Feeding the Baby

YOU CAN NO LONGER CALL TIME. (By Miss Information) I learned this today when I needed the actual time and not the i-wake-up-late-and-set-my-clock-ten-minutes-fast-so-that-I-can-be-punctual time. It's sad to me, because I actually USED this service, but I was apparently alone. & when I got the recording (who was speaking?) informing me that this service was discontinued, I went to catch my train to find that it was twenty minutes late! Gee, wonder why? It is not as sad as the demise of the telegram but somehow it is similar. & I shall always regret never having sent a telegram. "Good morning. At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be 12:57, exactly". It was always confusing to be told "good morning" at just past midnight. sigh. I might just be (am) overly sentimental but this rather saddens me in a serious way. The lady voice was Jane Barbe. I like her. She is dead. She is rolling in her electronic grave. this sounds like transmittals from a very special...

I just woke up from a sad scary dream. I was sitting on the front porch of my little house with dennis. It was a cottage and very old and we were on the street that ran uphill from my house on Montery street where we lived when I was 12 and 13. Sky and Zoe were visiting, but at the moment Dennis and I were sitting alone. Dennis was shirtless and very tan. He looked years younger. We were discussing how we were going to pay the electricity bill. It was a lot, 500 dollars and we didn't have a penny. I suggested we have a garage sale, but he hated that idea. Then a middle age woman walked up across the lawn. I was sort of thinking of sending her on her way, but she had a nice tray of drinks. Little silver cups with a golden liquid and a silver stirring stick in each one. She offered us each one and we accepted and sipped the deliciously sweet thick liquid. It was wonderful and she laughed to see how much we liked it. She showed us how to take a drink and use the stir stick to sprink...

Dreams that hurt Last night I had a dream that left me gasping for air. I woke up with a jolt and started to scream. I am feeling very afraid. Work is hard and uncertain. There is so much to do and so little time to get it done. The people I work for seem intent on setting us up for failure. There is no room for success. This is going to be a really scary hairy time. On top of that I keep thinking about the quality of my life. That I am now much closer to death than birth and what do I have to show for the years? I didn't do anything! I wish that it were clearer to me what to do now. I feel like I need to make one last determined surge towards rightness. Make an effort to make a difference. I don't want to die before I can say my life was well spent. The picture is of Death Valley after a very wet spring. The people in the picture are wading in water. That seems like a hopeful image, but it isn't. It is an image that doesn't parse, it isn't right for there to be w...

The house was old, as the best ones are And shabby beyond quaintness The rent was low because the kitchen walls Didn’t go all the way to the ceiling Still it had its charm, the young amused Partied on the pounded dirt slopes of the side Yard and rising above it all the tower A radio tower, a metal skeleton Wrapped in thick snaky black wires But still you could not touch Not tell even those you love best The words, the words that radio times forgot.

Anger As if not saying the words were enough To make a civil discourse. Angry bees behind the lips loud enough to wake the babies. Christ, all those babies. Lying row upon row, below the house And you lost in milkless wandering, So much hunger behind pursed lips. Still, not a loud word between you two. And each autumn, the withering.

This is a picture from The Online Archive of California a very comprehensive collection of photos of California. You can see that it is the Tejon Pass area. That is a really lovely rocky mountain. The road that connects Los Angeles with Central and Northern California goes up the mountain through Tejon. Its extreme grade and potential for ice or snow has always made that road especially perilous. Truckers have to think carefully before taking their machines over the "Grapevine", if the engines or brakes aren't functioning properly they will probably fail on the road. There are emergency ramps at or near the bottom of the roads for trucks that have lost their brakes. The ramps are little dirt hills a little wider than a truck and the idea is to slow the truck to a stop on the slope of the hill, rather than plowing into something or someone at the bottom of the hill. I love the look the two women are sporting. I am reading the Worst Hard Time by T. Egan and I want to dre...

World is too much with us This is Henry Wessel , if you want to buy me a fiftieth birthday present you could buy me one of his prints. I would be ever so grateful. I was thinking that a print like this is like a poem. Robin Ekiss , who taught a poetry class for adults last spring, told us that her technique was to hold those big stormy ugly emotional stories at the very tip of our tongues and then describe something mundane. This way you allow your subconscious to pick the metaphors for the big stormy ugly emotional ( bsue ) stories, and allow the reader to pick the bsue stories that the image evokes in them. They are not necessarily the same stories, but they are most likely from the same category. This photo, and all of the photos of Henry Wessel that I have seen, evoke my personal  story. That place is my childhood and teens, that color is my own despair, that sign my cry, that degraded wilderness, my soul. But of course the picture is so much better at explaining it. I th...

In my dream last night I was living in a tatty little track house with my husband. It was very much the end of the line for us, nothing great, just a space to lay our heads. He and I were in our bed but I couldn't sleep so I got up and went to the living room, probably the ceiling was that cottage cheese shit that all houses had in the 70's. I was reading and the lights were dim, there was an open window and through it I heard a crash. I jumped up alarmed and screamed for my husband. I called his name over and over and he didn't come, so I went to look. Out the window in the back yard I could see a trail of "things", you know bits of clothing, books, stuff and then out of the side room came a large Samoan. He just looked really bored with me and told me to to shut up with all the noise. He was robbing my house. He and this thin little woman, in her twenties, and this was all just a job for them, they had no fear of being caught, but they did have weapons and woul...