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Thursday, March 24, 2011

"Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants." -- Dorothy Parker




I spent most of last weekend working on a poem, but when I read it for the 110th time on Tuesday or so, I dumped it.  Admitting it wasn’t any good was a relief, really.  See, there were a few lines I liked, but I was asking too much of them. You know, sometimes you can write a poem, and sometimes you can’t.

Yesterday I had a Nonnie and Drago idea-doing a blog about one of Drago’s claims to fame.  He’s one of the guys on the black and white “Village People” album.  My brother, wearing a sleeveless and sideless T-shirt  (a style he says he invented) stands behind the motorcycle and next to the Indian Chief.  In fact he had his hand on the Chief’s ass, but you can’t see that.  You can Google it and see what Drago looked like during the club crazy, disco crazy early eighties, before so many of the gay or drug-addicted village people died of AIDS.  I wanted  to write yesterday, but it would have been drivel.  My brain was thick, my fingers leaden.

I think it was the news that Japanese babies under a year old couldn’t drink the water-too radioactive.  Like a mother would feel okay giving her 13 month-old baby tap water.  Like anyone on that sad, sad island would feel okay drinking the stuff.  Maybe that was why I couldn’t write about all the funny things that have been going on around here since I last blogged.  And there’s Libya and all.  Dunno, but *“so it goes.”  Hope you’re okay.

*Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. (He might be able to write something these days-if he weren’t dead, if he wanted to.)

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Respite


Some person, she couldn’t recall who, or even when
said, ”Maddy, go to Callaway Gardens.”
So she drove from northern Florida
to the low Georgia mountains, to the pines,
lakes, thickets of muscadine grapes, and thousands
of calling birds, who were mating, nesting, giving birth.
The room they gave her was forest damp, worn out, shabby even,
a perfect fit for Maddy’s spirit. The morning after a quiet night,
she walked through woods to the butterfly pavilion.
Glass high above and all around, awed children softly laughing,
water falling, reds, yellows, every single green growing,
winged creatures fluttering wherever she looked,
pulled her from the narrow room
in the nursing non-home
where her father died earlier that spring.
In the sunlit, moist enclosure,
a bright Blue Mortho chose her,
alighted on her breast,
where it stayed and stayed,
even as she walked, whispering,
down the Wonderland paths of the butterfly palace.


Monday, March 07, 2011

Nonnie's Bothered, Drago Gets Hair

 
Mike Huckabee is obviously a stupid-head.  Last week he called Natalie Portman a starlet! If it had been a big news week, I might have missed this egregious error, but not much else has been going on lately, that I’ve noticed, anyway. Natalie won the Academy Award for Best Actress!  Just last weekend!  Jeesh-politician no-nothings.
 A starlet is:
starlet [ˈstɑːlɪt]
n
1. (Performing Arts) a young and inexperienced actress who is projected as a potential star

2. (Astronomy) a small star

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

Everyone’s entitled to a mistake or two, within reason, but if Tea Drinker Huckabee needs to air his opinions on Ms. Portman’s pregnancy, he could at least get her status straight. She’s an A-list actor, not a “potential,” but a “made it.”


People keep asking my brother Drago how he got his hair. Turns out, he’d never lost it.  He just thought he had.  Ten or eleven years ago he started shaving his head because he didn’t like the gray that was coming in (or something.) Last November Drago liked our other brother Leon’s haircut so much he decided to see if he could get one. So he stopped shaving his head and he went from bald to haired, just like that!  (Well, “hairy” isn’t the word I want either.  Drago has not become hairy.) Our housekeeper Lydia calls him Adonis, which makes him blush. (He does all that Yoga, too, you know.)

Not much going on in my life.  Finally got the tests my doctor wanted for my breasts and bones. Oh, yeah. I’m reading a novel by a friend of mine, Russell Bittner, that has a lot  of sex. I’ve known Russell mostly as a poet and although his poetry is often sensuous, I had no idea what I was getting into-bedtime reading-wise with his prose.  Good writing, mind you-none of that throbbing, gushing, or taking; his love-making scenes are explicit and er...engaging, yet poetic. Ima gonna tell him that he should have made at least one of the protagonists a vampire, or a virtual reality-come to-life type, or a serial-killer profiler!  He would have made millions by now, easy.  Of course, he can always do another one.  Easy, right?