on granite and the need for sparkle

On my desk is my new book! It has a blue and while cover with a print I made years ago. I keep moving it around from pile to pile knowing that in the next few days I’ll send it out to readers wrapped up in beautiful paper.

I’ll send it friends who have watched poems meander over the years. I’ll send it to people like you who come back and read this newsletter week after week. I’ll send it to Holly who helped coax the book to life week by week watching the shape grow. Thank you, it feels good and important to be held in that bigger web. I’d like to invite all of you to a zoom book launch September 4th at 5 pm PDT. Please RSVP here!

I’ll read a few poems, we’ll acknowledge that this book made its way into the world this year! For those of you who are paid subscribers! It’s finally here!!!! Coming to you very soon! And if you want to support this work here’s another chance to get the book as part of that support!

This summer has been a little blurry. I am looking out at the garden which has been eaten at the top by the deer and the bottom by the gophers. There is something new and bright yellow blooming…maybe a marigold tucked in the leaves of an amaranth. After replanting four times the cosmos grew, they are a favorite color of mine, some kind of dusky pink, a little iridescent.

Just in the past few days I have been looking out and seeing the flowers amongst the zucchini monsters and thought, it’s a small miracle there is a garden this year. Can I enjoy it a little bit? Is it possible to see something other than the lack and the want for strawberries?

Can August bring a little softness? A little hope? Some way to concentrate the wild bright sun? Can I notice that it’s not smoky while knowing there is lots of smoke?

I ask this because this moment of this world feels precarious. It feels wobbly and uncertain. I can’t usually tell where this individual or collective experience depart from each other. I don’t know if I want to. I do know that without noticing the warm spread of granite under my belly after jumping into a cold alpine stream I am lost.

I don’t pretend that I am in charge of the level of blur of world. That would be exhausting but I do think that when it’s sweet, we might as well taste it. We might as well slide down sand dunes, wander out in the new moon night in our underwear to marvel at the sky. We might as well eat blackberries, sweet, sticky, and ridiculous, getting as messy as we can.