Making the Best of the Incessant Rain

Our yard has become marsh.
The egrets will be coming any day now,
white and dazzlingly self-aware
as Hvorostovsky on a Russian stage.
And we, their audience, cry
na zdorovje seeing them, admiring
their brilliance in this dreary week, the way
they make us feel, like a small icy draft
of coriander vodka slipping down.


image: Snowy Egret, Franco Folini

Writing Spaces

My green café table and chairs after the winter rains, with bust of Eros—from the potters on the winding road to Half Moon Bay—looking on bemused.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Overgrowth

The Alternate Census

More questions for the Alternate Census:

Your favorite season and time of day?
Have you ever thought of keeping backyard chickens?
What music should be played at your wake?
Your favorite ice cream to eat directly out of the container with a spoon?
Whom do you most despise? revere?
Have you ever paddled a canoe?
Would you like to do it again?
—Liza

What is that fuzzy stuff in the bowl in the bottom drawer of your refrigerator?
How did you come by that nickname "Scamp"?
—Christie

Writing Spaces

Only imagine what could be written in this chair!


image: Corset Armchair, Munna

What Poetry Is

Poetry is—

The fifty kinds of rum in Key West and the rough-shelled oysters being shucked behind the bar by hands that play jazz trombone after closing time.

Nabokov's butterflies, and the powdery wings of moths batting the bedside lamp on some late summer night (millers, my Grandma Bailey called them).

The Old English Sheepdog standing waiting in the Quad, patience heavily distilled.

Sun after rain; rain again.

The sleekly polished wooden floor of the old basketball pavillion, unseen traces of tatooing shoes and sweat evoking tenth grade and the seminary court.

My chased silver Navajo pen.

The stone wall and the hunter clearing it, a dappled gray named Tapitia we're all urging on—my heart bunching and rising every time he does.

—Christie

Writing Spaces

From the film of four ghost stories I've remembered since junior high when my father took me to see them at St. John's, just this month rediscovered—Masaki Kobayashi's spooky Kwaidan (Kaidan), 1964.

image: Kwaidan