31st
The trees stand absolutely still,
leaves too lethargic to wave to anyone,
sunlight draped across the deck
as if it fainted there and can’t get up.
Feeders hang devoid of wing
and chirp; the wind
has sped ahead to more ferocious
months. Poor August, caught between
the splash and squeal of summer,
the pregnant backpacks and obese gourds
of fall. The month we plod through
on our way to virgin crayons
and intimate evening walks,
the subtle touch of someone’s hand.
It’s even burdened with this extra day.
No cars scuffing the blacktop.
No dogs protesting letters floated
through the slot. Even the ginger cat
lies belly up in the uncut grass,
not an eyelid lifted as the vole
in his wooly coat chugs by.
9/1/09
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How to Keep a Notebook I have always carried the mountain with me: grandmother, Crede hill, Pedernal, Petoskey stone. I learn how to sing these things alive, how the vibration of pencil on paper strikes a chord, how that sound can be blue, its waves tucking over you. Because he had no word for blue, Homer sang the sea wine-dark. Inside a wine-dark shaft in the mountain, lips are moving: it may take months to form a syllable, for a word to swim the mapof the known world. With words I begin to map the mountain: dirt, pulse, snow-light. 1/21/10
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Learning to PrayI was never good at it, even as a kid, kneeling on the tile floor, elbows on the pieced quilt, hands folded, a collapsible steeple.
When I shut my eyes, I didn’t see God, but silver bullets and horses cresting the horizon of hills. What I was told to say to God
about my soul, my blessings felt muzzled by an inside voice, one that wanted a fast new sled, more of my grandmother’s dimes.
I knew my mother prayed daily that my grandmother’s brain tumor would shrivel to a raisin. The grape enlarged to cluster and she died.
I never got the inside voice to hush, stop interrupting, making, grocery lists, quit asking how to miracles and seeking explanations.
It kept up such a racket: argue, measure, translate, deny. Compose, regret. Then my mother died. Voices lost their sound.
Now I know silence as a kind of prayer, a voice asking nothing, tired of words, tired of lifting up and tying down, tired
of grammar, syntax, left brain. Prayer finds its own release, the hand and breath of God calling forth a chord.
It’s no struggle tuning this instrument I’ve never held, playing a score I’ve never seen,
the song untethered from its notes: acorn, feather, moon.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and poetry, art and text, artist and writer collaboration, call and response, Guillermo Delgado, MSU poet, MSU Visiting Artist, text and image, The Secret Lives of Things, writing and art | Leave a Comment »
You Never Know
The wolves rise with the moonrise.
As your breathing grows heavier,
more rhythmic, the wolves emerge
from their underbed lairs. They watch
you sleep. They watch you dream
the things which make you howl
in the forest of nonsense. They hear
that howling. The fine hairs in their
ears waft like anemone in the sea’s
undulations. The wolves leap onto
the quilt, patchwork of plowed fabric,
no woods for dens or caves. They lie
down around you like dogs, not friend,
not foe. The wolves wait for your next
move. You watch a raven circle, needle
of black stitching a wound in memory’s
sky. There is something familiar about
the bird, something in its cry that cuts
open your heart like the surgeon’s blade.
Still, you float unharmed on the white
river of sheets. But, the wolves smell
blood. They glide toward you, fluid
and feral. The raven departs, flies
through a hole you hadn’t seen. It
widens, opens like a porthole, the iris
of a blue eye, cold as Arctic air. You
step in: left paw first, then the right.
7/20/09
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and text, art and writing project, artist and writer collaboration, call and response, Guillermo Delgado, online artistic collaboration, The Secret Lives of Things, writing and art | 1 Comment »
After Reading the Note from my Cousin
It’s a card from Moab, sandstone
arch stretched, as if a rock
could be elastic, could extend
like an arm reaching across the table
for dinner rolls, that reaches Michigan
with her words from Utah.
She’s been to Palm Springs, she’s packed
the place in Phoenix, she’s got a room
rented, a ski pass, and a job
in Vail. Now it’s just getting there,
she says. Yes, just getting there, I think,
looking at the curly blue words
on white cardstock, the small i
and ampersands, the dashes and ellipses.
Here’s someone already taking flight.
But among the fragments bumping into
one another, an exclamation point or two,
a hot tub under a full moon, clouds
and cold and snow, and a final phrase,
time to move on & live in joy.
This is the cousin who once arrived
with a sack of granola, two pans,
and a vegetarian dog at my door in Kansas.
After fifteen years, I recognized her
only when she said my mother’s name.
She left her job five years ago
to travel with her mother
on that night train to the country
of lost names and landscapes,
conversation dropping like snipped threads.
And then my mother, just a year later,
surprising us all by departing on the same train
before we even knew she had a ticket,
the two of us left in a thicket
of brothers and my father tending
the bleeding heart that bloomed
the morning she did not see.
Just getting there, I hear.
This is the week of Thanksgiving,
tables calling us from our dark corners
to handshakes and ham, potatoes
the way Aunt Phyllis mashed them,
my mother’s molded jello salad,
our grandmother’s pumpkin pies.
Just getting there, she writes:
under the cold November moon,
snow obliterates the swirls of tire tracks
in the driveway, no one coming,
no one going.
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Flowers, Then In a plot beneath the dining room window my grandmother grew carnations, pink and white layers of lace smelling like the handkerchiefs she tucked discreetly up her cuff. On Sunday morning my father might clip one for the buttonhole in his gray lapel. To the east side of the house, beneath my bedroom window, my mother grew roses, her favorites the peach of a Florida sunset, pink curl of a conch shell. My grandmother fancied reds, bold and certain who they were, unlike her. I loved the yellows: summer sun, no school, and my special Davy Crockett shorts. On the bank outside the kitchen window, to the west, grew morning glories, blue of New Mexico sky, trumpets voluntary. When they opened, a hillside symphony. When they closed, no one could pry their secret music from them. To the north, where I roamed, blackberries, pokeberries, milkweed, ironweed. Gulley, full of poison ivy. Rocks in the creek bed, grapevines to swing across. Blossoms we trod on, some purple, some white, on our way wherever.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and poetry, art and writing, artist and writer collaboration, call and response, Guillermo Delgado, Michigan writer, MSU poet, MSU Visiting Artist, Oak Park artist, The Secret Lives of Things, writing and art | 1 Comment »
What Can Happen
Every poet writes a poem
about writing a poem: the first
poem, weak in the knees
and suffering acne; the last poem,
confident in voice but unprepared
to acknowledge it will have no successors.
There’s the poem about why
it is not a poem (which is usually
the case) and the poem of longing
for a poem, the one of looking
for a poem, the one of discovering
the poem in some unexpected
lair: on a flowchart,
in a possum’s tail spoken by
someone named Ashley.
The poet might claim the poem
has written itself, or sprung
full-worded onto the page like Athena
from the head of Zeus (never mind
the woman he must have swallowed).
A young poet writes of his honeymoon
with the poem, how together
they will sail to the lost continent
of love. A survivor poet
knows that boat’s going down,
listens, marvels at how
words can take wing
from a concocted thing,
circle free, imagine their way
to another fiction.
6/13/09
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and poetry, art and text, art and writing, Guillermo Delgado, MSU poet, MSU Visiting Artist, online artistic collaboration, text and image, The Secret Lives of Things | 1 Comment »
Those Summer Mornings
after the report card came home
and bus 228 no longer stopped twice a day,
the world woke canopied in translucent
green, light dappling wet, spider-webbed
grass, fog drowsing in the river valley
like me, still hovering in half-awake
beneath my grandmother’s double
wedding ring quilt, loops of blue
and yellow calico for my cars, roads
that always circled back, stories plotted
as wheels turned. All was still, my parents
gone to jobs, NanNan in the kitchen
ironing to gospel hymns. In my day a bike,
a dog, a friend, the woods. How could
I know what loss already lodged among us?
5/21/09
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and poetry, artist and writer collaboration, Chicago artist, Ghost Ranch, Guillermo Delgado, map art, Michigan writer, MSU poet, MSU Visiting Artist, Oak Park artist, painting on wood, Pilsen Artist, text and image, Those Summer Mornings | Leave a Comment »
The Mapmaker lifts her pen from paper and sees the shape she has drawn is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Not wanting it to be alone, she touches down her pen again outlining a mitten, open-faced and ready for cold. There will be a city somewhere mid-mitten, so she drops a yellow ball into the palm calling it the state capital. Now a highway would be nice, though she’d rather have a river. She dips a brush in blue and a line flows south below the border, curving to miss the lake she has not painted, bending north a short distance where she drops another yellow dot. It’s windy there, she can tell. She wonders what a voyager on this river-road might see, what is the season of this map. Because, like the UP, she is lonely, she decides it is autumn, leaves swirling on the cerulean roadway, a hunter’s moon rising over water. This, she is sure, must be cadmium red. She does not paint the man in the moon but the stag she hears crashing through undergrowth, caught in the sight of the marksman’s rifle, the bullet hole blossoming onto parchment, alizarin crimson rippling the lake she cannot paint, her map collapsing under the stag’s weight. 5/18/09
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art and text, call and response, creative map, Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #9, map of Michigan, mixed media on wood, The Mapmaker, The Secret Lives of Things | 2 Comments »
Swimmer
When I heard my mother’s voice
for the last time on the phone
I said I’d be there soon.
That’ll be nice, honey. Bye.
Then she stopped smiling, stopped
eating, stopped talking about the rain.
Before I arrived she was already swimming
the channel of dreams toward that beautiful shore,
awash in the waves of a soft blue blanket,
the deep breaths of her last laps
audible in the room.
As a kid, I remember watching her
at Daytona Beach, out beyond
the breakers where my father and I rode
the canvas raft, swimming up, then back,
white bathing cap bobbing like a gull
on the blue. I never feared for myself,
dumped under by the churn, rising
with a mouthful of crushed shell,
sputtering to breathe, but I was anxious
that my mother swam too far out, too far away,
that the current was too strong,
that she could not swim back.
Her stroke was sure, steady, unfaltering.
Even though her father drowned,
she loved her buoyancy in the ocean.
She did not believe in evolution.
I believe she retained fins.
When I saw the surf swelling,
thunderclouds rumbling in, I called
to her as she stroked back and forth,
back and forth. She never heard my voice.
She heard the hymn of the waves, rejoiced
as they rose beneath her like a final
heartbeat, lifting her on their feathery curl.
Mother, I called, as she dipped
out of sight, Mother, swim back.
4/24/09
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Skeen, art, art and poetry, Guillermo Delgado, online artistic collaboration, Swimmer, text and image, The Secret Lives of Things, writing and art | 2 Comments »









