was about to haul out a bag of squid to clean in the sink for dinner. Cats seem able to preternaturally sense the presence of seafood. Our former cat would be in the kitchen waiting if we just talked about having shrimp for dinner. And they have such a sense of entitlement about it, too--we end up having to offer up bits of squid just to placate this demanding creature, this small feline goddess with the great power to read, and sway, our minds.

Ears up, tail wagging,
our cat patiently awaits
her squid offering.

August 2: Late night drive

Driving home late from a Lucinda Williams concert in Portland, half-asleep in the car, the edges of our night world made even blurrier by fog...

A flare in the night--
cigarette tossed from a car
In the foggy dark.

Posted with Blogsy

August 1: First day of August

A new month begins, summer creeps ever onward. After a rainy morning, I felt fortunate to stand in the sun this afternoon on a creaky old dock on a pond in Morrill, surrounded by purple pickerelweed flowers waving above the water's surface and darting dragonflies. We could see little fish swimming in the shallow water around the dock. A kingfisher rattled in the distance. And after we hiked through the pines back up the trail, we finally heard a loon call--not a cry of alarm, but that simple call of a loon declaring its presence on the small, bright pond.

Now August begins.
From the lily-choked pond, loon
calls forth the new month.