April Diary 19: onion snow

 

Dear April forget drunken sailors, what shall we do with a poet who can barely use a pen?

trying to write bananas on a shopping list my hand gets lost in some kind of 70s folk-rock song going na na, na na na na. i add an s and squint at the result: it might be right. fortunately it’s a nearly illegible scrawl so who can tell

weird to lose that muscle memory though

(again with the muscle memory)

(i do keep a pocket notebook in my pack for when my phone poops out)

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an email from Black Lawrence Press with the subject line 50% Off All Poetry Titles! got my attention pretty quick. i wish more publishers would put their money where their mouth is about poetry month. shared the good news on Twitter and ordered three books including two i’d been meaning to get for a while, Shanna Compton’s Creature Sounds Fade and Kristy Bowen’s sex & violence, plus [ G A T E S ] by Sahir Muradi

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got a notice that a book i was really excited about had arrived at the post office box (no we don’t get delivery up here) so i thought i’d walk in town for it. it was sleeting but the forecast said snow. i can dress for snow i thought

don’t know why i don’t walk into town more often, it’s a little over two miles away and Tyrone is nothing if not photogenic. i don’t even mean that ironically

the I-99 overpasses are something of a feature. LIFE’S A BLUR says the graffiti. especially from the interstate, yes

i don’t have to go to the big city for a dose of urban bleakness

i was a bit shocked to see some graffiti promoting a website that preaches violent fascist revolution. a sign of the times?

i don’t know what they did to the surface of the sidewalk on the 10th Street bridge but i think i got a contact high

it started snowing pretty hard while i was in the post office

you might think given my usual snobbishness about cliched images that i would resist the temptation to take lots of photos of blossoming trees in the snow

you’d be wrong

snow on cherry blossoms beside Reliance Bank

but the snow wasn’t the only thing making the town seem a bit surreal…

as long as we have public librarians who do quietly subversive things like commission a painting of the Lorax on the sidewalk, i tend to think we’ll be OK as a society

the new country core shop at the end of the street has slightly terrifying window displays

then there’s the salvage yard…

honesty compels me to admit that i removed some racist graffiti from this image in processing — not to try to whitewash the town’s image but because if i left an n-word in, that’s all the photo would be about, inevitably, and i just wanted to focus on the aesthetic contrast here. that said i did keep a version of the photo with the hateful word intact for documentary purposes. like, this is America. Childish Gambino got it right

BUT a single (? let’s hope) hate-filled individual not only doesn’t represent Tyrone, s/he doesn’t even represent local street artists as the adjacent overpass demonstrates. shout out to these kids whoever they are

one appears to be a fan of Gardner’s ice cream parlor

a freight came along

the advice to be sic [sic] is certainly intriguing. are there pro-Covid radicals or is this just an old-school Satanist i wonder

the fun thing about walking up the mountain while it’s snowing hard is that it gets prettier as you climb. which does kind of seem like what should happen when you climb a mountain doesn’t it

i do worry about all the wildflowers and especially the flowering fruit trees of course. above is part of our trillium patch

these are not supposed to be white trilliums, they’re wake-robins. who probably wish they could go back to sleep

i never get tired of looking at snow on hemlocks though

there was one hepatica blossom still just visible, one exposed purple petal like an outstretched tongue

some black cohosh sprouts weren’t looking too happy

but damn the hollow was purty

the witch hazels are probably feeling pretty smug about their whole blooming-in-November deal

i tried drinking my tea on the one bench along the hollow road but my umbrella wasn’t really up to the task and my primary mission was to get the mail home dry and in one piece

as long a winter as we had, there weren’t more than half a dozen snows this pretty

so i’m not entirely crazy to celebrate the beauty of it, destructive as it is

a hen turkey trotted across the road in front of me and all i got was this lousy photo

i tend to forget this forsythia is here even though it’s right across from my house—when not in bloom it just kind of blends into the woods’ edge

a photo so obligatory i sighed as i took it. poor downcast daffodils

all in all a classic onion snow. and not a surprise because the poetry bloggers i follow who live out west got it last week. looks as if we’ve gotten about five inches now

if i’d brought a larger umbrella and worn my snow boots i could’ve stayed out longer but i was happy to get home and start the book i’d hiked in town for

Italian poet Elisa Biagini’s first collection translated in full

it’s a trip

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at around four in the afternoon i sometimes feel a rush of happiness and i think that’s because four o’clock was when we got home from school after walking up the mountain

today i was happy like that so i made some decaf coffee and processed all these photos because why waste a good mood on just feeling good and i admit i’m not as free of the American obsession with productivity as i might like to think

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after supper i finished the erasure poem i’d been working on. the second stanza is distinctly Simic-esque. wasn’t quite sure what tied the three stanzas together until i hit on the post title: Unseasonable

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my Moving Poems co-blogger Marie Craven just reminded me of this video featuring the wonderful Australian spoken-word poet Caroline Reid

Reid calls it

A playful fusion of poetry, visual art and film in which a reflective middle-aged poet discovers that life’s interruptions to writing poetry are the very substance from which poems emerge.

exactly.

(Marie is planning to share more of Reid’s work on Moving Poems so keep an eye out for that)

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