Movin'

It's official -- I have moved this blog onto a different server. From now on, access to Calliope's Diary is located at http://www.calliopesdiary.com/, minus the "blogspot." I hope you'll stop by my new location!

Out West

Out West

Stay put
Hide
Seek not the reward of danger
For its price is death

Put down your guns
And lie in the dirt
Smell the honeysuckle and
Manure

Make your own tracks
In this valley
Stay put and
Hide

Come with me to the lake edge
And dive in without your clothes
Underneath Orion and the huge expanse
Of sky

Walk among the innkeepers
Not the hunted men,
But build a community of two
At long last

Stay put
Hide
In plain
Sight

Funny

I'm reading Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. First of all, if you aren't familiar with her, please check her out.

She mentions a poem that a friend of hers once sent her and it made me laugh out loud on the subway this morning. I must share it. Phillip Lopate is the author:

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

Hilarious. She quotes this as an example of using one's feelings of paranoia, discontent or self-loathing when faced with a blank page and the need to write, and turning those very feelings into a piece of writing. It is like this for us actors as well, using whatever we are feeling in a given moment and putting it "into the text". Say I show up for a rehearsal and am feeling tired, or anxious or crabby or bored -- I can put those feelings into the script, using them for my benefit rather than letting them defeat me or get in my way.

This poem provided me with a good laugh this morning and I hope it did the same for you.

Happy Friday!

I want to get married in a library

In the Library
by Charles Simic

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Do you know...

Margaret Atwood's poetry?


Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.


I sent this poem to someone once. If he stops by this site, I wonder if he'll recognize it. It was years ago and needn't be spoken of between us, now that we are friends but no longer lovers.

I offer it here as an example of the sheer beauty that economy of language provides.

Aunt Leaf, or Do you know Mary Oliver? You should.

My voice and speech teacher in graduate school, the lovely and wonderful Claudia, introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver. If you are not familiar with her poetry, I urge you to seek it out. Below is one of her poems, one that I worked on in grad school.

Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her -
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker -
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish - and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

Post the first

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