July Golden Shovel #23

You haven’t been home for years. It’s time to revisit

The homestead. Except you have no homestead or a

Single home where you grew up. The past

Is a patchwork of city, country, suburb, an experience

Of all schoolgirls named Judy Linda, Nancy, Joyce, or

All boys named John, Bill, Mike, Spike. Perhaps

You have lived many lives coded with a tap

On a tab of memory that mixes the kaleidoscope of your

Past life or lives that cannot connect your heart to your feet.

 

source: Revisit a Past Experience or Perhaps Tap Your Feet

July Golden Shovel #20.1

Fire meets Fire aloft, introduced by lightning, a

Cousin to cumulus. Sere redwoods bloom with fire.

Orange flames lick dry leaves, wrapping a necklace so

Tight on the trees, they shatter in overwhelming

Heat. Fire skims tender caresses over the forest. It

Melts into a gale where Fire nestles on sequoias, controls

All wind, sun, air, jilts water left steaming in the

Streams. Fire scripts love letters to Fire in the weather.

 

source: A Fire So Overwhelming It Controls the Weather.

 

a revision of what I posted earlier.

July Golden Shovel #20

Father lightning shoots down a sharp jolt and a

Dry tree welcomes his jab, leaping into fire

That creeps gingerly among dry leaves so

Slowly she’s unnoticed until a burst of overwhelming

Flame takes charge, leading fire’s advance. It

Revs up, gobbling all tinder handy. Fire controls

The earth, the air, all becomes nourishment for the

Fire, announcing her dominance to power the weather.

 

source: A Fire So Overwhelming It Controls the Weather

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I’m continuing to use Terrance Hayes’s Golden Shovel poem format, as proposed by the Sunday New York Times "At Home" section, for 30 Poems in 30 Days during National Poetry Month.

 

Take a newspaper headline that attracts you.

Use each word in the line as the end word for each line in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Describe the story that the headline is for.

The poem does not have to be about the same subject as the headline that creates the end words.

 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOL Tuesday: A Train Tale

Yesterday, I had to go to White Plains to see my dermatologist. He has not been coming to his Manhattan office since covid arrived, and I haven’t had a body scan for almost two years. (Since I’ve had two noninvasive melanomas, I want to be checked out regularly.)

 

I got on the train at Grand Central. At 125th Street, a young man got on, with backpack and two folded-up walking sticks, and sat across from me. When the conductor came around, the young man said he only had a receipt, said the ticket never got spit out of the machine. “Someone got a free ride,” the conductor said. “Show me the credit card you used.” The young man gave him a credit card, but the conductor said it didn’t match the receipt. “Find the transaction on your phone,” he said, and continued down the car.

 

I wondered if the young man was trying to use a receipt he’d found to get his own free ride. When the conductor came back later, he inspected what the young man had brought up on his phone, and was satisfied.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLTuesday: In the Heights for an “In the Heights” Walking Tour

A couple of weeks ago I went to a movie theater for the first time in a year and a half, to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights.” The city street scenes were great, but I don’t know that neighborhood so well, and mentioned to a friend who lives in Washington Heights that there should be walking tours of sites associated with the film. She immediately volunteered to take me on one, and that’s what we did yesterday.

 

            If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I won’t say too much about the plot. But here are three scenes. The first is in the J. Hood Wright Park (a rich man who had a mansion on this site) where Benny and Nina, the secondary couple, sing a duet. This part is set on top of Manhattan’s bedrock and looks toward the George Washington Bridge, which BTW is the world’s busiest bridge: it carried more than 103 million vehicles, many trucks, in 2016 (latest figure on wikipedia). On the New York side it connects to the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I have heard long-haul truck drivers call the worst highway in the country; having driven it myself, I would agree.

 

           

            Next is a row of three-story houses on West 176th Street, very much like private homes in Greenwich Village much further downtown. Judging from the mailboxes, it looks like they have been converted to one apartment per floor. In the movie, people are sitting outside on the steps and Nina dances down the street, singing of her love for her neighborhood.

 

            This location I didn’t think really existed. It’s part of Usnavi’s song and dance to honor his Abuela Claudia (Usnavi is the Lin-Manuel character). But it is real: the tunnel leads from Broadway under the hills of Washington Heights (it’s called “the Heights” for a reason) to the #1 subway train. The graffiti is still being worked on — one man was adding finishing touches of red to one part — and from all the paper and cardboard near the walls, I suspect that people sleep there at night.

            I will definitely watch the movie again — it’s available on Hulu — now that I can see outside the frame of the camera. 

 

 

 

 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. Add one of your own.