Secret Garden

Time-battered sentinel, guardian
of the past
In the heart of the city you remain
the weary elegance of antiquity
Ivy-drenched and unforgotten,
your silent scars and rust-crowned lock
bewitch the ghostly winter sun
with the promise of Eden inside

Memoir

My lovely friend Joan has tagged me to participate in a meme that originated way, way over here to post a six-word memoir on my blog. These are the rules:

1. Write a six word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration or photo if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so the meme can be tracked as it travels across the blogosphere
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

And here is my offering:

Prayers open broken, end in hope.

As for tagging five other blogs…Maybe this is silly, but I don’t feel comfortable tagging people that I don’t know well for something like this, and everyone I would tag has already been hit. So instead I shall issue an open invitation to anyone who reads this: consider yourself tagged, and if you participate please post a link to your memoir as a comment, because I would love to see what you came up with!

Small things

This week, there is a myriad of small, seemingly insignificant things that have conspired to give me joy. So here is a short list of the things that have brightened my life recently.

1. Granola. Because I am an adult now, I can cram my yogurt so full of granola that I hardly realize I’m eating yogurt anymore–which is a truly marvelous thing, because I’m not big on yogurt and I’ve had to eat a lot of it recently. Granola is yummy!
2. This song makes me really happy. It has such a beautiful, whimsical feel that inevitably makes me perk up and imagine that I’m skipping through a sunny meadow in a cute dress sucking on a gigantic lollipop and holding a bouquet of brightly colored balloons.
3. I sold $32 worth of candles Tuesday! Weehee! It makes me happy to send people yummy-smelling things of my own creation.
4. Last night’s lunar eclipse, with the scarlet shadow creeping across the moon’s face…*shiver of ecstasy*
5. The sun. Not just the fact that it is finally sunshiney and warming up, but that the days are getting longer and I can see the friendly, beautiful sun until almost 5pm. (!!!)
6. I’m going to call my best-friend-since-second-grade, Elizabeth, this afternoon and that is always the most fun that can possibly be packed into 45 minutes or so. Elizabeth, wherever you are right now, you are so utterly spiffy! I love you!
7. We ate lunch at Stadium Pizza over the weekend, which was not only yummy but very fun because that is where we filmed a large part of one of our silent films back in 2005…And even more exciting because next weekend we will return there with some friends to start play testing the card game we designed based on that silent film. *mwahahaahaaaa!* (I am in a very strange mood today; all this happiness is making me hyper) This is the side of me that has not yet released itself into the blogverse: the spontaneously weird, utterly silly part of me that wants to do things like dress up in a fairy costume and skip around downtown Spokane with a basketful of candles handing them out to everyone, and actually does things like skip through Cannon Hill Park with a basketful of donuts to film a short, B-movie-ish little piece titled Lament of the Pastries, or  show up to midnight showings of I Married a Monster from Outer Space in ducky pajama pants, multicolored toe socks with flipflops, and glittery headbobbers. This might help explain why certain people (mostly teachers) have referred to the experience of knowing me as a trip to Planet Amy or being sucked into the Amy Zone. This will probably embarass me later, but for now…the secret’s out. I’m a bonafide weirdo. And I enjoy it.

Dreamer

Cold-cast porcelain dreamer,
heroine of a thousand tales,
you are the ever-changing face behind
every woman’s fate,
the faithless beauty of Helen and
the burning passion of Cleopatra,
the three-fold Celtic goddess weaving lives
into destinies,
stepping from the pages of myth
to dance like a cold, flaming star down
the stairway of centuries,
whispering in the spaces    between    whispers:
I have many faces, and I might be
any woman you meet,
anywhere.

Inspired in part by The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip

Ushering in Spring

 

It feels so unspeakably good to see the sun again. This winter has been harder on me than any other–only two weeks ago, with 2 feet of snow on the ground and no end in sight to the frigid bleakness, I had recurring dreams of being trapped in a snowstorm while menacing creatures (first wolves, then an invisible, malignant presence) prowled outside waiting to devour me. But last week and this week…This week, it is 40 degrees every day, and the skies are a clear, fresh blue with the sun pouring down golden and warm. I have been watching the snow melt off my neighbor’s roof and recede from the sidewalks, and growing in me is the hope of Spring, that at last this long winter is over. Perhaps this is silly of me, since it’s only the middle of February, but still, I treasure this renewed hope. Even if the snow comes again, I will have these weeks to hold onto, these beautiful golden days to remind me that winter is not forever. Today, it does not matter that it is still cold and that Spring might still be far away–today all that matters is the promise of sunshine.

Cheshire Moon

The Cheshire-grin of the moon
hangs low in the sky
A vanishing act,
a taunting charade
The mystery of what shadow
lies behind that wild smile:
the Cat itself, or
the Hatter and the Hare?
Perhaps the whole
of Alice’s daydream country,
teased into existence
–the place where I, too,
will leave
only my smile behind

February SPC 1: The Little Blue Butterfly

The little blue butterfly that sits on my hip…It’s ridiculous how happy a small, pretty thing like this can make me. I picked up two packages of these little buttons done by Paperchase the other night, and I’m obsessed with finding things to stick them on. The bright, bold colors and fun swirls are just so irresistible.

Meanwhile,  I am being bold (bolder than I actually feel) and taking my poetry/photography self-challenge one step further…taking it outside myself. Calliope Unbound is in its infancy, one week old today, but we shall see how she grows.

I am also diving headfirst into yet another research project. *sigh* Am I ever going to stop researching things and actually start writing this novel? Although to be fair, my last research project culminated in the completion of my very own, made-from-scratch but totally functional language, and I’m pretty pleased with that. So off to the land of research, and we shall see what comes out this time!

Magic Numbers

Counting out the days,
each one packaged neatly
sleeping and    waking
The chill, muted colors of winter hemming
them tight
—as seamless and uninspiring as the hours
that fill them, the little pills
in their bright plastic jackets that count out
the magic numbers 7 and 21,
these 7 bottles and 21 pills the collective
sun I orbit ‘round.

I wonder, did
my father     feel like this?
His magic number hovered somewhere
above 70.        And it turned out
not to be so magic
after all.

Will these small, bitter inconveniences
heal me?
Do I tally up these days and hours, the 21
and the 7,
to knit my broken body
back together again,
or just for the illusion
of hope?

The world purified & eternalized

 A few quick thoughts close to my heart today… See you all on the other side of the weekend.

We remember wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture our hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.
                                             –Jack Zipes 

One evening while the festival of lanterns was being celebrated on a bank of the river, Han Fook happened to be wandering alone on the other side. He leaned against the trunk of a tree that portruded over the water and looked at the thousand lights swimming and shimmering in the reflection in the river. He saw men and women and young girls on boats and barges greeting one another. They were dressed in festive costumes and beamed like beautiful flowers. He heard the faint murmuring of the glittering water, the melodies of the singers, the hum of the zither, and the sweet tones of the flute players. And high above all this, he saw the blue night hover like the arch of a temple. The young man’s heart pounded while he stood there as a lonely spectator, and he became enraptured by all this beauty. Yet as much as he longed to cros the river and become part of everything, to be near his bride and his friends and enjoy the festivities, he also desired just as passionatel to absorb all of this as a keen observer and to capture it in a totally perfect poem: the blue of the night and the play of light on the water, as well as the enjoyment of the people and the yearning of the silent onlooker leaning against the trunk of a tree on the bank. He sensed that there would never be a festive occasion or any pleasure in the world that would make him feel entirely at ease and cheerful. Even in the midst of life he would remain solitary and, to a certain degree, a spectator and stranger. He felt, among other things, that his soul was formed in such a way that compelled him to feel both the beauty of earth and the strange longing of the outsider as the same time. He became sad about that, and as he pondered this matter, he came to the conclusion that true happiness and deep fulfillment could be his only if he were to succeed one time in capturing the world so perfectly in his poems that he would possess the world itself, purified and eternalized, in these images.
 –from “The Poet” by Hermann Hesse, translated by Jack Zipes