On Monday the air in at my open window came in uninvited
and at such a pace:  not a run, not a skip, but with the sweep
of a ballroom diva gliding a fast fox-trot.  I had no choice
but to name her Joyce.

Tuesday, the gauze curtains hung limp until sunset when this air
(I’m sure it was German) blurted through in know-it-all gusts,
rocking a crockery stringer of fish to clunk like terra cotta bells,
chipping a maroon fin.  I named her Bertha.

Wednesday brought Anna who curled my bedsheets up
like the back of a slumbering cat.  And Thursday, Phyllis,
who stirred only rarely, and then like a nurse with a tongue
depressor, demanding that I say, Ahhhhh.

Today is Friday.  None have come and suddenly June
fails to fit this chunk of days with one this still, this stale.
While doldrums remain, June will be Jane.  (I had, you see,
no choice.)

Oh boy Lynn do I love this one.  You have such an amazing way of describing things that it makes me want to choose one for myself.  Would have to say I love it, but only one thing that sits funny, and its probably only me....  'the air in at',  as I am wanting to say, the air at my window came in uninvited'.... course that is probably why you didn't write it that way.....

Laura

Hey you!  Thanks.  This whole week I've enjoyed the changes in air -- and really did start off on Monday by naming that diva air "joyce' -- [I live alone and even if I didn't, no one would pay much attention to my random naming of things].  I think you may be exactly right about the structuring of that opening -- I made some modifications, sort of.  Not sure if it's a poem yet, or just my imagination at play.  What totally surprised me, as I rambled through this, was how June became Jane at the end.  I mean, I glanced at my window, the white gauzy things I have hanging up there were so still they looked like a transparent wall.  A day like today doesn't deserve such a fine name as June -- do you think?  I don't.  And the so cool thing about writing is that it's just writing. 

Glad you liked it Laura and thank you for taking a look and finding that "sits funny" spot. 

Then I start thinking about the so cool thing, about writing just being writing, and realize how I meant that just as it applies to me, writing for me, to entertain none other than me -- but of course that changes once the words written are put to others; the writing becomes something more, like communication.  Not "like" communication, but communication.  Good communication or bad communication.  Bad, in that it may be written poorly, or, "bad" in that it may be intended to sway opinions or beliefs one way or another.  Or, good, in that same way--at least, that is, with good intentions, perhaps. 

I have this huge chunk of information (research and interviews and more research) about a woman who truly lived in a time of great change.  Her name was Irene.  What's happened over the months that I've been working on Irene's story, or I should say a novel that includes Irene's story, is that all this knowledge about her has turned into something like a slab of granite, or marble.  She's in there, inside all this stuff and more stuff.  How do I bring her out?  Twice now, I feel like I've slipped with my chisel and whacked off an ear, then a finger.  Twice now, I've started all over again.  The debris on the studio floor is stacked up as high as both of our chins.  An avalance would bury the cat [if I had one]. 

Which reminds me -- I need to take down my "Beware of Crazy Woman with Cat" sign on the front gate.

Your writing Lynn, is far from just writing.  Your imagination is a blossom that never ceases....

Laura

Lynn... you see what I mean.  Even your stories have character.!!!

Laura

I look at my clock, the one with no protective clear shell to keep dust and cobwebs from knitting clever sweaters on the long and short hands, the thin, long, red second-hand--and it's 8:32 a.m.  I've been up since five and there are seven ciggarette butts in the ashtray, but I've already emptied it once, and the quit-smoking drug is refillable and waiting for me to come up with the bucks and the gumption to go that route again.  If I do, then I won't have a filthy, yuck reminder, close as my fingertips, of this vice, this weakness.  It keeps me grounded, this knowledge that I am not in control.  Not just of my addiction.  Of anything.  The smoke curls up as best it may.  An overhead fan whirls, making the curls just mentioned not curls at all but jagged little efforts to find some path to follow.

And the filthy, yuck reminder ashtray--if it were gone, out of sight, then I wouldn't recall as often, if ever, the large amber-colored glass ashtray that this smalll plastic square once sat inside.  The one I use here, so easily removed from the larger, decorative amber one--the two of them at the top of a pedestal stand that stood next to Grandpa Ivy's scrathy old armchair.  An armchair a girl in shorts never dared sit in, even when Grandpa was at work, because the harsh, nubby weave of the upholstery was the devil on girly skin.  The chair was green.  That sort of green shade that moss takes on after it's been tossed to the shore and faded by the sun for some days or weeks. 

And now the clock says 8:45.  I have warmed my fingers on words for thirteen minutes, more now, as I continue to warm them.  All the while, Irene is waiting for me, tucked in a folder inside a file where I have been writing about a whistle that her brother Alex wore on a chain and blew, as a warning, to signal Irene he was about to light the fuse and pull the lever that would expel her out of the cannon, over the audience seated in tiers at the Atlantic Steel Pier, and into the Atlantic Ocean.  Four minutes more--gone.  As is she.  And now me, from here.

"It keeps me grounded, this knowledge that I am not in control."

of course you would know why I love that so much, and the armchair . . .

 on another note -
I cannot help but think of dandelions when you mention Irene.  I walk to and from work, I see them, and think of clowns and floorboards, very strange.  I never forget pieces I read, they stick, stick, stick.  though I'm certain you've changed it by now.

in kansas- june is a month of mug honing to july where even the rocks cut sweat- I miss my mountains. enough of my prattle,  always happy to read you.

Such an interesting thread that seems in consequence of posting the poem on this board instead of "submit". I am curious how some poems trigger notes and comments of shared experience, or should I say, how the reading triggers the thought. Do we remember the poems that resonate our own experience?

The poem belongs on the editors board...

larry

I was looking for a journalese thread title.  The poem had just been finished and the title seemed a good choice for someone who writes out of season, out of calendar, out of memory, experience, mind. 

Clowns and floorboards and dandelions dancing and Nora in Jane, or is it June, honing to July where even rocks cut sweat and biscuits dot the lawn for leapfrogging.   Where it rains and the landscape swallows the sky, or tries to--the white stiff tongues of mountains teasing enterable clouds.  And mists are great fuzzy lips that want only to nuzzle the fir stands and broken stumps and rills.  Are the rhodies blooming there now? 

And there was delight in Columbia and I was always lost, never knew my bearings, where east was, or west--only that I was in the great South and safe with friends never met until met.  And sitting near the back of the room, you were there on the left.  And sitting at the back of the room, I was there on the right.  And Maggie was reading, her hips leaned into a stool, her elegant hand reaching out toward me and her fingers traversed all those chair rows and the place where they touched was like the place where little girls prick their fingers with pins and press them together, mumbling oaths of sisterhood through blood.

Jane will be gone soon -- I know it seems odd to say so, but I will be gone to Santa Barbara by Wednesday (funny, I wanted to write, "by Wanda") and when I am gone I will be in June rather than Jane.  I will probably not be writing, but learning from writers about how to, going from panel to panel at the Writers' Conference.  I am equally anxious and eager to meet Carolyn See again.  She once told me that anytime I had an ms. ready, she'd willingly give me a critique.  She's accepted an invite to dine at my daughter's on Sunday, the 24th.  My ms. is not ready.  Irene is still hugging the floorboards, clowns and dandelions swirling her watery thoughts.  At least James Cagney's father has died and Jimmy is in a chorus line at the same theater where Irene is appearing.  Pretty soon Boston will be flooded with molasses and a doughboy who made it through the Pandemic and mustard-gassed trenches will drown.  I don't know what his name is.  I better go figure that out while it's still Jane.

Not Jane anymore and no wind coming in at my window to name.  I could call July 'Julie' but I've known two women named Julie and neither of their personalities fits this blazing heat.  Although one was a redhead and the other a blond.  The blond was a co-worker who became a friend when I was 19 and worked for Pacific Bell and became somewhat less of a friend when I was a widow at forty and realized she probably had, in fact, succumbed to my late husband's charms at some point in time--maybe in the seventies, maybe again in the eighties.  Would have to be early eighties because he was outta here by the late ones.  Ah, Al, you did live enough life for three men, maybe nine.  Miss you, darlin', despite your wandering ways.  The redheaded Julie was a neighbor for a few decades and made the best peach cobbler this side of Georgia.  She used to make an extra one for our family and had the best all-out laugh of any woman I've ever known.  They moved--Julie and her blue-eyed, bald, born-again, over six-foot-three, great hulk of a husband--to Tennessee a few years back.  I do miss that redheaded Julie and her cobblers.  I even miss her husband's efforts to coax me back into the fold.  Such a look he would get in his eyes when I'd smile and tell him faith was a gift and, so far, ungiven to me.  A look that said he would miss me in heaven. 

So, although 'Julie' might be the easy answer to renaming July -- it just doesn't fit.  Maybe, like a new puppy that by its antics and actions brings on the right name, the one that says all that puppy is and will be--maybe July will do that for me before the remaining days peter out.  Or maybe July will just be July.  Will have to wait and see.

And then there was my friend Jillian, a fiery redhead with guts enough for three teenage girls. She stomped on a policeman's toe once - on purpose - and then smiled her way right out of that ticket. She drove a green Hornet with a 304. Green went with her hair.

The month of Jillian is July for me. Nothing ever happened in July after that and it's been 35 years.

The month of Jillian is is July
for me.  Nothing
happened in July after
that redhead stomped
a policeman's toe
purposefully, then
smiled her way out.
She drove a green hornet
with a 304.  Green went
with her hair.

And so shall July be the Month of Jillian for me as well.  Fourteen days into it and August out there in the stars, waiting to be renamed on journal page by a whim of weather or hair shade . . .

If August is a month for obsessions, then what of September? 
Will sated days sprawl so fat with gain and applesauce
they'll stumble to set, fumble at the shades of mountains
to rise, only to slouch across a patchwork of states loosely vined
by ripening pumpkins? melons ready to bust wide at Labor
Day picnics with the coaxing of a long knife, smiling rinds
bagged up with so many thighs and breasts and leg bones
of the Colonel's bucketed chickens? 
                                                  Or, will obsessions go
unsatisfied, hungry through August in abnormal ways--binge
on row after row of tender sweet corn plucked from stalks
grown high in tall acres, platoon after platoon? binge and
bring it all back, unrecognizable?  What a strange, strange
fate it must be to see fat where ribs protrude.