New Bike Rack, Privet Honeysuckle

Changes outside the County City Building.   A new bike rack has appeared. 





And today at the County City Building they are planting Privet Honeysuckle.  Some flowers become purple berries in the Autumn. 

A Poem from 1976

For Father's Day:  Seventy years ago next month my father had returned from a year and a half in England and made plans to marry my mother.  My mother's father had died in 1931.  She had worked nine to five for fifteen years.  My Uncle Elmer was to give her away at the wedding, which was at the house.  For six years my parents lived next door to the house, where the grandparents had lived.  They had died during the war.  This was a poem I wrote remembering a vacation back from college. 1968, in 1976. 

ONE DAY IN MY SUMMER YOUTH 

One day in my summer youth

I carried my drawing book into the rain.

At the old town dock I drew

the fish scattered strangely

on the old brown planks,

then walked uphill to the vacant house

my uncle owns.  I sat

on the covered porch where my play-pen

held me long ago and drew

the mill, carefully – cranes,

and the light piles of lumber

with the sweetest smell on earth.

Eventually my uncle looked around

the corner of the porch and found me.

We walked uphill to the house

they all lived in, long before

I was born, and before the war. 

One of my earliest memories

is of my uncle holding me

on his knee, reading me

the funny papers.  I remember

him pointing at each word

of NANCY AND SLUGGO. 

Before the war my uncle was a barber.

He kept his scissors

and would set me or my sister

on the closed treadle sewing machine

to cut our hair like the dutch.

 
He worked at a mill

in the cloud of industry

that is the tideflats

Once he fell from his place

into a conveyor belt and held fast

to a metal bar above him.

The machine abused him

and went on without him.

It must have seemed

a long, long time before

friends found him.

My mother took me to see him

in the hospital bed.

He had been ready to let go,

he said.  He lifted the sheet

and I saw his bruises.

I did not know that bruises

ever could be hurtful to me. 

(Feb '76)

Four Links to Comments I Have Made About Density

The essay, a coda in this anthology,
describes the Proctor District briefly

This blog post is written to offer links to posts I have done about density.  After graduate school I began to live in Tacoma in small apartments, and often I visited my parents in the Proctor District.  It has been over twenty-five years since those times, presently I sometimes read a poem at the Open Mike at King’s Books. The first link I offer is to an essay published on-line at Salt River Review.  This spring it was included, as a coda, in an anthology called In Like Company,  I describe the Proctor District briefly in this essay.

During the effort in 2012 for the MLK Subarea Plan, I sent in comments and attended an open house workshop.  These blogs posts are from May 23, 2012, and February 10, 2012.

The future will require people to repair, restore and maintain buildings, because truly there are more and more buildings that age every day.  So, any new project, whatever else it is, also is a loss of training opportunities for re-use and restoration.  However, if we care about the ecology, we have to care about density.  The apartments I have lived in have been mostly in old houses, and as I have biked around I am fortunate that I had that opportunity.  A fourth post is an impression from last year when questions rose about the new building in the district.

There must be ways to create housing that merges the old with the new creatively. 

A Long Poem - Meditation

My blog entries have been delayed, because I have several decades of thoughts continuing simultaneously.  I can include this long poem that I worked on in 2002.  This long poem refers to movies - Black Orpheus, Auntie Mame, and 2013's Fruitvale Station -  where other film is spliced  in.  It mentions a 2002 mining rescue of nine miners trapped underground for three days, and a radio show host of big band swing.  It also refers to 1965 to 1967 when I worked at the library in high school. 

A Long Poem - Meditation

BLACK ORPHEUS AND AUNTIE MAME

 

The band on the ferryboat kept playing,

spliced into Black Orpheus,

another roll, another camera.

It was the international

geophysical year, the 1950s,

 

Early in the 1950s Auntie Mame

in a taxi, in the taxi back window

is inserted street-scene footage

it is wide, loose pieces.

 

In 1957 my aunt died. 

My aunt was blind.

thirty-one years of sight.

Thirty-four years of dark.

She died of a heart attack in 1957.

 

I could watch Auntie Mame

on a library video player.  As I watched,

during two thousand two nine miners

were trapped underground for three days.

 

Late on Saturday evening,

it shows in the newspaper photo

there was still a little light

in his headlamp.  As they rose,

the radio in the small kitchen

did a television theme song

recognition contest.  I could

never call long distance.

Dr. Kildare.  Steve Allen.  Route 66

from so long ago. 

 

Cynthia Doyan was the radio host.

As it happend - she ended her life on impulse

when her radio station let her go.

 

MEDITATION - 2013 VERSION

 

Fruitvale Station resembles Black Orpheus.

The rapid transit train,

spliced earlier material,  the people

of African descent, the love and violence

in a night of exuberant holiday celebration.

 

I was writing a meditation in 2002

about music in Brazil and a 1960s

Time-Life Series about countries. 

This meditation is a version.

 

The Samba and Carnival are joy

before Lent begins.  Bossa Nova puts

Samba indoors into nightclubs, so joy

confronts the sad, sad blues.

 

IN MY MEDITATION

 

There was the damaged book.  And that

began my thoughts. 

On a chair in the small kitchen

there was the damaged book.

The sky in the window

and the house next door were blue.

Not chrome

like a painting by Hopper,

no.  But through the screen -

like some photographs are blue

in wide, loose pieces.

Like light was on the planet

so water turned like animated jewels.

 

In the small kitchen

there were such waves of weariness.

But along through the air

there wheeled in spirals

Ideas about the photographs

inside the damaged book.

 

I lifted such books one by one

in the warm air near open library windows.

Such a Time-Life book slowed

for a moment.  I felt then

so much desire

To be at the white building

in the Time-Life book called GREECE,

or at the beach near the sea,

that I was there,

and it was not desire at all,

but a miracle.  BRAZIL.

 

Did it pass through my hands

into a bag to the main library?

 

Forty years since BRAZIL

by Elizabeth Bishop and the editors

of Time-Life, it is library re-bound,

a glossy pattern of green,

the narrative columns meet

so that letters are missing at the binding.

But someone with a razor blade

stole a dozen pictures.

The wide, loose pieces

like animated jewels.

 

THE BOOKS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY 

In the small kitchen

there were the waves of weariness.

There was the damaged book.  When I

brought that back I had to report it.

 

When I brought back BRAZIL,

I tested for Library Assistant, then

Looked through books about photography.

 

The animated jewels, the color imbalance.

In one caption it is FOCUS -

the background, the foreground

in a compromise of blur

to avoid a shadow everywhere.

No loss of detail

into the shadow everywhere.

There is a compromise of blur.

Then people, landscape

are as the eye would see it.

 

A COMPROMISE OF BLUR

 

I had tested for library assistant.

Then studied books about photography. 

At the park, dark tree species,

cars with shadows,

the church at the top of the street,

all focused into that

appearance.  A compromise of blur

with some color imbalance.

Mid-July, sun everywhere,

a photograph from the 1950s,

all the park framed ahead -

it was miraculous desire.

 

So much desire

To be that it was not desire at all,

but a miracle.

Order of Runeberg Lodges

Earlier called The International Order of Runeberg, the group now will call itself Order of Runeberg Lodges.  The name change refers to a change in membership numbers.  My blog, Spice Drawer Mouse, links to their website - one can click to reach the website and information - Order of Runeberg Lodges.