Carolee Bennett –> poet. artist. crankypants.
something interesting happened at the halfway point as we made the turn to climb back up out of a deep gorge. i panicked. i realized i had no choice but to conquer the steep hill. one way or another, i had to get up and over it. i remembered something i told jill recently, though she teased that i must be high …
i am trying to use some of my time on vacation to work on my final portfolio for this semester’s poetry workshop at st. rose. one of our tasks is to combine poems we’ve written for the workshop with some of our older work and end up with the beginnings of a chapbook manuscript. and it is giving me grief.
seeing earth from 33,000 feet still feels like magic to me. i have never bothered to learn the physics of flight, so that’s certainly part of it. but it is more than that: the view. arrival in portland this time didn’t put on a good mt. hood show like it often does, but there were beautiful landscapes earlier in the flight. i hope i never stop being that girl who needs a window seat!
the pizza was strange and wonderful and delicious. though i’ll make a few tweaks on it the next time around, what doesn’t need anything different at all is this evening.
so far, november hasn’t been a month full of poems (though i have been making notes), but it has been a month of clarity and action. i’ll take it.
the light is going, and it feels lousy. there’s also another quality to its departure: a strange frenzy. i don’t really know how else to describe it. it’s not the soggy leaves in quiet piles i’m talking about. november feels like the crisp ones that race the wind. they never seem to stop moving. they’ll never be caught. and i’ll never catch up.