BACK INTO POETRY AND THE GARDEN

It has become quite warm here.  The day I put away my winter coat, I wore a sundress.  We are accustomed to long slow springs here, but not this year.  Everything was late and now everything is happening at once.  The plants in the little greenhouse are practically screaming to get into the earth.  Today it was 102 in there.  We have all our tomatoes in. Then came cucumbers.  Then eggplants.  Today, peppers [not the hot yet; they go in a different place not yet weeded]. It all has to be done yesterday. So into the garden and back into poetry.  Usually when I am writing a novel, there are certain days when I stop and write poetry.  But short stories have some of that intensity, although to a lesser degree.  So while I wrote a few poems while I was working on putting the short story ms. together, I didn’t product as many as I normally would when writing prose.  The collection is tentatively called THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC.  Since I sent the ms. off Monday to my agent and to PM Press, I have written three poems and revised an older one.  It feels good to be writing poems regularly again. I have to start reading 15 poems apiece for the 12 participants in my juried intensive workshop June 17-21.  I can do one ms a day with all the notes I take, having to read and reread to understand what to recommend for moving to the next level.  It’s different with every poet.  I can thus do about four a week.  Time to start. We have been eating huge salads from the garden and much spinach. The red radishes are perfect right now.  Arugola, wrinkled crinkled crumpled cress, red giant Chinese mustard, mint, lovage, violet leaves and flowers, small bok choi leaves, thinnings of beet greens and of course a lot of lettuce. But Thursday I succumbed to 2 beautiful artichokes at the store and we had them that evening stuffed with chicken sausage.  I have just begun learning to cook quinoa and we like it very much. A friend died suddenly after a nine hour heart operation.  His wife collapsed and went into the hospital, but she was released yesterday.  There’ll be a memorial   for him Monday in town. I’ve been asked to read my Kaddish.  I don’t normally agree to do anything out of the house on Monday, but we had known him since 1983.  He was, along with us, one of the founders of the havurah Ay-haYam, which is still going strong these days although neither he, his wife, nor Woody and I are very active any longer. So far nobody has dropped out of the poets selected for the workshop.  Every other year, somebody left when the final payment and 15 poems were due. One year it was a guy who noticed he was the only male. One year it was a woman who noticed there were guys in the class as well as women.  One year it was someone whose family objected when it became real that she would be gone for a whole week.  So it goes. A strange unaltered male cat has been leaving little gifts at the front door [dead mouse, vole] and spraying.  It is driving Puck and Mingus crazy.   It obviously belongs to a summer person as he was not visible all winter and only seems to be here in good weather.  I understand his desire to move in, but I wish people would spay or alter their cats.  It would do a big favor for the rest of us, prevent overpopulation and the execution of perfectly healthy cats at shelters. And preserve the life of their cats, as we have coywolves, fisher cats, great horned owls foxes and predatory dogs around here, all of which kill cats – why we no longer have stray or feral cats here, as we used to.  I found homes for half a dozen, but no more.  [Fisher cats are not cats but large weasels.]  This may in some areas almost look like the suburbs, but it isn’t.  Not nearly.