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Motherhood is a role that always has and always will be fraught with challenges, for some many more than for others.  Most of us manage to do pretty well in spite of them.

Here’s to all the Moms of the world on Mother’s Day.

Wishing you much strength and love.

—–

What Must Be Done

- The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body, and yet, each child represent[s] just that — a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.
             — Debra Ginsberg, Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress

I

Jessie writes a poem for her unborn child

and hands it in to me two weeks late.

Dear Aurora Leigh, you will be all mine.

I imagine her on the school bus,

hands folded across her growing belly,

eyeing garage sale signs. We have enough

saved for two months’ rent, she tells me,

believing the old story about how

she will manage by waitressing nights.

She sees the clean formica counters,

hears coins jangling in her apron pocket.

II

Evenings I read posts from the other moms.

We search for group homes, part-time jobs

through the DRS, routes of the ADA bus,

reliable aides. No matter how much

we put away, we worry it’s not enough.

Our sons are 20 or 30 and still can’t

tie their shoes or cut their own meat.

We fight off visions of their tiny rooms

with single beds, graying men alone

with memories of us. In our dreams

they are still small. They wander away –

we call out for them until we wake.

III

Our mother raised us on borrowed time,

close to death at 35, then resurrected

and chained to a machine. It was not about

making a choice. Rx bottles filled two shelves,

tubes and needles the others. In constant pain,

she cried behind the closed door of her room.

Foods became poison –chocolate, oranges,

even too much water. Still, she managed

a small office, baked cakes and cookies

for us, denying herself without a word.

Only when we had grown and gone

did she let herself lie down in sleep.

IV

After a night of spring rains I slip out

for the morning paper. Small paw prints

cross the driveway, and stones are strewn

over the walk. I imagine a dark form

rooting through the bushes, seeking refuge

as her time draws near. I see her stop

and raise her head, sniffing danger

and moving on, the stripe of white

along her back catching moonlight as

she works to do what must be done.

—–

—–

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Well, it’s wobbly, but it’s finished — my first Villanelle.  It’s more like playing a word game than writing a poem, but that just makes it a different kind of challenge.  I’m sure it uses a different part of the brain than free verse does, too.

_____

Time to Leave

_____

I knew that it was time to leave.

While crying in an upstairs room,

it dawned on me I should not grieve.

___

Outside in darkness I perceived

an owl’s soft hoots under the moon.

She knew when it was time to leave.

___

Our love long dead, I could not cleave

to us one day more.  Yet mid-swoon

it dawned on me:  I could not grieve.

___

I wiped my eyes upon my sleeve.

Was not a world beyond this tomb?

Oh, yes, it’s long past time to leave.

___

So I determined I would weave

my narrative to newly bloom

at dawn.  For now, I would not grieve.

___

And since that day, I now believe,

I’m most content when I’m alone.

Like springtime boughs, I had to leaf.

Each dawn confirms it:  there’s no grief.

___

Here’s the rhyme scheme if you want to try your hand at a Villanelle.  The A’s and B’s must all rhyme (or come close).  Line A1 must stay essentially the same with each repetition, as must line A2…. but you can have fun making clever, slight changes with each one as the poem progresses.  Line length doesn’t matter, so long as you’re consistent with the length you choose.  My poem uses iambic tetrameter.

___

____________________________  A1

____________________________  b

____________________________  A2

___

____________________________  a

____________________________  b

____________________________  A1

___

____________________________  a

____________________________  b

____________________________  A2

___

____________________________  a

____________________________  b

____________________________  A1

___

____________________________  a

____________________________  b

____________________________  A2

___

____________________________  a

____________________________  b

____________________________  A1

____________________________  A2

___

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I’ll be attending the monthly poetry workshop sponsored by RHINO tomorrow in Evanston, which I’ve missed since last fall due to the demands of my teaching job.  I’m having mixed feelings, though, because the session will focus on the villanelle, the fixed poetic form that I’ve never tried and find somewhat intimidating.  The most well-known villanelle today is Welch poet Dylan Thomas’ lovely 1951 poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which begins:

—–

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

—–

The villanelle was created as a fixed form in France in the 19^th century and adopted into English a few years later.  It consists of six stanzas and requires the poet to repeat particular lines in particular places, constraining poetic freedom.  Like sonnets, villanelles are hard to pull off without sounding childish or overly simple—yet they can be beautiful in the hands of musical poets like Thomas.

—–

Now — Here’s the hijinks part:

While I’m not a huge fan of the villanelle, one of my favorite poetry stories involves this form . . . sort of.      Billy Collins, the beloved American poet, is a free verse disciple who loathes the fixed form and openly mocks the notion of using random constraints in poetry.  In 1997, Collins pulled off one of the cleverest hoaxes in the contemporary literary world by writing a poem he called a “paradelle.”  He published his poem, “Paradelle for Susan,” in his brilliant collection, Picnic, Lightning, and included this footnote:

“The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.”

BUT HE HAD MADE THE WHOLE THING UP.

Here is the opening stanza of “Paradelle for Susan:”

—–

I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

I remember the quick, nervous bird of your love.

Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch.

Thinnest love, remember the quick branch.

Always nervous, I perched on your highest bird the.

—–

Amazingly, readers took the bait and believed this to be an actual form—and the poem to be serious.  Collins could only laugh at the critics’ scathing commentary of this ridiculously clunky poem, and when word got out about the ruse, critics proceeded to attack again, feeling foolish for having been duped.  But Collins didn’t stop laughing.

Even funnier, the paradelle had wings and became a fixed form in its own right.  Poets around the world began writing them, and Red Hen Press actually published a whole book of them in 2005.

Here is the one and only paradelle I’ve written, strictly following Collins’ rules.  Like other poets who’ve tried the form, I felt challenged to try to create something meaningful even while playing along with the joke.

Should I end up creating a worthwhile villanelle after tomorrow’s RHINO session, I’ll post it some time, too.

—–

A “Paradelle” for Ramon, Age 17

—–

The boy changes into a man.

The boy changes into a man.

You stand tall and claim the earth.

You stand tall and claim the earth.

Stand a man into the tall earth,

and claim the boy changes you.

—–

I know a mother’s love glows.

I know a mother’s love glows.

Remembering each hour, we smile and weep.

Remembering each hour, we smile and weep.

Each mother’s remembering a smile glows,

Hour I know and weep we love.

—–

In old age you will hold my heart.

In old age you will hold my heart.

As a spirit, I will bring comfort.

As a spirit, I will bring comfort.

Hold my spirit as old comfort will,

In you will bring a heart I age.

—–

A comfort I will know in age.

We weep a tall heart into remembering.

The mother’s hour you claim as love,

And the changes you hold will stand.

Each boy and man bring a smile.

Old earth, my spirit glows.

_____

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Am excited to be this week’s guest writer at the great new blog of Minerva Rising:

http://minervarising.com/2013/04/18/contributors-blog-going-beyond-the-facts-by-kate-hutchinson/

My post is about using an authentic voice, even when writing about world issues, by tapping into the larger human consciousness.

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So I made it through 45 minutes of The Dark Knight before ejecting it – though this included 3 spots of activating the FF button.

I hadn’t seen a Batman film since the very first one, with Michael Keaton, back in ’89.  (Who knew Keaton could be so sexy?)  I’m obviously not a fan of superhero films – or action films, for that matter.  Or violent films or war films of any kind.  Or films where children are abused, lost, sick, or dying.  Or films where those things happen to animals.  Call me hyper-sensitive.

But several friends and family, whose opinions I respect and who are loving and caring people, told me this Batman film was different.  This one really shows the psychological complexity of the character – the nuances and depth of the tortured heroes, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, and the back story of their evil nemesis, the Joker.  Well, I prefer my tortured heroes without all the guns, knives or grenades, thank you.  Knowing that playing such an evil character led Heath Ledger to an early death didn’t help, either.  Even seeing Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, two of the kindest old souls in films today, playing gentle mentors didn’t rescue this film for me.  (Though Caine’s new teeth are beautiful!)

Some of us are just wired differently, I’ve come to believe.  Maybe this is why some of us become poets.  Our hypersensitivity to noise, crowds, flashing lights, and scratchy tags in clothing are just outer manifestations of a nervous system that makes us more likely to feel images of ugliness and violence deep down, causing symptoms from stomach upset to nightmares and even mental breakdowns.

I mean, it’s been 40 years since I’ve seen Jaws, but I can still see and hear vividly the moment when the girl’s leg gets bitten off by the Great White Shark.  I still see the look of horror in her eyes and hear the wrenching whimper as her body jerks beneath her in the water.  Scenes like this don’t stop haunting me – and they just involve actors in movies.  I know that actress finished the scene and probably went up onto the beach for a sandwich, but that doesn’t make the moment any less chilling in my memory.

We learn through time, the overly-sensitive types, to shield ourselves.  We turn off the TV, find quiet radio stations, select films we know will not bombard us.  We shun large concerts and festivals, or if we do attend them, we arrive early, hang toward the back or the edge, and slip out before the finale or fireworks.  I may teach in a large high school, but you’ll rarely find me in the halls during passing period.  And I’ve found ways to wiggle out of having to attend all-school events in the gym.

Am I blocking out reality by shielding myself from so much of the world?  I don’t know.  I read 2 newspapers, scan the net for information, attend readings and lectures, and immerse myself in books of all kinds.  Must we experience ugliness and violence, even in the arts, to know that it exists?  I don’t believe so.  I’d go so far as to suggest that the more we expose ourselves to it through media, the more we perpetuate its existence in the world.  The images and sounds in our heads can have a very lasting effect.  Reality can mirror art as much as art mirrors reality.

So I’ll go onto the IMDB and read about The Dark Knight to learn all about Bruce Wayne’s psychological complexity.  I really do want to know about it – I just don’t want to have to watch him work through it while crashing his Batmobile and firing off a zillion automatic weapons in the process.

 

[NOTE:  The bombings in Boston the day after I posted this only underscore my conclusion.  How despicable these random acts of violence.  How unsettling to have it happen just after I wrote this post.  I've not watched a moment of the footage and don't intend to -- though the face of the 8 year old victim, Martin, with his toothy grin, is forever etched into my brain.]

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Readers sometimes make assumptions that any poem written in first-person voice must be autobiographical.  I often find myself wondering this as I read poems of favorite authors:  Did Billy Collins really suffer through a horrible divorce?  Did a clown’s car really break down in the front yard of Stephen Dunn’s friend?  Did Carolyn Forche really have dinner at some Guatemalan mobster’s mansion, and did he really empty out a sack of human ears onto the table?

It shouldn’t matter, I know.  The poems are what they are, true or not.  Each poem is its own little world, and if I’m sucked into it and am made to feel or think about life a little more deeply, then the poem is a success.  And yet….it does make me stop and think about that blurred line between fiction and reality, and if writers owe readers an explanation.

Ever since the James Frey “Million Little Pieces” debacle, that line has become a larger issue.  This year’s Oscar contenders faced criticism for the same reason:  Just how “factual” is Zero Dark Thirty?  Argo?  Lincoln?  How “factual” should they be?  Must a film or book that is not historically accurate begin with a big disclaimer:  “Based loosely on real events”?  Many publishers and film producers have begun to do just that.

Poets have been given longer rope with the issue, mainly – I’m sure – because far fewer people read or care about poetry!  A poem is perhaps seen as more artistic at its core, like a little song, or a painting.  It’s not a re-enactment of real life, even if it is based on real events.  Poets are given a greater degree of artistic license because we expect poems to be full of metaphor and veiled meaning.

And yet….

Even among the few who may read a poem I’ve written, a small part of me wants these readers to know if the poem is “true” to my life, if it’s based upon what has happened to me or is a true reflection of my own thinking.  Because sometimes my poems are not….and sometimes I’d hate to think that a reader may get a wrong impression of who I am if they misinterpret a poem that is meant to be ironic, or if they assume I’ve experienced something I haven’t.  Call it neurosis, vanity, or just plain ridiculous, but I do think about it any time I use a first-person voice in a poem.

The first poem I ever got published was in a West-coast literary magazine called Cloudbank a few years ago.  I got the idea from a column written by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune, after a spring thaw, when she commented in her ever-astute way about what is suddenly revealed under the snow, and how these items capture the past in mysterious ways.  Here is the poem, which is included in my book, The Gray Limbo of Perhaps:

—–

Exposure

When the snow finally melts

revealing flattened brown grass

it’s as if the sky has unlocked

a time capsule for us –

a yellow tennis ball under

the cluster of azaleas

Chloe’s small red mitten

at the base of the birch tree

and alongside the driveway

a faded ticket stub from the

Meryl Streep film we saw

that night you told me you

had taken the job in Portland

and backed out of my life

my door still slightly ajar

causing the dome light to

cast a glow above your head

as you drove to the end

of the lane and turned out.

—–

It was my driveway I pictured as I wrote this poem, and I did at that time have a neighbor with a little girl named Chloe.  But there the “real” details in the poem end.  I haven’t had a boyfriend in years, or even dated anyone – let alone been dumped by a guy who moved to Portland.  But I could easily imagine what it would have been like to experience these things, and it caught my imagination to put myself in the position of a woman who finds a ticket stub next to her driveway.  I liked how the title can be taken in multiple ways, and how the universal experiences – of watching the snows melt away, of discovering detritus in the browned grass, of ending relationships – all come together in one moment.

Schmich’s column had suggested some of this, too, and I can only assume she really did spy a lone mitten in the grass on the day she wrote her piece…. though I believe the mitten she saw was pink.  I borrowed her idea and let it launch something altogether new in my poem, which is what writers do all the time.  T. C. Boyle, the great contemporary fiction writer, says all his ideas for stories come from the newspaper.

Truth is usually stranger than fiction, after all.

So in the end, does it matter whether the thoughts and details in a poem come from my life?  Not a bit.  Anyone who knows me and cares enough about my poetry can always ask.  Otherwise, I’m fine with leaving readers to guess….or to simply enjoy the poem for what it is.

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Anton Chekov, the great writer (and some say inventor) of short stories, said that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”  What a beautiful thought, and one I agree with more and more.  The quote is aptly included on the book jacket of George Saunders’ new story collection, Tenth of December – the most moving work I’ve experienced in many years.  What Saunders can do to capture the complexity and pathos of a character in just a few lines is an astonishing feat of genius.  His young characters especially – primarily teenagers – are captured in their exact moment of leaping, or falling, into adulthood.

——

Saunders’ work explores all the big stuff:  What a struggle it is to grow up.  What a struggle to exist at all.  To live purposefully, to find one’s passion, to love or to give or to find a little joy or peace.  Art can rivet us to the moment, make us shed all distractions and focus our attention on what matters.  Whether we are creating it or experiencing it, a powerful story or poem or painting or song or play serves to point our focus centerward – to our own beating hearts and to the heart of the planet.  It can “prepare us for tenderness” in reminding us of the fragile mortality of every living thing.

——

If you’re seeking that kind of transformative experience, I urge you to read Tenth of December.  Its stories are strange and haunting and will disorient you at first.  But then you’ll begin to get used to the imaginative quirkiness of the Saunders world, where lights shine like pinpoints on truth.  If you’re like me, you’ll find echoes of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, and even William Shakespeare in these stories.  They will stay with you.

To paraphrase another master, Emily Dickinson, they will take the top of your head right off.

——

——

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The previous post mentions a poem springing from the pages of an scrapbook I made after finishing high school.  I still have the old thing in the closet of my study.  Opening it takes me back to that summer I assembled it by trolling the pages of fashion and decorating magazines, cutting out pictures of items and scenes I found beautiful.  I still like most of the pieces I clipped — guess my tastes haven’t changed much over the years!

But what the photos also remind me of is how sick I was that year — with anorexia.  What a lonely and damaging condition it is.  Girls at my school still struggle with this — though fortunately not in the huge numbers they once did.  I’m lucky to have crawled out of the black hole of anorexia over time, but it left physical and emotional scars that I’ll never totally shed.

The comment that did the most to help “cure” me was made by my good old G. P., who told me my body is a machine that needs certain elements to operate efficiently, including proteins and fats — just as a car needs gasoline and oil.  As soon as I stopped thinking about my body BEING me, and instead started seeing it as the vehicle which CARRIED me, I began to mend.

Our culture has gotten better, but it still has much work to do in the area of promoting healthier and more varied body types.  I put the blame largely on women’s fashion magazines and advertising, which continue to try and convince females that our bodies are the only thing that matter…. that our bodies are who we are.  But of course they are not.  Whether we gain or lose 100 pounds, we are the spiritual/emotional/intellectual/intangible “thing” residing inside.

—

Magazine Summer

There she is in the scrapbook:

the model in the photo from 1979,

still beautiful, smiling in her

azalea-pink sweater and white skirt,

hair in perfect swoops against

her cheeks and shoulders,

lavender pumps perched on the steps

of some antebellum façade.

She’s a model selling clothes, but

to me she was quintessential—

backlit with sunlight, poised for

a life of confident elegance.

—

That was the year I regressed into

second girlhood through anorexia,

feeding only on the fear of a world

that I was sure would eat me alive.

All summer, preparing to leave

for college, I lay on my bed among

the glossy pages of Glamour, Redbook,

and House Beautiful, dreaming a future

of warm comfort and perfection—

flower-filled parlors with pastelled walls,

billowing draperies, cats coiled on divans.

From closets of skirts and sweaters

and ribboned straw hats, I could one day

emerge as the girl from Ipanema,

carefree and gazed upon, secure as

a photograph glued to a page.

—

The scrapbook rests on a shelf, with

its wicker sun rooms pres de la mer

and lace-covered tables set for eternal tea.

I turn the frayed pages and smile,

sipping coffee from an old mug,

tucking a strand of graying hair

behind my ear, offering up gratitude

for the fullness of my life.  I glance

once more at the model on the steps—

ever youthful like Dorian Gray.

Oh, how pink is that sweater still.

How golden the mid-day light.

—–

—–

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We’re aging, all of us following a timeline toward we-all-know-where.  Yet at the same time, nature keeps cycling through the seasons, enfolding us in its endless looping of springs and summers and Christmases.  This sense of living in both our memories and in the present simultaneously seems to me to be one of life’s great paradoxes.  Those of us with grown children feel our children at multiple ages all around us, through photographs and memories that are so real we’d swear they happened yesterday.  And maybe they did.  More and more, science is bearing out that time and space are not fixed notions.

Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and author of Science Set Free, believes in a fluidity of time and space that allows for more inter-connectedness between us and our pasts. . .and between us and others.  It’s ESP of a sort, if you will — that which enables people to sense the pain of a loved one from across the country, or to envision with clarity a place he or she has never been.  Studies have proven decisively that people can often “sense” who a telephone caller will be, or that a dog often knows when its master is nearing home, even when no patterns of either have been established.  Sheldrake calls this “morphic resonance,” a theory of collective memory from which all organisms draw.  Rather than our memories being stored in brain compartments, Sheldrake theorizes that they enter the cosmos where all organisms can all tap into them.  In animals, we call it instinct.  In humans, we become skeptical.

The unseen webbing around us – whether one calls it atoms, energy, spiritual connectedness, or God – is undeniable.  There are just certain images and stories that affect us deeply, in ways we can’t explain.  Carl Jung suggested this theory with his study of archetypes; Joseph Campbell took the idea even further, suggesting that humans intuitively respond to particular cycles and narratives, no matter where and when we live in history.  And this concept is an essential element in poetry.  As I look back through poems I’ve written in the last ten years, I see a huge variety of topics, styles and themes, but one constant in nearly all of my poems is the human response to life’s cycles and time’s passing.

Today I’m working on a poem that focuses on a magazine clipping I made at age 19, a photograph of a fashion model in a bright pink sweater whose hairstyle struck my fancy in 1979. That summer, before I left for college, I was suffering from anorexia and hid in my room, envisioning a perfect world where I had total control and everything was beautiful.  This was the only thing that gave me comfort at a time when life was so uncertain.  I bought issue after issue of magazines like Glamour and House Beautiful, clipping photographs I liked and gluing them into a scrapbook.  I still have this scrapbook, and even though I hadn’t looked at it in years, I remembered in detail the pretty model in the pink sweater.  Opening to that page this afternoon was like zooming through a portal back to 1979 in my little childhood bedroom, birds chirping through the open windows.

Why did I attach such importance to a clothing ad?  How does this photo still serve to connect me to my younger self, and why is that important?  It’s hard to put into words the feelings of longing, dreaming, and uncertainty that I felt at age 19, but it’s my job as a poet to try.  If my poem is successful, readers will not only understand how I felt, but they’ll remember feeling that way at 19, too.  Hopefully, the experience of remembering such a feeling will deepen their understanding of themselves and their appreciation of life – even if just a tiny bit.  I believe that’s a noble quest for a poet.  Sheldrake, Jung and Campbell would call it mythic.

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We all have our favorite smells:  fresh-baked bread or chocolate-chip cookies, coffee, oranges, lilacs, new cars.  Scientists have long understood that our sense of smell is the most powerful of all our senses, as the olfactory nerve is directly wired to the brain.  I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of smelling something that takes us back to a particular time and place from the past — even when we can’t pinpoint exactly what the smell is or why we connect it to the memory.

English researcher Steve Pearce explains that as babies, we rely on our sense of smell to identify our mothers long before we can recognize them visually.  Pearce says that by the time we become adults, we’ve become inured to many scents and dulled our noses through abuse of alcohol, medications, and dairy products.  Plus, all of our senses just wear out as we age.  Pearce has been given some interesting assignments over the years, including trying to re-create the smell of Cleopatra’s hair for a museum and creating the smell of outer-space for NASA’s use in its astronaut acclimation chambers.  According to the few people who know, space smells a bit metallic, or meaty like a sizzling steak.  Strange!

Companies like Essential Oils have promoted the power of scent to increase concentration (lemon, peppermint) or for relaxation (vanilla, lavender), as well as to actually heal certain ailments. Even the world of sports has begun to understand the power of smell.  A Chicago Tribune article last June revealed that jasmine works wonders on accuracy with bowling, golfing, batting and pitching.  Much has also been made of using scents for libido enhancement, of course, and it’s fascinating to note gender differences in this area.  Women in some studies responded most to cucumber and licorice, while for men it was pumpkin pie and doughnuts.  And to decrease libido?  Women, ironically, find the biggest turn-offs to be barbecued meat and men’s cologne.  For men?  Nothing the scientists tried worked in this effort.

So, why the attention to smells on a writer’s blog?  Writers are continually challenged to describe moments in their stories and poems.  Most rely heavily on sight imagery, paying passing notice to sounds or internal feelings…. but few mention smells.  It’s a pattern I notice among my students as well.  Yet how much more real can we make a child’s room in a short story simply by noting that it smells like cherry cough syrup?  Or that a garden smells of rain-soaked lilacs and mint?  The hotel room of dry-cleaning chemicals and old cigarette smoke?

My childhood home was continually filled with the smells of baking, as my mother refused to pay for Hostess or Sara Lee treats.  I’ve made much use of these smells in my poems, stories, and personal essays.  I’d open the front door upon returning home from school and be greeted by the cinnamon of snickerdoodles, melting chocolate chips, or sugar-glazed coffee bars.  Each fall, for several days we’d be treated to the overpowering scent of grapes when she’d transform the Concord grapes growing on vines outside my bedroom window into jars and jars of pure jelly.  These are the smells of growing up, for me and my siblings.  And never fail, at birthday time, it was angel food cake.  That’s a pure, unadulterated sugar smell if ever there was one.  I can still taste those golden crumbs she peeled off the cake as it cooled, which she would drop into our open mouths like a mama bird.

—

My poem about angel food cake is included in a new chapbook of artwork and poetry recently published by the Northwest Cultural Council, which is headquartered here in my hometown of Palatine.  This beautiful, full-color book contains oodles of poems and artwork created by members of the council and those of us who attend the monthly poetry workshops.  Books can be purchased by emailing Kathy Umlauf at northwestculturalcouncil@yahoo.com.

Next Sunday, Feb. 17, I’ll be participating with other NWCC poets in a reading of our chapbook poems at the beautiful Cuneo Mansion in Vernon Hills, pictured above.  It will take place at 2:00 and is open to the public.

—–

Angel Food

I’m sure I aged a year every June,

but when I think of the cake

you made for us each birthday,

I see myself always at five –

eyes counter-high watching

the mixer blades whir and then

lift out of the bowl, creamy white.

Sugar filled the air as the cake

puffed in its o-shaped pan

and later cooled upside-down

on a pale green Coke bottle, like

a spaceship on The Jetsons.

It was angel food, of course,

because soon you would

nearly die and come back,

haloed and hallowed, your life

grasped like the mixing bowl

between your two able hands,

the white birthday cake

once again rising and cooling,

balanced on a bottle and then

slathered with icing, assuring

us of a future as sweet and vivid

as a Saturday morning cartoon.