Tag astrology

* sketching with Miriam Sagan

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment
*historically historic district*

*historically historic district*

This is a church right across the street from our new apartment in Cincinnati.  We have moved into a historic district which reveals new things with each walk we take around the neighborhood.

The drive across country was a series of things being revealed.  In Itasca, Ani pointed out a cardinal excitedly, fascinated with how the actual red of the cardinal is a different from what she envisions in her head.  I told her to sketch it.  She responded: How do you sketch that red?

**

A few weeks before the move I was delighted to receive from Miriam Sagan herself a copy of her book “Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn.”  The poems and essays in the book follow Sagan as she travels to seven places and documents the life lived and seen.  It was a great guide for my own poetic sojourn, and the inspiration for my post last week.

The poem below is one of a number poems in Sagan’s book that create their magic through a series of short lyrics.  There’s something about the short lyric that is ideal for travel.  When you travel there is so much to see – you can barely take it all in, much less write about it.

How do you sketch that red?

One line at a time.

**

Sketches in a Notebook – Miriam Sagan

a lizard
living
in a rolled up shade

tree bromeliads –
two cormorants
build a nest of twigs

man with a cane
crosses path with
a tiny turtle

child pats the palm tree
ignores
the alligator

tree canopy
butterfly, and purple glade
morning glory

rare buttonwood vine
looks like any foliage –
but rare –

a leaf drops in
the mahogany hammock –
without season

out of the palm trees
a peacock darts – escaped –
but from where?

tree snail gleams
in the leaf canopy –
stolen ghost orchid

raindrops’ circles –
yellow spatterdock flowers
floating green pods –

two shy vultures
pick raindrops
off the car’s roof

only the most
delicate colored pencils
draw the tree snail’s shell

cypresses
drawn in an inky line,
overcast afternoon

leaf’s
drop tip
implies rain

**

Happy implying!

Jose

* check out Miriam Sagan’s blog here.

* Oregon: farewell (for now) with a few friends

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

The Act of Contrition – Sam Roderick Roxas-Chua

It’s hard to exorcise bees
you must start at a young age
and answer only to quiet things,
a hum from the television,
a wick’s last spark,
a pulse from a yolk,
study the many hues
of yellow and black,
flight pattern
and eyelash,
climb atop a hill
and offer your body
as pollen, it is not
until then, their black
bean eyes appear and
your penance begins
with its sting.

*on the road, yo*

*on the road, yo*

Me and mine are set to hit the road this weekend – so I thought I would send us off with poems by two members of the Eugene writing group, The Red Sofa Poets.

Sam’s poem above moves me in the way that it creates a mood and engages you in images – goes from the small to the epic and back again all in the language of, not religion, but sacredness.  The bees are both outside and inside the soul.

Toni Hanner’s poem below enacts the feel of a carnival ride – picking up images as it careens in its longer lines.  The pull of the line is set against the lists detailed by the speaker, the associations of which charge the poem with an undercurrent of immediacy.  In this way, the poem evokes the passing blur the world becomes in the movement and momentum of a carnival ride.

***

Carnival Ride – Toni Hanner

A dozen black tickets will cost you your shadow but weren’t you tired

of dragging it around anyway, ice box,

carbon paper, skate keys, chalk.  Hand it to the crone smoking on the corner,

ric-rac, floor wax, linoleum, hair nets, she blows

a smoke ring deftly around your face already you’re inside,

there are the girls in silver masks and here comes the ice cream

man with his jingly bells playing a tune you recognize as one your mother

used to sing, you turn to look and there she is, your mother, in her housecoat

laced with burns.  Typewriters, can of worms, chicken feed, fireflies,

and she is singing, your mother, but not that song.

*ferris is fair*

*ferris is fair*

Both of these poems were published in the first issue of Fault Lines Poetry.  The release party/reading for this issue was the first poetry event I attended upon returning to Oregon a year ago.

It has been a good year for the page and for the Influence.  We’ll be on the road for the next week.  Wish us luck!

Happy Oregoning!

Jose

* painting found here.