You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
The land was often golden in the bright sunlight. Not green, but a permanent range of yellowish brown only flecked with green in a few weeks of spring passing.
Once I adjusted to its palette and air, I hoped we’d live there forever.
~*~
It’s the background for some of my novels and poetry now appearing at Thistle/Flinch editions. To read more, click here.
I’m tempted to say there are two sides to the mountain – a wet one and a dry one. Or even the side you see and the one you don’t. Or what’s ahead of you and what’s behind.
But none of that’s quite accurate.
You could, for one thing, be standing on the summit.
Or you could realize it’s one continuing side, like a Mobius strip, to explore. Even in your mind.
~*~
For a set of related poems, click here.
Not every desert is a Sahara or a place of giant cacti. The interior Pacific Northwest is a prime example. Its dry grasses rattle like swords in the unobstructed wind.
~*~
It’s the background for some of my novels and poetry now appearing at Thistle/Flinch editions. To read more, click here.
The mythologies of Greece are easily countered by those of India, China, Tibet, and Japan in the Native tales of the Olympic Peninsula and the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
Sit down by the fire, then, and listen. Some of the voices are millennia old.
~*~
For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.
The Olympic Peninsula of Washington State is a world of its own. About the size of Delaware, it has few settlements apart from its Native American tribes. Its remote coastline is gorgeous. Its forests are thick and varied and receive some of the heaviest annual rainfall in North America. Its central mountains include hot springs and glaciers. There’s a U.S. Navy base on the eastern edge along with an artist colony and ferry connections to Seattle.
Listen closely and the underlying mythologies shape a new understanding.
Here is a place where East meets West in its own nature.
~*~
For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.
The conditions that created the desert where we lived created what was sometimes called a “rain shadow.” It was ironic, actually, considering that we got far more sunlight by living on that side of the Cascade Mountains than if we’d been in, what, the rain glow?
Sometimes, though, it seemed to dry up all of our emotions, too.
A journey into the murky places of endless fog, mist, and rain, in contrast, could do wonders in the soul.
~*~
For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.
I’ve already mentioned it, the patio-like space beside the barn where we grill and dine through the summer. The place we call the Smoking Garden.
Originally, I envisioned it as a haven for the kids’ grandmother to sit with her cigarettes, but she never used it. Preferred the porch to the barn, if anywhere.
We inherited the arrangement when we bought the place. A couple of thick maple branches had to be removed, since they were blocking any passage at chest level. But the round fiberglass table was already in place, with pea-gravel on the ground and three adjoining panels I’ve since cleared and planted.
Now we’ve added tiki torches and twinkling Christmas lights overhead, plus the hammock.
Pour me a glass, please. Turn up the music.
~*~
let me praise the secluded outdoor corner
as part of an urban dwelling:
a patio or deck
(my last apartment lacked one)
the courtyard with a fountain
a large porch or gazebo
at the least, a place to sit
or, better yet, cook
any place close enough to the kitchen
with a degree of privacy and a view of something
Poem copyright 2015 by Jnana Hodson
Our first spring in the house, we discovered that our lawnmower wouldn’t work. Maybe we wouldn’t have been able to use in it the Swamp anyway, considering how wet that side yard can be. By the time the mower was back, though, the Swamp had gone wild. Waist-high with growth.
That’s when our elderly neighbor, Ernie, told me he had a scythe, offered to lend it to me, showed me how to cradle it and cut, and just how sharp he’d honed it.
So off I went. He was right, there’s a trick to using it right. But it’s work, all the same. Hard work.
So it’s something I’ve now done once in my life. And, hopefully, never again.
Yes, there’s good reason weed-whackers have taken over.
SCYTHE
in the meantime, waiting to refurbish
the red cobwebbed mower my wife salvaged
from her first marriage. The plot grows waist-high
and matted until our elderly neighbor extracts
a scythe from his garage and demonstrates its use
after which I vow, “never again!” while admiring
its hungry edge and once commonplace muscular skill
yes, before I get a functioning lawnmower
the swamp erupts in waist-deep weeds
on its far side, elderly Ernie laughs knowingly
before lending my his scythe
and demonstrating its use
“just call me Scythemaster”
my girls are instructed
watching me rock the cradle
oh, then, do I ache deeply …
poem copyright 2015 by Jnana Hodson
Got a rejection letter last week. All authors, and especially poets, are used to them. What was striking for me was that I hadn’t sent off any hard-copy submissions in the last three years. Repeat, THREE years.
As I’ve explained, a while ago I shifted over to online-only submissions as a consequence of much higher acceptances that way and of simplifying the difficulties of trying to maintain duplicate sets of files. (One for online, and a duplicate for hardcopy.)
So it took the editors of this particular journal more than three years to decide? What’s their problem? No wonder they’re feeling swamped!
This also touches on the issue of exclusivity in sending out work for publication. In the old days, meaning when I started, you didn’t dare send your work simultaneously to different periodicals. It was more a kind of serial monogamy. Or serious business.
Although the hard-and-fast requirement started melting, I stayed with exclusivity more as a matter of keeping track of what was out where – but I did keep an unmentioned caveat: after six months, if I’d heard nothing, it was fair game to send out again. In more than a thousand acceptances, I don’t recall more than a half-dozen cases where this became a problem.
Suppose I could look up the five poems to see if they’ve been published elsewhere in the interim, but frankly it’s not worth it.
You might have even seen them here, at the Barn.
When my private-time writing returned to poetry shortly after relocating to New England three decades ago, my attention turned to this unfamiliar place where I was now living. Quite simply, it felt much different than any of my previous locales, and the spirit of specific locations has always been a central concern in my literary ventures.
My personal writing has often been a way for me to assemble thoughts and impressions. In many ways, it’s the way I work through a problem or gain focus on an issue. So when it came to the exercise of looking at my new environment, I soon envisioned a set of poems along the line of a monthly almanac or even a calendar of words rather than color photographs.
I’ve long had a fondness for those large monthly calendars anyway, and by the time I got serious in pushing the almanac, I had a good selection of images to draw from as additional inspiration. Just what images does the region conjure up, anyway?
That’s when New England’s famed Winged Death headstone engravings came into play, and each month began to compress the overlapping centuries this corner of the United States embodies – more so than other parts of the nation, at least.
New England also has a strong tradition of authority and dissent. The Puritans, after all, came to these shores in their dissent from the Church of England, and Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and their followers in and around Salem, just north of Boston, were soon challenging the Puritan hegemony before being banished, in waves, to Rhode Island. Early Quaker firebrands were soon adding to that upheaval, and that’s included in my spiritual legacy.
What emerged from all this is a craggy, even Baroque, collage that reflects the evolution of the Yankee character in its landscape of harbors and mountains. It’s now available as a free PDF as my latest Thistle/Flinch edition. To read more, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 