Journey to the East

Cape May, New Jersey which is at the southern-most end of the New Jersey shore is a beautiful city that was shrouded in snow and clouds and cold this time of year. It sports many beautiful old Victorians (houses that is). There's something forlorn about a seaside resort shuttered for winter. I was attending a weekend poetry retreat/workshop which provided "prompts" for writing new poems and for working outside my usual poet's box. It was good too see old friends, Susan and Alyssa with whom I had worked with in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center a couple of summers ago.

Here's a photograph of the late afternoon sky from the balcony of the hotel. the blues were particularly textured, almost creamy.



NEW YORK was the first stop on the trip for culture and entertainment. Ah my home city, drawing me back again. Coming full circle, returnings and yearnings. It is difficult to stay away though the cold makes me appreciate living in CA. It was a pleasure to hear the New York Philharmonic with Dudamel conducting a rousing Mahler's Fifth, the New York City Opera performing Barber's Antony and Cleopatra and the MET performing Gluck's Orpheo with choreography by Mark Morris. As an added benefit, the city provided, snow--how lovely, at least for a few hours.

Inauguration Day

Wow, I am watching Barak Obama walk George Bush to the helicopter that is taking away 8 years of disaster. There's laughter as it heads into the sky.

Enough, at last.

To new beginnings. How moving that a poet reads her words right after the Inaugural Address was delivered.

Sunday Concerts

On a clear and relatively warm Jan. Sunday in SF, I let myself get swept up in the Whirlwind--3 events this afternoon. Two half concerts sandwiched by a party.

The SF Symphony performed Aaron Copland's music from the movie version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Slow, majestic in its simplicity, quintessentially American and so Copland.

I recall reading the play on a car trip with my parents driving back from Washington DC to New York, in one of the world's worst cars--our Chevrolet Chevette. I must have been in Junior High School. My inexplicable weeping as I finished the play disturbed my mother until I explained the reason. I was a "sensitive" child, after all. I still find the play quite moving, though at this point overdone. And who can forget Robby Benson in a made for TV version?

Alas, my 70's paperback of the play is missing, which is a real loss. I love the yellowing pages of those volumes and how they fall apart as the cheap glue that had held them together dries into dust. I just cracked the spine (literally of the 21st edition of another Bantam paperback edition with three of Wilder's play in it) to reread the ending. Ah, ah the stage manager...... who of course has the last word:

"Yes it's clearing up. there are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strains' so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest...."

Damn, he gets away with it.

Now you too have a good night.

[Time Passes]

[Time Passes]


Imagine grief as a parenthetical,
all the hours and days of mourning
contained between two punctuation
marks, all the unmet expectations,
unconsummated love affairs, condensed
to two words, compressed between
two outstretched hands, raised in pain,
cupping your head to prevent suffering
from spilling out of your eyes
in a series of unending ellipses....


This poem started out as an exercise in writing with parenthetical statements in it. I failed in that regard! My writing process is circuitous (All Rising to a great place is by a winding stair-- Francis Bacon) and often images and lines from poetry or books that I have read take center stage for a while. Sometimes I like to riff off of them or throw in obscure references to obscure quotations. (The games that some writers like to play.)

I started thinking about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse which contains a haunting section late in the book entitled "Time Passes." Don't read further if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the book, though Woolf is not the author I would read for plot. (Wow, a triple negative.) In this section, we learn of the death of many main characters through a sentence or two that are always in brackets. She is writing BIG in which themes of DARKNESS and TIME are set up against the human and the inevitable brevity of our life on Earth. Rereading the section this morning, I was blown away at the beauty of her prose.

Another parenthetical story: I first read To the Lighthouse at Yale and had borrowed my ex's copy of the book. In that edition, the section "Time Passes" had its own page upon which the ex had scrawled something like "This is the part in which Andrew Ramsey dies." Well perhaps it is true that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Mendocino

The Medocino Coast in winter. Tall redwood trees, fog and mist. A December of the soul. Hills of fern and moss. Mushrooms of all varieties appearing on the forest floor as if through spontaneous generation. And then the ocean. Seething and surging against craggy outcroppings of rock and sand. Savage in its beauty. Grand in its ferocity. Romantic with a capital R. A communion with the sublime. Ah, but when all is almost lost in the most purple of prose, the perfect sunset.

Poem for the Inauguration of the New Year

The world past autumn turns sere and skeletal,

a landscape sketched in chalk and coal, each line

a dormant branch or vine submerged in drizzle,

its flames snuffed out, a flaw in God’s design,

a smudge, a slanted rhyme, define despair

until I see a tree on fire, with jewels

of burning orange light, a vision rare--

an oxymoron nature ridicules.



The poet cloaked in black leaves oval footprints

in the snow, his face a mask of cold resolve,

a fan in his outstretched hand, bears a glint

of spring, a branch of plum blossoms absolves

the winter of its dying dream, its barren strife,

instills a newborn hope and cries, Choose life.

An Explanation

Why name a blog after a Ferris Wheel? Location, location, location. The Pacific Wheel sits at the end of the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles California, and I used to run by it once a week when I lived in LA. Its wildly blinking lights were a landmark , the half way point on my runs. I also think of it as marking the end of another type of journey as the Wheel spins at the western end of the continental US. For many years, I had tried to write a poem capturing the BIG theme of my westering journey and the place that California holds in my own twisted artistic consciousness. Finishing that poem a few years ago was a breakthrough for me. How fitting then to choose Pacific Wheel as a name for a blog that I hope will capture my idiosyncratic poetic pretensions, observations, and travels (geographically and culturally.)