RANT

We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.

Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.

It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...

And which is the Work that counts the most?

O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?

The Real Work.

I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.

Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.

click here

Happy Friday.