The full moon lit up my sky last night, which was cloudless and star-filled.
My daughter tells me of my grandson trying to water the moon. He loves the moon, stories of rockets going to the moon. “Moooon. Moooon,” he croons.
“Moon,” he says, holding his watering can. “Water.”
She tries to explain that the moon is too far away to water. It’s way high in the sky, above the clouds.
He’s not even two years old yet. What does he care.
He stands on his tip-toes, lifts his arm with his watering can, positions himself at just the right spot in his perspective, and waters the moon.

…..if you’re African American, that is, is detailed here. These are excerpts:
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb….. [snip]
Florida’s racial profile mirrors the nation’s–both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don’t count. “In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled–not counted–as a white voter,” explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley’s Harvard report. “National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters.”
So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer–because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.
One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day
On Sunday, when my women’s group gathered for brunch, we got into a loud discussion about my assertion that Bush’s America has managed a major escalation of the self-destruction of this planet’s human species. While the current lives of us seven women are not that bad (no thanks to Bush and great thanks to the feminist movement), we nevertheess feel powerless to have any effect on the supposed democracy in which we’re trying to at least to do a little better than merely survive. Even the major march of women in Washington — thought to be the largest rally ever held in the nation’s capital — is not making any difference. It barely got any media coverage, and you know that Bush and his cabal couldn’t care less anyway. Well, we still have our votes. Oh yeah. HAVA nice day.
I’ll meet you on the corner of Apocalypse and Armaggedon.

OK. He really is inspiring. Yesterday I went to a open seminar and a reading by Eamon Grennon as a way to wrap up this experience for me.
“poetry is an interplay between music and meaning…..between sentence and line….a dance…registering elemental presence in the ordinary…”
These were just some of what he tried to expalin in relation to his own writing.
elemental presence in the ordinary
Yes, that’s what his poetry achieves and that’s my goal as well.
He also spoke about the moment when the poem takes on a life of its own, begins to become something other than you started out with. That’s the point that I have a hard time getting to these days. It happens for me when I get into what I can only describe as a meditative state — drifting in deep and touching that “elemental presence.” Hasn’t happened for me in a while.
With a Irish lilt in his voice and a rhythmic movement of his shoulders, Grennon read his poetry into music. He talked a little about the background of each poem before he read it, adding his unique humanity and humor to the context of each.
What he said and what he writes resonate with the poet in me. I bitched and moaned about the writing exercises that he had us do, but I’m really glad that I hung in there. I just wish the timing had been better and I had more of myself to give to the process.
In between seminar and reading, I went out to dinner with five other poets, all but one who were in the Grennon workshop with me. Two are in the every-other-Tuesday night poetery group as well. Being in their presence — laughing, getting to know each other on a personal level, sharing stories — was amazingly energizing for me. Tonight is the Tuesday night group, and I’m definitely going….
…even though, while I was out last night, my mother experienced shortness of breath and didn’t eat the dinner I left for her. I think she’s having episodes with her heart, since she doesn’t want a pacemaker, since she doesn’t want to do anything to prolong her life.
And so it goes.

I stayed up last night to watch the faces of our needlessly dead American soldiers move across my tv screen on Nightline So young. So many minorities. All I could think about was how their mothers must feel. And how insensitive ABC was to run pizza commericals between the segments.
Bash that Bush!

The poetry workshop ended on a good note for me — including going out afterward for a burger and beer with a couple of the other poets.
My revision of Still Life With Lunch got a great reception. All the scaffolding is gone. In all honesty, I do believe that it’s a better poem. I had to take out stuff I liked, but the stuff I liked wasn’t adding to the power of the piece. So, what I learned from Grennon is that it’s worth it to keep revising and revising — IF what you want is an artistically crafted and meaningful poem. I’m still learning.
Meanwhile, my Road Runner connection keeps coming and going, so I have no idea how much I’ll be able to post.
There are some poems written by some of the other poets in the workshop that I’d like to post here. I’m going to email them next week and get their permission. Maybe they’ll let me post their “before” and “after” as well.
There were some changes suggested for my final Vermeer’s Lady poem (as well as a comment by Grennon that I was being “weird” and “shades of Sylvia Plath”. I think he was just trying to be funny, since my poem was the only one that was, indeed, a little weird.) I’ll post the final version when I make the minor changes.
As a final learning experience, Grennon shared copies of the umpteen pages of revisions that finally resulted in this poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Her papers are in the archives of Vassar College.
Now I’ve got to clean up around my computer, so that when the Road Runner guy comes over tomorrow to figure out what’s going on, I won’t have anything incriminating hanging around. 🙂

I keep tinkering. But at some point you have to cut it loose. This is what I’m taking to the poetry workshop tonight (changes, while small, I think are signficant):
Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter
she’s taken a knife to her hair, again,
sliced away those willing strands
that each day hold her captive
in the clasp of perfect pearls
she studies herself in the mirror,
in the mellow light of morning —
a golden woman besieged by shadows
chained to a string of perfect pearls
at night she dreams of rubies
crystalline and star-filled
burning shadows bloody,
crushing seas of pearls
to evanescent dust
and so she closes her door
against the burdens of moment
turns to quill and paper —
a mirror freed by sunlight
and rich ruby dreams

If you’ve been following my labor pains as I make the effort to complete the assignments for an advanced poetry workshop at the New York State Writer’s Institute, you know that
–the first assignment was to write three different possible first stanzas (of 11 lines each, each line between 9 and 13 syllables) based on this Vermeer painting. At the first session, the group came to consensus about which of each of our three stanzas was the one we should each go with.
–the second assignment was to sharpen that selected first stanza and write three second stanzas (I only could get out one). The same consensus process followed — except for mine, of course since I gave them no choice.
–the third assignment was to write three possible versions of a third stanza. I missed that workshop session for lots of reasons, including that I didn’t have the time or energy to come up with even one possible third stanza.
If you didn’t know all of that before, you know it now.
Our last workshop session is tomorrow. The assignment for that was to arrive with and share, in whatever form and fomat we finally freed ourselves to choose, our poem about the painting.
Here’s mine. Much better, doncha’ think? Well, too bad if you don’t because I do.
Vermeer