from a letter published in Lesbian Connection sometime in the late 1980’s:
I become more and more convinced that those who perceive themselves as powerless are the most treacherous people of all because they do not believe they can inflict harm on others.
MID-FEBRUARY
for Maxine Kumin
The mare rears, she has almost thrown her rider.
It’s the thaw, it’s the scent of spring,
The animals know it before we do.
While we still shiver and worry ourselves over aging,
In the sickroom, the patient begins to heal.
Inside here, the windows are steaming up
But a path runs through the woods,
Half dirty snow, half mud
With the stones sticking through
And the snapped branches lying across, the ones
That were ready to die
And gave themselves to the wind.
Friend, it’s a day for a walk.
Are we going to walk it?
Alicia Ostriker No Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press ©2005)
there was a time when our ancestors sang together every day
I’ve been devouring Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her chapter on translation is insightful and the poems she’s selected as examples are moving, especially this one:
Lying alone,
my black hair tangled,
uncombed,
I long for the one
who touched it first.
– Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani
Hirshfield writes, “Japanese critics have long pointed out that Shikibu’s tangled black hair is one of very few references to the details of physical life in all Japanese poetry.” Reading Shikibu’s poem made me think of Jack Gilbert’s poem “Married,” one of many poems in The Great Fires that made me realize I couldn’t live without poetry:
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off…
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These are date pinwheel cookies. I loved these as a child. Passionately loved them, for 3 key reasons:
1. Look how pretty!
and
2. Delicious!
and
3. My mom would make up several rolls at a time and keep them in the second refrigerator on the backporch. The one where we stored all the coke (such as coca cola or a Dr. Pepper coke or an orange coke or a grape coke) and a drawer of earthworms for live bait. Once she had cut a few slices off to bake, I could sneak in and take little slivers without being scolded or shamed for loving them while being “husky.” Because of course it must have been my stubbornness that led me to sneak food and not the fact that I was being pushed to diet WHILE living on massive doses of steroids for my asthma.
But the cookies are really good. You should try some, and that means making them yourself, cause the dry crumbly version some diners sell are nothing like the soft fresh originals!
Date Pinwheel Cookies
To make the filling, combine and cook over low heat for 10 minutes:
2 1/2 cup pitted dates, chopped
2 cups white sugar (white sugar, white flour, white people. It’s where I grew up.)
1 cup water
Then add 1 cup chopped nuts (we always had hickory nuts, but those are damn hard to find in markets. Try pecans, I guess). Let this mixture cool to room temp.
To make the dough, cream together:
1 cup shortening (lard is best, crisco will do)
2 cups brown sugar
Beat in:
3 eggs
4 cups white flour
dash of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
Chill the dough for a couple of hours. Then divide it into 2 even parts. Roll each section out as a rectangle. This will involve adding plenty of extra white flour under the dough, cause it begins to get sticky as soon as it warms up. Thin, but not too thin, maybe a 1/2 or a bit less. Spread cooled filling across the rectangle, then roll it up, beginning with the long side.
Pat into shape. Wrap in waxed paper and place on a cookie sheet. When both rolls are done, place them in the fridge and chill. They can stay in the fridge for up to a week, so you can slice off only as many cookies as you want at a time and serve them warm.
Cook at 375 (or maybe less, our old oven didn’t always heat consistently) for 10-12 minutes.
Or just slice some and eat them raw. The shortening/sugar combo feels so good in the mouth, substantial and a little crunchy and all that fat soothing any rough edges of your cells.
These little crunchy perfections are NOT real date pinwheel cookies.
These ARE real date pinwheel cookies
from lesbian-feminist philosopher Joyce Trebilcot’schapbook 1983 chapbook “Taking Responsibility for Sexuality”
Notice first that to take responsibility for a state of affairs is not to claim responsibility for having caused it. So, for example, if I take responsibility for cleaning up the kitchen I am not thereby admitting to any role in creating the mess; the state of the kitchen may be the consequence of actions quite independent of me.
Similarly, in taking responsibility for her sexuality, a woman is not thereby claiming responsibility for what her sexuality has been, but only for what it is now and in the future.
Joyce Trebilcot
The world is magnificent, because we will make it that way with our brilliance.
Carol Burbank
from my beloved friend, who, when she receives despairing phone calls, listens and then responds with quotes like this utterly unselfconsciously. And when you hear her voice say it, you know it must be true. Or at least one possible truth.
The most difficult of all things, the only difficult thing perhaps, is to enfranchise oneself and – even harder – to live in freedom.
Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever she takes refuge.
I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others.
Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902
Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was an explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For her time she was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.
yes, I read it in college, and was told how good it was, but at that age and level of experience I wasn’t remotely ready to love this poem. Now, though–just taste these lines:
– The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds
– With barbaric glass
– An indecipherable cause
– lucid, inescapable rhythms
– Even the bawds of euphony
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace StevensI
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
This Frenzy 