Weather Empathy

Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles

Around five o'clock this afternoon, it got really quiet and still and I said to Henry that I thought something was going to happen. I texted The Bird Photographer, too. It feels weird. Something is going to happen. We thought earthquake. Everything was quiet. The only thing I heard was the air-conditioner kicking on. No birds, no cars, no horns, no ambulances or helicopters. What would I do if there were an earthquake and I was in the backyard? Henry asked on his way into the house from the backyard where he'd been hitting a lacrosse ball. I was lying on my bed reading. I figured it was a rhetorical question and didn't answer. Henry is feeling anxious about college. My schedule! My future! What will I do? What if I don't do well? I reassured him that no one knows the answers to those questions when they go to college, and if they do, they will probably change their minds once they get there. I told him that it'll all become incredibly clear one day. Ha. I said no such thing. He has no idea that it was only yesterday that I was walking through the Arboretum near midnight with my books on my hip, quickly, back to my dorm where I'd join my Jesus freak room-mate in our Carolina blue room. I'd go down the hallway, take a shower and wrap my hair in a wet towel, go back to the room and sit in front of the window, the fan blowing high, cooling the drops of sweat already beading on my skin.












It rained. Actually, it drizzled. Still! It's August! Well, it was more like a few drops. The sky got dark, there were a few rumbles of thunder and I saw a picture online of a lightning strike in Orange County. So that's what happened. At least for now.

It Never Rains in Southern California

Well, I guess I should say Happy President's Day!

I posted the following on my Facebook page for an Andy Warhol fifteen minutes and then decided to take it down because it's so vile. Someone I know asked me whether it was real. Yes, it's real. It's true and not alternative fact. It's a transcript of 45's comments from ten years ago, and even as I acknowledge my role as contributor to ugliness, it bears repeating because we're all responsible on some level. I still can't believe that 45 now represents all of us on the world stage.

Let's move on.

On Saturday night, I attended the first meeting of our local Indivisible group. We're called Active Empathy, and we're intent on active resistance to not just 45 but also to the extreme right Republicans in power whose agenda doesn't represent us or -- in some cases -- the majority of people in this country, in addition to its undoing progress to protect our environment and ensure equal access to our healthcare and threatening our first amendment rights. I'd have to make this a Faulknerian sentence if I kept typing everything that's under threat, but our intentions include flipping the legislature with methodical action. The group that attended the first meeting was diverse in age, race, religion, sex and sexuality, a mini-Los Angeles. We introduced ourselves and told the others what issues we were most interested or concerned. The range was wide. Some tears were shed and some expressed anger. Many attendees are originally from the "flyover" states and perfectly aware that not everyone who lives in those states condones some of the more egregious behavior of 45 or the conservative platform. Many expressed the need to be self-aware, to at least acknowledge our part in further dividing the country with our anger and sometimes condescension. Others had more of a screw that attitude, believing it is going to take the adoption of Tea Party tactics to be most effective. Here's the beautiful logo created by one of the founders of the group. Active Empathy is the name that's above the following:

We're not a moderate group, which brings me to the other thing I wanted to write about, and that's the personal war I have going on in my tiny little mother mind.™ I generally use the tiny little mother mind™ expression to describe the relationship between me and the Powers That Be in Neurologyland, how over decades I've learned just how hegemony works. The analogy has some use here, too. What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be an elitist? When did the open derision of intellect become acceptable? What does it mean to be moderate? Why is moderation a virtue? Why is moving to the center a goal? Is that a construct or something truly admirable? Are there certain principles that should not be compromised? What convictions do I have that are immoveable? I don't have the answers. I have a tiny little mother mind™ and some gut instincts, though, that have served me well and that I have to constantly be vigilant to honoring. To help me with this, I've been reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, and it's startling and fairly easy to draw parallels to what's going on today. I'm reminded of my instincts and of honoring them, how difficult it is to do so when I also have to deal with emotions, with a patriarchal culture and values that are more authoritarian than inclusive. There's a good discussion of Arendt's work here, including this choice passage:

“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part . . . Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction . . . [and] can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.”

It's exhausting, isn't it?

Let's move on.

I saw the extraordinary documentary about James Baldwin called I am not your Negro. Everyone should watch it and the documentary 13. They're both antidotes to the superficial bullshit that reigns in this country. It rained off and on all weekend here in southern California. Everything is green, so green. I've been reading Ann Patchett's novel Commonwealth and love it. I told a good friend that I haven't been able to get into a novel in a long time, that I remain half in and half out, that that was worrying me because reading novels has been really the only constant in my life (that's NOT hyperbole). I'm in Patchett's story -- totally in. The man I love brought me pink roses, and the boys I love showed me how to take pictures with my new iPhone so that the background is blurred out. How wonderful is that! Here's a picture of the roses using this clever technique and one of the cinnamon bread I baked. The boys I loved showed me the scratch and sniff technique on the phone, too. Just kidding. That IS hyperbole.

Reader, what did you do this weekend?

Sneak Peak on Xeriscaping Project

We've ripped up our front and back yards and replaced the grass with planting beds, California native plants and mulch. It's been four weeks of work, and it's starting to come together and look really great. I bought a small fire pit and some funky chairs for that back right corner and hope that The Brothers will invite their friends over to roast marshmallows, toast weiners and drink lemonade rather than cavort around the big shitty in low-riders, eating pot brownies and drinking beer. Maybe I'll put in a chocolate fountain to ensure they prefer the pleasures of home to carousing.

A mother can dream.

The front yard is just a big pile of dirt and manure right now with millions of small bugs buzzing around, so I won't take a photo until it's all done.

Now, we're going to hunker down and wait for the big rains that are due to come in January. I suppose I could have left the grass and hoped for revival for at least another year before the drought begins again, but now I'm thinking I have a number of swimming pools should we be flooded with water.

I Wonder if Slava is Looking for a Room-mate

Photographer: Evgenia Arbugaeva

Slava Korotki is described as the most cut-off man in the universe. Except for the  problem (for me) of the extreme northern position of his home on the edge of Russia and the Arctic, and those frightfully short winter days, I've a hankering to join him. I thought about it even as I dragged myself to Trader Joe's today and joined the literal throngs of people waiting in line to buy stuff. I imagine I could make a pretty decent matchstick house or two, maybe a castle or one of those lonely wooden towers that Van Morrison crooned of in Purple Heather. You can't go anywhere in Los Angeles, and I mean anywhere, without seeing some of the most destitute people living on the streets, under bridges, in shopping cart villages. The other day, as I pulled out of a gas station and waited at a light, I found myself staring at a man trying to light a match to the contents of a tin can. It was the first chilly morning in forever, my car sat idling. At home, a house rich in the accoutrements of 2015, the buzz of workers creating a drought-tolerant landscape, a saint who helps to tend Sophie yet is desperate for more work.  I closed my eyes and imagined myself stopping the car, stepping out, closing the door behind me and oblivious to the honks and shouts of the others, walking toward him, abiding there. City of Angels. Slava is a weatherman, and according to the woman who wrote the article, he  doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.

Conversations with Special Ed Bus Drivers

The weather has turned here in Los Angeles to crisper temperatures (meaning around 55 at night and 65 in the day), and we've even had a few drops of rain here and there, probably nature's easing us into what promises to be a brutal El Nino rainy season with apocalyptic flooding and slides. Oy. The light right now is indescribable -- although shortly after I moved to Los Angeles eighteen years ago, I read an article about it in The New Yorker that did perfect justice to its luminescence.  Interestingly, I had only lived in Los Angeles for a few months, was pregnant with Henry and already noticed the light. The last truly huge El Nino winter storms happened that winter as well -- so much rain and craziness that I remember wondering what everyone talked about when they said it never rained in southern California! Unfortunately, the article is available only to subscribers, but here's a brief excerpt from Lawrence Weschler's L.A. Glows in the February, 1998 issue.

I was recalling McWilliams' comments one morning while breakfasting with the architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light, and he concurred. "It's an incredibly loaded subject -- this diaphanous soup we live in," he said, "It feels primeval -- there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non-hierarchical. It's not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, 'dramatic' is exactly what it's not. If anything, it's meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it. In places where you get a crisp, sharp light with deep, clean shadows -- which we do get here sometimes -- you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we get here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity -- not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows, and the opacity melts away into translucency and even transparency."

I wasn't quite getting it, so Howard tried again.

"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -- the object -- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say, and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and the wave comes in, splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here -- the air, the atmosphere, the light -- that makes everything shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world -- diaphanous soup I was talking about -- which, in turn, grounds a magic - meditative presence." 

This afternoon, while busy working I heard the familiar screech of Sophie's bus come round the corner, and when I emerged from my writing cave, I blinked in the sun and shivered -- both from the chill in the air and the warm sun on my skin. The bus driver got busy letting down the wheelchair ramp, turning to me afterward with a huge smile on his face.

Isn't it beautiful, today? he said, The day, the light reminds me of when I was five years old, running through the fields of my country, El Salvador. Free.

Reader, I don't know why that brought tears to my eyes, but I felt them prick there and could only tell him what a wonderful memory that was and thank you for telling me. Then we both turned to Sophie, busying ourselves with the straps and levers that assured her safety as she descended.

This place I live sustains me.

Sunday

Silk floss tree is blooming

It's hot.
I'm not.

52 and Hot (not THAT way)

So far, I've had a lovely birthday. I had an early breakfast with my astral twin Debra (we have same exact birthday) and then a little later breakfast with my oldest friend Moye. I've received texts and telephone calls and Facebook greetings. We are waiting until 5:30 when The Air-Conditioner Man comes and replaces our air-conditioner with a brand-spanking new one. I am hoping that he gives it to us, out of pity for it being my birthday and 95 degrees in the house and all. If there's anything I've learned in my 52 years of life on the planet, all you have to do is ask and ye shall receive. In the meantime, the boys have built what you see above -- a sort of hacked air-conditioner that my friend Mary Beth directed me to the other night on Youtube. It kind of works. That's a cooler filled with ice, with holes cut into it for an insulation tube (the silver thing) and a fan. The video claimed it cost $8 to make, but we spent closer to $17. It blows surprisingly cool air, and I guess it's as good a day as any to remember the days of my youth, nearly thirty-five years ago or so when I lived in a dorm at UNC with no air-conditioning. Since we started school in mid-August, I spent my birthday there for four years, and the dog days of summer in North Carolina were brutal. We would take a cold shower, soak the towel in cold water and wrap our heads, then sit in front of the window fan to cool off. We've put the hacked AC in Sophie's room since seizures and heat are no good. I am waiting for her bus to get here and then will move out of the way and plant her in front of it. in the meantime, I'm reminiscing about some of the best years of my life and those left to come. Thank you for helping me to celebrate!

Conspiracy

We had a tiny little downpour last night where we all thought deluge! and I was even tempted to go out in it, head upturned and dance, but then it stopped and today it dawned startling clear with the bluest of skies and a crisp turn to the air. The wind, though, has been knocking the palms around, their dry brown husks litter the streets and the yard and I wonder, again, why I never hear of someone being killed by one or at least knocked out. I myself took the above photo gingerly, aware of the ones hanging over me from the neighbor's yard, and I've felt jittery all day from the wind. The power has gone off and on and off and on this afternoon and my house is so quiet and so empty except for the wind whispers that it feels like a conspiracy.

Homeschooling in the Winter in Los Angeles

One of Oliver's instructors

I know that it's cold elsewhere, and the effects of global warming on our territory is an alarming lack of rain, but this morning Oliver paddled out into the ocean again for another stand-up paddleboard STEM class and I can't help but feel grateful, again, to live here. That fellow above was one of his instructors. The other is a woman who looks equally as fine, but I don't think you need a photo of her. Right? So much for those of you who say that you'd miss the seasons if you lived here in February.

We drove home from Redondo Beach in the early afternoon and delved into Egyptian history with a curriculum that uses the Usborne Internet-linked Encyclopedia of the Ancient World. We read about Hatsepshut, the queen who became king. Do ya'll remember learning about her when you studied Egyptology? I sure didn't, and it's quite a fascinating story. After being wedded to her brother for a bit (a common occurrence in ancient Egypt) and producing no heir (probably a blessing), her young nephew was next in line to be king but too young to rule, so she became a regent.

Eventually, she decided that she would be not regent or even queen, but King, was properly crowned and began to wear all the royal regalia that a male king would wear, including a little beard. Oliver wondered if maybe she was transgender, an interesting thought that I could only marvel over in its casualness. These open-minded millennials!  I told him that I didn't know but that he could perhaps one day write a doctoral dissertation on it.

Hatsepshut ruled for many, many years, but after she died, the pissed-off nephew became king and ordered all of her images and buildings -- everything associated with her --  be defaced and destroyed. Sigh. Some things never change. Evidently, Egyptologists are working on restoring some of the buildings that she ordered built, including a mortuary temple. Here's a picture of Hatshepsut, with her little beard:

So, it's been a productive and educational day. Onward.

There's still nothing to talk about but the heat

105 degrees and not even noon

Global warming, schmobal warming, saith the right wing pundits.

More Notes

Helicopters are circling and the night breeze is gentle on my bare shoulders. There might have been an earthquake an hour ago. I do love Los Angeles.

It would be nice if I could lie down on the floor, kick and scream, like a two-year-old, if I could spit it's not fair like a seven-year-old, if I could sneer my life sucks like a fifteen-year-old, or moan pray that I die like an eighty-five-year-old. Instead it's all breathe in, breathe out, rueful smiles, looking for angels in trees, being mindful of the goosebumps on my skin, reaching for ghosts.

Peonies and Peeps

So the heat wave in Los Angeles has broken, and the breeze rustling the palms is decidedly cooler. It's glorious outside, which is a good thing because I'm off to yet another baseball game. After I dropped Oliver off for his pre-game practice, I lowered the windows in my sexy Mazda and cranked up my song du jour, the Byrd's Here Without You, those harmonies, the memories it stirs up, what ties us to another.

It's all a big, fat mystery. We're mules with burdens and impossibly free.







P.S. My peeps: I changed my comment form to a pop-up window. Please let me know if that helps the situation.

Self-portrait

curious window display on La Brea, near my house

I feel a strange lethargy this preternaturally sunny, dry and windy day. Perhaps it's the two hours I spent lying on Sophie's bed watching Rosemary's Baby, one leg thrown over Sophie to keep her from trying to get off the bed and hurt herself. She is going through the difficult part of the wean process -- withdrawal seizing, agitated and clearly uncomfortable. Perhaps it wasn't such a good choice of movies to watch on Mother's Day, except those clothes! the misogyny! the spectacle of Mia Farrow's infantilism! what we know about Roman Polanski and Woody Allen! the Dakota! Ruth Gordon! Perhaps it's the Sunday blues. Perhaps it's the desire to be somewhere else sometime other -- you know the feeling that belies all the meditation, the Buddhist study, the admonition to be here now. That's it.

The best looking thing in Placentia, California today

 was Henry, for sure, and I'm not taking credit for any of it (well, maybe I did give him an x chromosome). Placentia, California is in Orange County, or behind the Orange Curtain, as those of us in Los Angeles like to say. The name Placentia begs for metaphor, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with any. Richard Nixon's presidential library is right around the corner, so you can imagine what sort of metaphors I would come up with if I wasn't so damn tired from the drive and the heat and the dryness.  I know that in some cultures women will eat the placenta after birth, and a good friend told me today that some Hollywood celebrities are doing just that. More power to them, I said, through my cracked lips. Placentia was very hot today and very dry. Did I already tell you that? My lips were honestly so chapped that you could have filed your nails on them. They went beautifully with my usual sharp tongue. How's that for metaphor? Henry's team played very well and won their first game. For some reason, I missed him scoring his first goal of the season (he generally plays defense and rarely is in a position to score) which I'm going to chalk up to a placential daze. They lost the second game to a group of rowdy, dirty-playing boys from the desert. When we left Placentia in the late afternoon, Henry lifted up his arms and showed me the rings of white salt under his arms. That's when I pressed the pedal to the metal of my sexy Mazda and got the hell out of Dodge.

It's Wicked Bright Outside

It's freaking hot as blazes out here. We've turned on the air-conditioner, a sort of unprecedented event in late April/early May. When I walked outside, it smelled smoky, but the sky is an implacable blue, so I'm wondering if there aren't fires somewhere, their trace brought in with the hot winds blowing all the palms and stripping my lips. We all feel weird on days like these, sort of bottled up, maybe dangerous. Those of us with tongues like scythes don't need a stone to sharpen us. If I weren't round and soft, I'd be all edges. There's nothing languid about this kind of heat. If I weren't typing, my fingers might be talons, unsheathed.

Pittule Day

photo by Jennifer Werndorf (one of my best friends)

I was supposed to be landing at Newark airport tonight, be on my way to my cousin's house to spend the night. In the morning we were headed up to Rockland County in New York, just over the Hudson from the city, where all my Italian relatives were meeting for the annual Pittule Day. I haven't been in fifteen years, since I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, and I was so looking forward to seeing aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' children and even cousins' children's children. My parents will be there and so will my two sisters. Pittule Day is an Aquino family tradition where the elder women make enormous bowls of a yeast dough that rises and rises until it's almost tipping out of the container. Then pieces of the dough are grabbed and shaped into small balls and dropped into hot oil. They float there, frying, while the women and more enlightened men prod them in their oil bath until they turn a golden brown and are removed and placed on paper towels and are then topped with powdered sugar. Hundreds of these little delicacies are fried and eaten about as fast as they come out of the pot, until someone declares that it's time for the savory ones. The same-sized pieces of dough are pinched off, and a small chunk of anchovy is pushed into the center before they're dropped into the oil and cooked until golden brown as well. There are about sixty people at the gathering and food, probably, for six hundred. Trays of melanzane, homemade soppressata, cheeses, breads, pasta and meats, figs and peppers, oranges and whole walnuts, ready to be cracked.

Anywho.

I bought a ticket about a month ago for a very cheap price and was going for two nights, a quick trip with a stack of New Yorkers, my ducks at home in a row, and an ugly, old L.L. Bean coat pulled out of the back of the closet (I don't own a coat!) . I even wore socks! About a half hour after I arrived at the airport, when I was just opening my first New Yorker and eating my first Twizzler, I learned that our flight was delayed due to weather on the east coast, and because I was already arriving very late and the rumor was worse storms beginning Sunday, when I absolutely needed to make a flight home to Los Angeles, I decided to cancel my flight. Snow, sleet, ice and rain kept me away.

I'm sad to have missed the weekend and seeing people whom I haven't seen in years. I was also looking forward to all that reading on the plane, to ripping off the address labels of my New Yorkers as I finished them and tucking them into the pouch on the back of the seat in front of me.

Anywho.

I'm here in Los Angeles where it's gloriously beautiful and very cold for us. It's going down to the high thirties tonight, but the air is crystal clear, the clouds fluffy, the moon a perfect crescent. We won't get snow or ice or sleet, and that's just fine. I'll be picking out a Christmas tree tomorrow when my dear relatives are picking dough balls out of hot oil and licking their sugary fingers. I'll miss them.

Spreading the LA Love In a Messy Way

Obviously I didn't take the above photo of Los Angeles, but there have been plenty of days that I've looked east and seen that exact view and subsequently marveled over this piece of crowded land that I call home. I'll be honest and say that I almost never agree with my friends who really don't like living here. The complaints are always about the traffic, about the nasty entertainment industry, about the crowds and the many ugly neighborhoods, about the tackiness, about the culture and the plastic surgery and the bad schools and the excessive privilege. I'm moving back to the midwest, eventually, one friend always tells me. I would never want to grow old here. Friends who have also lived in New York say that there's no comparison, that they miss the grit and the darkness and the chic and effortlessly cool people, the walking and the honesty of that city. I, too, adore New York and feel as if the almost nine years that I lived there were among the greatest of my life. I don't think a day went by that I didn't think God, I love this place! and less so, but still frequently, God, I hate it here! I see my fair share of the grotesque here in Los Angeles -- even at my son's benign high school in the San Fernando Valley, you might rub elbows with Larry King and his eighth wife, Sylvester Stallone picking up his kid in a gold Bentley, and a veritable freak show of eighty year old men with trophy wives and teenage kids. But you'll also see the California boys and girls of your imagination, golden skinned water polo players with tousled, stiff chlorine-tinted blonde hair, towels around their waists, jumping into jeeps with surfboards on the top. I won't go into Los Angeles' weather, because you might up and leave, if you haven't already, but what might surprise you is that the culture here -- the sheer size of the city and the incredible diversity -- rivals that of any other city in the world, I think, and you only have to drive

a

bit

to take advantage of it.

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to my great friend, Tanya Ward Goodman, read from her new memoir, Leaving Tinkertown. She read a bit and then her brother, a tattoo artist and incredible musician with a gorgeous voice, sang songs that he'd written to accompany her. The performance was at a Masonic Lodge in the famous Hollywood Cemetery -- yes, a famous cemetery -- and it was filled with old people, hipsters, artists, attorneys, NPR folks, screen and television writers.  I met an attorney who works with families of kids with disabilities, and it turned out that she reads my blog daily and also knows of the organization that helps kids in the foster care system that I also work for!

Today, I finished a cake for a young girl's sixteenth birthday, and now I'm off to type for an hour at a performance art thingamajig going on at USC. I'll be pecking away at John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, part of a typing pool, and as soon as I find the announcement about it, I'll post it. Maybe I'll even get a photo.

Here's the cake in process:

I don't mind getting old in Los Angeles, by the way, as long as I have these things to do, the sun still shines year round, and I'm able to make a living doing the things I love.

Rainy day rambling

It's been raining, on and off, for a couple of days now. Actually, it's not really rain -- full-on rain -- but more like a sprinkling, and the air is hot and sticky and I'm reminded of the east coast and I just don't like it. I'm not fond of rain, really, ever, but I especially don't like rain in July in Los Angeles. Sophie doesn't either. She had at least five big, big seizures yesterday when she came home from summer school, and I'm going to blame it on the rain and humidity. Reader, if you have a child or young adult with epilepsy, do you see changes in seizure activity with weather?

On another note, one of my favorite cousins is visiting (that's her, above), so we've been busy talking and catching up. My cousin is intense, so we're sort of exhausting one another with conversation, but it's the good kind of exhaustion, the stimulating kind. She's a bit older than me, and when I was a child and she was a teenager I idolized her as a radical hippie who didn't shave her legs and wore maxi dresses. She might have even worn flowers in her hair. She wore out all the grown-ups, I seem to remember, with her hippyness, but even then I imagined her as my people. Now I'm all grown up, and we have so much in common. If you can believe it, she's considering the purchase of a van/recreational vehicle to wander the country and visit friends and relatives. I told her that I might call her to come by and pick me up one of these days, take me away.

I don't have much else to tell ya'll about. I'm finishing three different books -- Country Girl by Edna O'Brien and Transatlantic by Colum McCann are both great reads, one a memoir of the Irish writer and the other a brilliant novel by an Irish writer. To balance things out, I've begun Madame Bovary by Flaubert and translated by the great Lydia Davis. I read it in college in French and remember only the labor and agony of it all, but my god it's incredible reading now. I'm not sure if it's the thirty years that have passed and the cumulative life experience or the actual brilliant translation, but wow.

Read this incredible article in The Village Voice.

So, it's Monday morning, my favorite day of the week, and I've eaten the above digestive biscuits that I made yesterday -- not all of them -- for breakfast with my coffee. It's raining -- raining! raining in May in Los Angeles! -- the boys and Sophie are off to school, and it's a perfect day for an Emily Dickinson poem. This one is a tad obtuse, but if you read it aloud a couple of times, I think it'll make sense.

The Brain

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side, 
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson

Reader, what is your Monday like?

This Perfect Morning

Blue sky and trees, La Brea Blvd.

Just last night I joked with a friend that if it weren't for the perfect weather, I'm not sure what I'd do with -- well -- my life, to tell you the truth. Hyperbole aside (and that wouldn't include the weather), here's a perfect poem that appeared in the Borzoi Reader this perfect morning.

Sonnet for Minimalists

From a new peony,
my last anthem,
a squirrel in glee
broke the budded stem.
I thought, Where is joy
without fresh bloom,
that old hearts' ploy
to mask the tomb?

Then a volunteer
stalk sprung from sour
bird-drop this year
burst in frantic flower.

The world's perverse,
but it could be worse.

Mona Van Duyn