A Sea Voyage

An evocative invitation from a friend / poet / writing teacher in Malaysia—

Here's an image by the artist Odilon Redon. Try writing a piece based on your response to this painting.  How does the painting make you feel?  Who is in the boat?  Where is it going?  What is the nature of the journey it is embarked on?  What does this painting show you about your life?  See where it takes you!

—Alina Rastam

Writing Spaces

image:  Wishing Tree, kirstyelizabeth

Ode to a Turquoise Vase

       ODE TO A 
        TURQUOISE VASE

                      I have cleared my writing table 
                         just to see it there—

            a day of clearing what’s unnecessary,

            for this one right thing.

               Not weighty with significance like Keats’s 
                                              Grecian urn,

             an amphora thick-lined with pine sap and 
                                                with time

       nor yet one of the Hopi vases holding corn;

   a moment only, absolutely,

   the fullness / release of grace

 in clay and color and

 the hands of friendship

 that have cupped it, giving it to me.

  The silence of Green Gulch

  is in its lissome form somehow,

    the sonor of the temple bells

    and paper-whisper of the wish tree

       and birdsong,

             the ancient lady apple in the inner garden

             wearing only winter light.

                      And when they come to her again,

                      the appleblossoms, in another turning 
                                               of the world,

                                    I’ll interrupt its perfect 
                                        concentration, offering

                              a twig from that same tree

                                         burst into imprudent

     white flower.

—Christie

Writing Spaces

The Town Called XXX

Daily writing prompt from Writers Write (South Africa):

“He would never forget the town called ____________ “

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

—Herman Melville

He would never forget the town called Madrid.  Not the Moorish capital of Spain, with origins of bears and Visigoths, which everybody knows, but the place the New Mexicans pronounce wrong, like mad and rid—both of which were at one time true of it, certainly true of him.  That mad place rid of its people, as he was mad and rid of family obligation, societal rot.  That ghost town he had come to haunt, moving with mad Anika to the miner’s cabin with the bits of Persian poetry carved into its coal-darkened wooden walls.  He had been going to do a mathematics degree instead, at MIT, that coming fall, his place assured, until the last week of his last year as a student at the prep school on the street of the white cross, Madrid and Anika—unholy brachot—happened to him.

Or:

She would never forget the town called—well, she never knew, really, hadn’t been paying attention or hadn’t understood what he was telling her—something Italian, some name of a saint or of a wine tasting of old clay tiles, or of a cluster of Medieval towers printed in dark blue ink on the evening sky.  She wouldn’t forget the town even the day in a far August when her third granddaughter was born, though she’d spent whole months in the beginning with a road map spread across the card table with folding legs in Clara’s ratty apartment in Frederick, Maryland, looking and looking for its name, its likely position, proof of its existence.  Of hers.

—Christie

Writing Spaces

I'd love this to write in!






image:  Claude Monet, Floating Studio

On Selling a Childhood House

I wonder

if the patch of four-leaf clovers

is still there, half hidden

in the grass, to bring luck

to this stranger’s house, which

after these fifty-six years

I’ve signed away?

One of the things I realize

I neglected to disclose, among

those other inadvertent omissions—

the ghosts going matter-of-factly

about their business,

a few clothespins on the line

a little pile of onionskin paper

beside the typewriter

the big Random House dictionary

open to “verve” or maybe “vervain”

while the one who looks something like me

empties a wickedly extravagant capful

of lemon verbena into a summer bath

beneath the window with the BB hole,

beguiled that June by Scarlett O’Hara’s mother.

She’ll find them just a little slow

to wash the broiler pan,

or clean the rings off the glass shelf

where perfumes congregate

and a forlorn button or two, and always

before church a clutch of irritable hair rollers

bristling over some imagined jab.

They’ll be no trouble mostly.

Only turning up the Met broadcast

on Saturdays a bit too loud,

exclaiming over smoked oysters

at cocktail time, or wandering the hall

in bathrobes, turning up or down the heat,

asking themselves uneasily,

pretending not to notice,

who she is,

who it was asked her here.

—Christie