Poetry Challenge 53

August 17, 2010

Summer is winding down here, and the weather is changeable.  Saturday, we had a Chinook wind blow in; it was 75 degrees at 11pm on the last day of the Fair–a night that brings the first stars of the season and, sometimes, first frost.  Today, we loaded up the horses in sun, blue sky, and 80 degrees.  By the time we got to our lesson, we had driven under dark clouds and rode, shivering, in pouring rain.  The weather has us all off kilter.

Write about unexpected weather and someone or something reacting to it.  Be sure to use the sense of touch (as in warm sun/chilling rain) and some quality of motion.

Post the poem as a comment here and I will add it to this post.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

August 3, 2010

Camp Joy

I haven’t written enough here about my ever-evolving love and admiration for the tomato plant. As I learn more each year about them, their soil requirements, the care and tending of the plant, I’m struck by how resilient and beautiful they are. Each plant has its own leaf pattern, so that I am beginning to be able to tell the varieties apart by looking at the zigzag of dents on the leaves. Last year’s favorite, Chianti Rose, is a potato-leaf plant, with smooth-edged leaves like large green arrowheads. The Roma, on the other hand has a more complex, almost frilly pattern of dents that all together give the plant a lacy look in the greenhouse.

Tomatoes and I go way back. In fact, when I was quite young, I didn’t like them much; the acid juice was too tart for my taste. I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Then, when I was turning twelve, we moved to house on a farm whose farmer planted acres of beefsteak tomatoes. By this time of year, the plants were sprawling viny bushes of dark green leaves with tomatoes ripening under them. The tomatoes he grew were larger than my hand, firm and dark red, and they sliced into earthy, sweet, sour, slightly salty rounds that we ate with salt. I have a memory of sitting under the leaves on the tan-orange earth, cool in the heat of summer—but that may be a false memory. I would have been too big to do something like that, though I might have imagined what it would be like to hide there.

We picked a bushel to can each summer. The canning took days, at least in my memory. My mother and I would blanch the tomatoes, dipping them in boiling water briefly and pulling them out just as the skin began to split and curl back. We put them in a colander in the sink and, one by one, peeled the now loose skin from the soft tomato flesh. By the end of the session our hands would be burning from the acid juice, and I would swear I never wanted to see another tomato. I have not canned one since, in any case.

Now, with the greenhouse and a sunny spot on the deck, I’m growing tomatoes on my own terms. A few years ago, I would buy a few plants at a local greenhouse to plant in pots on the deck. When we built the greenhouse, though, I began to order tomato seeds in winter, plant around spring break and nurture the little plants till they could be planted in five-gallon buckets in the greenhouse in summer. I’ve learned a lot—temperature matters, for example, and lots of water. In the master gardener class last year, I learned that tomatoes cannot live on horse manure alone. And I’ve learned to appreciate the unusual variety of tomato plants.

This year, I’ve planted Pompeii Romas, Chianti Rose, Sungold cherry tomatoes, and an heirloom variety of cherry, Camp Joy. Besides that, I bought three of my favorite from two years ago, Black Krim, which has a fruit that looks nearly bruised, blackish red, with a soft sweet taste. A friend gave me some pear tomatoes, some Cherokee Purple, and Stupice.

After a few weeks of neglect, today I paid attention to the Camp Joy tomatoes growing on the deck. When I first transplanted them there, they were still in small pots and had exhausted the nitrogen and phosphorous in the soil. The leaves were yellowing and had a reddish rust color on them. I transplanted them into five-gallon pots, two or three to a pot, planting them in composted manure, potting soil (from last year) and a bit of fish bone meal and dolomite lime. After a week or two, they still looked pitiful, but there was green growth at the tops. Then the rain hit for a couple weeks, then the past few days of hot sun. By this weekend the entire planting was rich green and small green tomatoes clung to each one.

I’m thinking about all this, because, today, I took an hour or so to prune suckers from each of the tomatoes on the deck. I tied the tops to the stakes or cages, admiring how the leaves were green, even the lower ones that had been so pale only weeks before. It’s hard to trim the suckers, side shoots that look so promising and green, but suck nutrients away from the growing tomatoes themselves. Some of the suckers I cut looked like tiny tomato plants—beautiful frilly leaves, the promise of flowers—but I was ruthless. The sun warmed my arms and back as I worked. Small birds (and yellowjackets) swooped through the air. I could smell the lemon-earth smell of tomato where I had cut the tiny branches of the suckers. When I was done, the plants looked airy and the sun shone through the leaves, a bright green light.

Tomorrow, the greenhouse till, little by little, all the plants are tended and happy and can use what’s left of summer to grow enough tomatoes to tempt me to can again.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

Poetry Challenge 52

July 30, 2010

Last night several local poets and I gave a panel for the Alaska Book Festival in which we each read poems of other Alaskan writers whose work we admired.  It was fun and daunting.  I had heard the poets I chose read their works many times–I know their voices, their cadences, the stories behind the poems, and the bits not spoken.  How to read them and do them justice without preempting the other poets’ voices?

Along those lines, find a line or a phrase or a word from a poem written by someone whose work you admire and build your own around it.  If it helps, break the phrase apart and use the words in a different sense than in the original.  Let the poem take on your voice, with echoes of the other poet’s voice.  If it helps, find an unsuspecting word like lupine or hail or sandhill crane or clutch cable  find its way into the poem.

Send it as a comment to this post and I’ll post it here.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

July 18, 2010

What the Thunder Said

Summer is slipping by here in the Interior. Spring came early so that we itched to have our gardens planted before it was mid-May, even knowing that the last frost could still hit by the first of June. But it didn’t and we got our usual bright June weather in May, our hot July temperatures in June, and now, mid-July, August’s rain. Even our short summer seems to be speeding by so fast we don’t know how to keep up. There are blueberries for the picking on some hills; they’re green on others. Some gardens have zucchini, some only flowers. We’ve had days of rain between glorious dry heat—haying weather, if it lasts long enough.

Last weekend, we were out at Quists’ again, picking up three pickup loads of first cutting hay from the field. This hay was dry and bright and we only got enough to stack two layers in the hay barn so that each layer had one side exposed to air and could finish drying thoroughly. It rained fitfully after we finished loading the hay, but we grilled sausages and ate a salad from the garden sitting out on the deck while Mattie and Sam munched their new hay below us in the corral. At night, we could smell the sweet grass smell of the hay drying in the barn.

This weekend we were supposed to get more hay from the Mayos’ field, near the farm where Trish and I ride on Thursdays. By Thursday, however, the clouds had thickened, and by the start of the lesson we were spattered with warm rain that lasted the whole hour. I have been planning to ride in a small show next weekend with the Horsemasters and hoped to ride Sam this afternoon to start ramping up for the weekend. But, as I was raking manure from the corral, the clouds blew in and the rain rattled through the trees. Ira and Mike headed for the house, but I stayed behind, gathering up the tools and putting things away that might get wet.

I headed for the greenhouse. I’m still doing triage transplanting of tomatoes into larger pots, trying to get all the ones I can fit and can’t give away into kitty litter containers with holes drilled in the bottoms. The rest, I at least want to get into pots one size larger so that they thrive till I can find them homes. I never give up on plants I’ve started from seed. I had plenty to do while I waited out the rain.

I stayed in the greenhouse for a few hours, mixing manure and a purchased garden mix of peat and sand. I added fish bone meal and dolomite lime and mixed it all together with some of last year’s dirt to put in the pots. As I worked, up to my elbows in dirt, the rain stopped and the sun came out and sparkled on the tomato leaves where I had sprayed them with the hose. At one point, I stepped out to check the sky and the corral to see if I might still ride Sam on good footing. As I looked up at the ridge behind the house, I saw a bank of gray cloud sliding across the sky, dimming the light. Below the dark cloud were wisps of white cloud like a mist rising—except falling below the deeper gray. They were moving quickly, curling back on themselves, fraying apart, and skimming the top of the trees. There was a sound like falling gravel from up the hill; the leaves on the willows began to shiver; then the rain hit.

At first it was just hard enough to drive me back into the greenhouse. Then the rattle became harder and tiny bits of hail fell with the water. Then pebbles of white ice, fast and thick, the sound like a train clattering across the greenhouse roof. I leaned out the door to check some plants I had staged there, and I grabbed a small Sungold tomato to bring back inside. Sam stood in front of his shed, sideways to it, as close as he could get to shelter without being right under the racket. Mattie huddled back against the back wall of her side of the shed.

Lightning cracked the air. Thunder shook the ground. I stood in the doorway worried about my lettuce, peas, beans, shouting, “No fair! No fair!”

It went on for an hour or so, loud then soft then loud again. I planted all the heirloom tomatoes my friend Cindy gave me and a few of the Chianti Rose slicers—all in their square buckets for the rest of summer now. Then I went back to triage transplanting more Romas and Chiantis.

Then the sun broke through. The corral was deep in water and mud. The tall spruces on the hill dripped, and the air felt thick with moisture. The day was over by then; the opportunity to ride, gone. The horses came out and stood facing south, downhill, heads down. The storm had exhausted us, thrilled us, left us to rest up for tomorrow.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

Poetry Challenge 51

July 9, 2010

This is the time of insects here in the Interior.   Here at Mattie’s Pillow, we hear the buzz of yellowjackets everywhere.  There’s a nest in the hay barn, one in the eaves above our grill (logical place, if you’re a yellowjacket), and one in the greenhouse.  They are in a perpetual state of agitation; any vibration or movement near the nest sets them off.

So, it’s time for a poem about an insect.  Have one crawl through the poem, or have it land on a line somewhere.  Be amazed at it, or be indifferent.  Let sound be part of the poem, the small peripheral sounds that you don’t notice at first, until they stop.

Here’s one.  Send me one of yours and I’ll post it here!

.

The Stink Bug on Joe’s Shirt

We talk in sun

then the sudden chill

of cumulus, stacked

high with moisture, then heat

at our backs, on our faces,

the scrubbed blue

sky.  You lean against

a lounge chair.  Your hair,

.

wild as the clouds,

curls with the charge

and buzz that fills

your blood.  We talk.

We watch your face.

The cloud passes, all

that roiling not yet

enough to loose sparks,

and the blue shadows,

your eyes.  A bug

.

iridescent,

a small bronze shield, totters

up your shirt, legs

like shaved whiskers,

bent to cling above

the “l” in “devil,”

climbing up the curled

tail toward your shoulder,

all it needs for a cliff.

.

Someone reaches

to flick it where it gleams.

Your prize:

the grown-back hair

the numbness gone

the sun in its place

and you striding

beneath it—one

bug suddenly flicked

away.  A stink.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 30, 2010

Rainy days now that the solstice is past.  We’re so greedy for light here in the Interior that we grumble about rain after three days of cloudy skies, even though the garden needs it and is drinking it up, transforming it into green.  We want sun in summer to make up for all the dark days of December and January.  We store up vitamin D—some sunny days I can feel it fizzing there under my skin, like a stockpile of caffeine saved for later.

But now it’s raining and gray.  Sam stands muddy in the corral, thinking up mischief.  He’s rolled and the freckles in his white coat blur beneath the gray mud crusted over his coat.  When the wind blows—or sometimes for no reason—he startles and bolts across the corral, while Mattie, on her side of the fence, breaks into the running walk, her fourth gait.

I’ve been in the greenhouse, transplanting tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers.  As they move from smaller pots to their final kitty litter buckets or five gallon buckets, the greenhouse first looks orderly, then crowded.  I’m giving away plants as fast as I can, but then another problem arises.  As I give away plants, I also give away dirt and I’m about to run out of last year’s potting soil, even mixed with this year’s composted manure.  Strange as it seems, I now need to buy potting soil to mix with the manure in order to have enough for all my plants.

Still, rainy afternoons in the greenhouse are pleasant, with their own rhythm.  I bring a go cup of hot tea with lemon and honey, then dig my arms up to the elbows in dirt, mixing last year’s soil, this year’s manure compost, some dolomite lime and fish bone meal.  All the while, I’m thinking of the meal it will provide the plants and how they, in turn, will provide meals for us.  In fact, in the greenhouse, separated from the phone, the radio, the computer—just the drip of rain on the fiberglass roof, and the sound of Sam walking by the corral fence, checking on what I’m up to—every part of this life makes sense.  I dig in the manure that Mattie and Sam produce from the hay we load out of our neighbors’ fields, thinking of tomatoes, so sweet and tart.  It’s not a perfect cycle—I have to buy more dirt after all, and I pay for the hay.  But it’s a cycle with its satisfactions.

And there are other satisfactions of life in the Interior.  Moments ago, I went to the back door, headed out to feed the horses, when I noticed something on the railing on the back stairs landing.  A Boreal owl, slatey brown, speckled with white.  It swiveled its head to look at me, yellow eyes that looked wide with surprise from the circle of feathers radiating out from each eye.  It didn’t move, but contemplated me, and I it.  Then it swiveled its head around, staring down at the wild strawberries that grow there.  I had time to find a camera and take one photo before it tilted its head down intently, fidgeted a little, then spread its wings to float down to land on a vole, nibbling on a strawberry.

I went out on the landing.  I could see the owl there behind the delphinium leaves, his head turned to look at me once again.  Then he gathered his wings and brushed the air and soared over to land on the cab of the truck.

I’ll keep an eye out for him again.  He’s too small to be a danger to my skittish new cat, but I’m glad for his help with the vole population.  Maybe I’ll get beets and carrots this year, not just the tops.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

Poetry Challenge 50

June 22, 2010

In honor of the solstice and the delirious quantity of light we’re getting these days, write from a giddy place.  Think of a time or place or color of the clouds that made you feel silly and happy all at once.  For me, last night, it was a Midnight Sun Baseball Game that went 15 innings under the silvery light of Solstice night.  We sat in the stands and hollered and laughed as the sun slipped behind a row of hills, still sending a wash of yellow light into the arc of the sky.  Then as the last hit brought all the runners in, the light behind the hills brightened, the cirrus clouds turned fireweed pink and the sun slid back up again.  A perfect–if very long–solstice night.

Write about a moment of unexpected glee.  Use all five senses, of course.

Post it as a comment and I’ll post it here.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

The Post of Don Sam Incognito

June 12, 2010

Sam has been dusting off his hooves, preparing to type this post.  Sometimes I imagine that he’s smart enough that if I had a giant computer with hoof-sized keys and a Horse-English translator, he could write his life story.  And he might comment on what he really thinks of all of us.

We’ve been trailering out to Movin’ Free,  a local boarding stable where our Horsemasters group is taking lessons on Thursdays.   Last year, we got a beautiful ten-year-old slant-load trailer and an ugly clunker truck with issues.  This year, I’m getting over my anxiety about truck driving and learning to haul the horses.   Every week, it seems, I call my mechanic, Rick, the world’s best backyard mechanic, and we fix something else on the truck—pack the hubs, replace ball joints, trace down the short that blows out the turn signal fuses.  Next it will be the steering column.  Each week the truck gets better, and I get a bit more confident.  By the end of summer, I’ll have an ugly but workable truck, I hope.

And Mattie and Sam have been very patient with all the trailering.  Unlike some horse owners I’ve talked to, I give them plenty of hay in the trailer, so that they walk in eagerly and stand contentedly during the trip.  They are both experienced with trailers and it’s no big deal to them, it seems.  Sam is such a pro that he backs out of the trailer, even when I’ve swung the divider aside and he could turn and walk out head first.  It’s a funny sight, him carefully picking up each hind foot, feeling his way back to the step down at the back of the trailer.  At some point, he must have spent lots of time in trailers, I’m guessing.

This summer, Trish has been riding him, except for these three weeks when she is in the field (she’s a geologist) and Casey is riding him.  It’s been a steep learning curve for Trish.  She’s spent lots of time on horses in a camp situation, but this is her first time taking formal lessons on a horse as challenging as Sam can be.  Sam takes the measure of any rider who gets on him and will go just as far as he needs to to test the limits of their skills.  He’s not mean, just a trickster. Trish started out not being able to get him beyond a wandering walk until I got on him and showed her how firm she needed to be to convince him she knew enough that he should cooperate with a trot.  One day, I stood in the middle of the corral holding a driving whip pointed at his hip and he perked up and began to trot with her.  Now, riding with a bat, she’s able to get him to move out when she wants him to.

When an experienced rider like Casey gets on him, it raises the level of challenge.  At the lesson she rode the other day, he kept crow hopping when she tapped his hip with the bat.  He did settle into the exercise, but, in his Sam way, he seemed to be giving her a bit of payback for not having ridden him yet this summer.  I know this seems anthropomorphic, but Sam proves how smart he is over and over again.  And, from my perspective on Mattie’s back during the lesson, Sam looks great with his long mane and wavy tail, his neck curved into collection at the trot, his haunches providing the power of the gait.   He’s in better condition than he was last year this time, and it’s great to see.

Last weekend, the Horsemasters gathered for a weekend “camp” with Hannah Knaebel, a trainer from Vashon Island, WA.  During the weekend, an equine dentist who travels to Fairbanks from Arizona each summer, gave a talk on floating and aging a horse’s teeth.  She offered to look at our horses, so Trish and I brought Sam over, hoping she could give us something definite on his age.  She looked at the grooves in his teeth on one side and said, “This shows him as 18.”  The groove came down from the gumline but hadn’t disappeared from the top of the tooth yet.  This meant, however, that he had been 18 for the past five years, or, as I suspected, was getting younger each year.  Not likely.

Then she looked at the same tooth on the other side.  The groove had grown down the tooth leaving a smooth place at the top.  “Definitely over 20,” she said.

“That explains a lot,” I said.  He always seems younger than the age I’m guessing he must be.  She told us that sometimes the teeth wear irregularly so that the gum on one side came down over the top, smooth part, of the tooth, making it look younger.  The good news is that, except for the cracked tooth that we removed a couple of years ago, his teeth are in good shape.  She praised the floating job Colleen, my vet, had just done.  All good news for Sam.

It’s been interesting watching others ride Sam.  I’m careful who comes to work with him, knowing that he asks his riders to earn his trust.  He works better with consistent riding and, because I want to focus on Mattie, it’s better when I can count on someone to come bond with him and spend the summer learning what he has to teach.

In his Don Sam way, he condescends to offer us the challenges he spends all day in the corral dreaming up.  In our ignorant human way, we work through frustration to patience, to adjustment of our skills, to the ability to work together with him so we can tap into all that he really knows.

If I knew who originally trained him, I would thank them for the opportunity Sam has given me and the other riders who’ve spent their summers with him.   I’d ask Sam, but he’s not telling.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in The Post of Don Sam Incognito | Leave a Comment »

Poetry Challenge 49

June 8, 2010

Today a distant friend e-mailed me that she was reading a poem, “Bird News,”  from my new book, Beneath a Portrait of a Horse, and that it had her tongue-tied.  It’s always amazing to discover that someone sees what you intended in a poem–or sees more than you ever thought was there.  This was a poem I started years ago, tinkered with, abandoned, tinkered again, and finally included in the book, hoping that in made sense in somethingof the way I had hoped it would when I wrote the first draft.  Putting a book together allowed me to see old poems in new ways.  Sometimes just placing one poem next to another brought out some association I hadn’t noticed in the older poem and made it seem fresh once again.

So, go back and find an old poem you’ve stashed away somewhere.  Read it as if you were a distant reader, as if you had no idea where the poem originated or where it’s going.  Let yourself be surprised by the phrases that actually do turn out well–and do some housekeeping on the ones that fall flat.   Pare away.  Strengthen nouns and verbs.   Make short lines long, long lines short.  Or discover that the poem is actually a complete whole  that arose from the deepest awake places in your unconscious.

Post it here in the comments section–your oldies and actually goodies.  When I have a few posted here, I’ll post the poem my friend was reading, too!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 2 Comments »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 26, 2010

We’ve made the transition from breakup to summer with a mere nod to spring.  Here in the Interior, we go from bleak to blossoms suddenly as the light increases every day.  Today I noticed purple wildflowers blooming along the road where there was nothing—not even a hint of green–yesterday.  On the bank behind the house, something yellow and lavish that I planted three years ago is blooming among the rocks.  By the horse barn, I saw the first bluebells, purple in the bud, then a sweet far-sky blue as they bloom.  The leaves are almost fully out and flashing in the sun.

And there are other signs of summer.  Mosquitoes buzz the horses during the night, sometimes annoying them so much that they begin to gallop around the corral.  I’ve taken to putting their mosquito mesh blankets on them at night.  And with the mosquitoes come those mosquito-eaters, yellowjackets.  Now the heavy queens hover in the willows, along the bank, in the eaves of the greenhouse, looking for a nesting place.  Now is the time to trap them and prevent the colonies to come, but the queens don’t seem interested in our elaborately baited traps, going, instead, for tomato plants, the manure pile, or the leaves of willows.   We will need to find the nests as they’re built and spray them down in the early morning or at night when it’s cool.  Except we no longer have real night until about 1AM, for an hour or two.  A few years ago, we had the worst infestation ever.  People all across the Interior were getting stung and having allergic reactions.  I hope that we don’t go through this again. A late frost or a week of heavy rain would knock them back, but those are things not to be desired.

Meanwhile, the greenhouse is filling with tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, squash.  I’ve started my cutting lettuce and zukes and crookneck squash, too, and the purple broccoli, which I’m a sucker for the idea of, though I’ve not yet gotten it through the growing season.

Sam and Mattie are sleek and glossy.  Mattie always looks like she’s made of polished metal at this point in the season.  Her coat is still nearly black and it shines.  Later in summer she will bleach out to dark bay with a few dark dapples along her sides.  She also has begun to get more flecks of gray, so that she may become a dark roan at some point.

I’m much tireder this year than last, coming off an intense school year feeling so behind in my gardening and having the sense already that summer could slip right through my fingers.  I have an ambitious riding schedule set for me and Mattie and Sam (with Trish or Casey, this year).  I hope we can do it all.

I have to admit, though, that events in the world shadow my joy at summer.  As I plan to trailer my horses around town in my clunker truck, I carry the image in my mind of oil gushing into the Gulf waters, unstoppable, all the beaches and bayous I spent time in during my years in Mississippi gunked up with oil.  I want to be responsible for my little corner, to not add to the troubles of the world, but in the troubles resulting from oil, we are all implicated.  And face compromises.  To have the horse manure that nourishes the gardens of many of my “green” friends, I have to drive to the hay field, pick up the hay that has been tended by a tractor, and drive it back.  Something as earth-bound as riding a horse is also implicated in the consequences we all face as a result of using oil.  The yellowjackets, warm, dry-weather-loving, may also be a consequence of a warming planet—or they could just be in a cycle.

I don’t know the answer to this, though I know scientists at the university who throw all their mental energy into finding out.  For me, adding composted manure to last year’s greenhouse dirt, transplanting tomatoes, turning manure into the raised garden beds, and planting the seeds that can grow directly in the ground is how I deal with it.  It’s all a symbiotic system—living things: horses, plants, people—support and benefit each other.  Each time I enter that system with all its beauties, I feel renewed, a small counter to the ugliness of what’s happening in the Gulf and elsewhere.

As I finish this, I hear rain on the metal roof.  I just came in from the deck, where I moved the deck chairs under the overhang of the roof.  Off to the east, there’s already a rose color in the high clouds, and the sky to the south is slatey blue.  I could see out across the river to the flats beyond, rich with green and darker green.  The air smells sharp with new rain.  A robin sings, perhaps one of the pair that has nested on the beam above our window.  The sound of the rain is soothing, even though I don’t yet have the garden planted—we’re still a week from the last frost date here.  I’m glad to be in the Interior in summer, yellowjackets notwithstanding.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »