giving lemons to a sourpuss is fruitless

I can forget, momentarily, that young female business travelers are on occasion mistreated for not having a bunchy leather pillow stuffed with cash in their pocket, propped up structurally by an "it's ok, I'm on a business trip" flying man-buttress. Nor will I dwell on the fraying of my last nerve by the evil that are petroleum-laced cosmetics, staining with one nefarious "pook" my otherwise virginal white cotton summer dress, moments before the criminally placed hairdryer falls into the sink, cord still coiled like a southern black snake on a young pine, waiting to strike me.

But freaking Berkeley has lemons, on trees. And someone just smiled and gave me salt. And maybe the ghosts of the Claremont will break the life-long paranormal boycott on me. I'll bet Oppenheimer was here, the brush and sway of gentle St. John on his mind and a curse to the pink California horizon just flirting with a shape, "o...." And I'll bet those lemon-tree owners don't appreciate their lemons like I would, rosemary and olive oil, some coquette vinagrette that it is physically impossible to mess up.

I'm plucking that lemon tomorrow. That makes me a no-account sourpuss lemonnapper.

So be it.

vernal view

I do not mind sitting backward
sticks blur and pink blooms wisp
by in my single seat not by the others

I saw a subterranean march early spring -
little soldiers with lapel pins their weapons.
We hold the little secrets of ourselves
like treasured playing cards

And in the springtime they are so wet and full
in our quick hands dirt and creosote and birdsong -

But by crisp sudden autumn,
they blow away, the childhood leaves
turn vermillion and are gone

social justice and a hot breakfast

"You're looking very warm today;"
the sweet low twang of a southern man's voice
floated over the scrambled eggs and sausage
in the breakfast buffet. I said,
"I have to bundle up like nanook to be comfortable,"
matching vowels with him.
"I know that's right. Are you from the south?" he asked, I paused-

"Louisiana and southeastern Texas..and it doesn't get this cold there."
I wasn't sure why he wanted to know, but then came the verbal missive
on New Orleans, the humanitarian work out of Grand Lake his group
had done, the ongoing crisis, the old cypress guards of the fleur de lis
crumbling under the dismissive wave
of administrative orders.

It is not unreasonable to get nostalgic around this time.
Mardi Gras is around the corner. The displaced look for warmth in
each other.

He said, "you been back home
lately?" Home, I think about Home.

and he's right, Louisiana has always felt like home -
they say, where your bare feet first patter, that's the place that
matters, and to me - so deeply in my skin I feel it, I touch my chapped
winter hands together and think about the miracle in missing humidity-
he and I are suddenly in some space together, speak in the same voice,
and in that moment I feel a purple, green and gold emblazoned thanksgiving,
and when he says, "I'll get this one, you just do it for someone else
soon," I could just take off my hat and walk confidently
out into the bitter DC cold.

but ohio is normal

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving

The little white handwritten placards above our heads say “SOB” “MRB” and “CUM” The kid next to me has never heard the term “dear John letter.” He is blond and friendly, from Pittsburgh, and speaking with a broad man would like everyone to know that he charges an enormous hourly rate to make his commute worthwhile. I only know my stop, and will perhaps not know it well. Cumberland is where I hope to be let off, perhaps I will bribe the conductor with my beer, which I thankfully thought to buy in Union Station. It’s a toss-up if I or any of us will be released into the fall night by the conductor; when he talks his voice is full of cotton, his thoughts are sloe gin. We are headed for Chicago, and this is the strangest of routes. At first told to be seated upstairs in the sleek double decker, our little band was reprimanded en masse as the train embarked on its rocking trajectory, that the car was a “deadhead” and that we were to move, by an attendant who was troubled to put together a sentence, or make eye contact. There is a man in our mini-car who does this every day. Every day, 150 miles. Every day, he greets the crew, he puffs up with satisfaction that he knows them by name and by bad habit, by terminology and baggage and perfunctory rule-mandering. There is a young deaf man in the seat ahead, and he is better off not to hear this confederacy of plucky comrades. I don’t think we’ll ever get to Cumberland, and I imagine if we do, I will step off the train and see Studebakers. A woman comes in mildly amused by the gerbil habitat nature of our little car, and offers reservations in the dining car. I take mine for 6:30. It’s a bizarre ride, but
the sunset is all peaches and blue foamy November, a warm Tuesday for this time of year, and we’ve come to know each other chugging along, and I risk my ticket off this odd machine by drinking up.

new orleans notebook

Jackson Square was so freshly scrubbed it reminded me of a time I sat rear to ground and
chalk in hand chut-chut-chuting at an old roof slate for play, squinting at the sun
and a caliope played, some sad sweet tune- an echo I'd wake up to one morning,
thirty years later. how'd you get here? I could talk but it was before I cared to,
and things stick in you
like when you first put flour to oil to make a roux.

I wouldn't know this had Joette not told me, they used to pick up the trash with mules on
Prieur and it could very well be that way again, mules and prayers, cars and curses
it is so damn hard to get around now, but no hurry still.

An old chef told me in bright clean October, if I took my shoes off and walked around barefoot here,
nowhere else would ever feel like home. I remember scraping around shoeless in the early fall sun on stone and
grass, hands red and yellow and dusty, I saw the clown faces everyone did that sort of thing then - and I'd never be seven like my sister, and this old square was a big enough world.

the view from platform E

mingled at the castle, swirled around princes of industry
or just one bright business in particular-
the newest one where everyone wins
and realized no one would approach my chardonnay or my
prayer like stare
that one does to ones' electronic bonnet- to say "I'm busy"
ran down cool bluster to miss the red line just by a breath
and found I'd been tagged with a price on my hair
everyone has one

and then
the beige maw of union station opened up to me
and in two minutes I had a ticket and a possibility
this woman who sat next to me, she had just met the
president's father, don't you know it, she speaks some other language
that I can't understand, but whispers anyway
and with my bottle of water, young men in suits untied
bobbing forward and back staring with black pools
where blue used to be
staring and me and they are so slight and smart
in periphery
buy expensive beer and sometimes a pretzel

I'm going home now
where the heel stops short of the platform and
just as you fall in, a kind conductor offers
"miss, you forgot your sweater"

texas blues

Three and a half pounds of shrimp as big as your head for sixteen dollars. Texas blue crabs nip and I nip back, who knew there were crab tongs? Guilt tugs at me. they're too pretty to eat. I grew up on the Texas gulf coast, the part just shy of Louisiana, hot sauce with every meal the yearly threat of wind and water at your door and the promise of tiny black springtime frogs in a saturated emerald lawn. Childhood summers were covered by a green shroud; couldn't see any other color except for bark brown that you tag breathlessly with mud boots and herds of crickets your only witness.

Playing "outside or in, pick one!" was good until 9 pm and then suddenly sweaters, though it was 85 degrees and hot hot on the playground. The first day of school brought the excitement of pencil smell and playground pebbles in my knees. Why did construction paper not come in blonde? You have yellow hair when you cut it out that way-

Found Allison under a sappy white pine crying, no friends quite yet and there I was hands smelling like cyprus. It's twenty-five years later, ya'll and I look into her daughter's new almond eyes and mine cannot hold back the Texas Blues.

bizarre love triangle

Come out to see the play Rudy Doo by George Tilson,
performed at the Spotlighter's Theater in Baltimore (817 St. Paul Street)
playing the 17th and 18th Aug at 8 pm, Aug 19th at 2 pm, Aug 23rd,
24th, and 25th at 8 pm, and Aug 26th at 2 pm.

see The Baltimore Playwright Festival's website for more details:

BPF

slice of mandolin

strum thing- bent over a pie and a song
sometimes a poem is just a poem
other times, a word a besplintered, forlorn-
wooden spoon for a good while, sit and smile

all leavened and leveled and ready to file.

who's in nebraska?

The work of the thing - I suppose, could be part revisionist history,
part badly-gone affair of the heart, part super-nov(ell)a, part brown
sugar melting in the pantry. Perhaps summer is the time to air out
the underroos.

Bruce Springsteen's album by the same name is brilliant. Asbury Park
(pictured) what a mysery, and a mystery. It is not, however, a placeless
place, and could very well come back.

we're going streaking.

Below find the text from an article on today's Baltimore Sun
regarding naked hiking on the first day of summer. It is more
cautionary than judgemental, which I appreciate. More on nudity
some other time. I'd rather go frolick than sit in front of my
computer screen.
______________________________________________________

Naked ambition of hikers on the Appalachian
By Abigail Tucker
Baltimore Sun Reporter
Originally published June 22, 2007
Along the Appalachian Trail // Dave Odorisio unzipped his tent flap yesterday, peered out and stretched; a halo of gnats quickly formed around his tousled head. It was just another morning on Maryland's leg of the Appalachian Trail. But this particular morning, the 25-year-old hiker had an important decision to make: Namely, would he get dressed today?
Hike Naked Day marks the summer solstice on the 2,000-plus mile trail and gives the boldest adventurers a chance to walk -- not to mention scale boulders and gain summits -- on the wild side. The bad news for us is that the solstice falls at the time when backpackers are passing en masse through the Maryland area. These thru-hikers, trudging from the trail head in Georgia to its finish in Maine (a journey that typically starts in early spring and ends in late summer), are the most likely to shed their smelly regalia for the solstice ritual, making the 41 miles of in-state trail potentially perilous for Girl Scout troops or day hikers whose tour buses have paused there briefly on the way to historic battlefields.





The good news is that, although the nude hikers' flesh may be as brilliantly white as the blazes that mark the trail, they make themselves quite scarce.

It didn't take long for Odorisio to decide no, he definitely would not let the sun shine below the timberline, as it were. The morning was chilly, and the bugs were out for blood.

Besides, in the next tent over, 24-year-old Ian Russ of Chicago was yelling: "You better not hike naked! I've got my 11-year-old brother with me!"

Even setting aside the obvious examples, there are many strange activities that can be undertaken sans clothes. Naked bull roasts and naked chili cook-offs. Naked scuba-diving and naked sky-diving. Nude Texas hold 'em tournaments, beach cleanups, 5K runs, blues concerts and "shine 'n' buff" car shows. But naked mountain climbing ranks among the more hazardous options.

Think of poor Pus Gut, who hiked naked a few years back. All thru-hikers who attempt to complete the trail are given nicknames, but Pus Gut truly earned his, said Todd Berezuk, who works at the Outfitter at Harpers Ferry, a hiking equipment store near the Maryland segment. Suffering a fit of modesty in the midst of his solstice celebration, the young hiker attempted to fashion himself an undergarment out of leaves he found growing along the trail.

Poison ivy? He wasn't quite that dumb. It was poison sumac.

"His stomach was blistered, inflamed, broken out completely," said Berezuk, also a nursing student, who examined him when he came into the store. "So everyone called him Pus Gut."

Rather than devising natural-fiber loincloths, many trekkers prefer to "just keep a bandana handy" on the heavily traveled trail, said Al Preston, an assistant manager of Western Maryland's South Mountain State Park, which the trail runs through.

"I really don't know why they do it to begin with," Preston added. No one really does. "It's been passed down. When I got here in '92, I was warned that on the first day of summer people hike naked. And they do." Technically, it's against park rules, Preston says, but on the solstice officials "tend to grin" -- and bear it.

Of course, it depends on which park you're in. Stark-naked hikers who don't make it as far north as Maryland on the longest day of the year may encounter patrolmen to the south who are less tolerant of the holiday. Bare hindquarters are given no quarter at Virginia's George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, according to Woody Lipps, a patrol captain there who is not afraid to fine the naked. Penalties range from $75 to $5,000 or six months in jail, he said.

"Once someone called and asked if we would look the other way if they hiked naked to the Cascades on Hike Naked Day," Lipps said. "If you are in a public area nude, you are going to get a ticket."

However, Lipps admitted that tracking down nudes on the move is neither an enviable nor an easy task.

"It's like a needle in a haystack," he said. "How are you going to find one naked person in 1.8 million acres? You could hide a hundred naked people out there."

No one knows exactly how many hikers participate in the informal holiday, said Laurie Potteiger, information services manager for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Actually, "we really try to pretend that it doesn't exist," she said. The activity violates the sanctity of the trail and often disturbs other nature-lovers. Besides, because of all that extra exposed skin, the naked "are much more at risk for Lyme's disease," she said.

Not to mention for sunburn, snapping turtle bites and pack-strap chafing that even Body Glide, a special lubricant favored by thru-hikers, can't prevent. And "southbounders" doing the trail in reverse better not even think about it, hikers say, because it's still blackfly season up north.

And yet, despite these dangers, the day of nakedness seems an integral part of the trail's kooky culture, which revolves around reducing one's possessions to the bare necessities until a whole life can be crammed in a backpack. To many of the travelers bound for the trail's end at Mount Katahdin, the naked hiker seems to truly embody the principal of stripping down, and everyone seems to hope he exists, even if they've never met him.

Six hours after dawn on Hike Naked Day, no one had passed by Maryland's Dahlgren Backpackers' Campground less than half-dressed -- not even 23-year-old Scott Ames of Massachusetts, though his trail name, Quarter Moon, sounded promising.

"Too many roads in Maryland" was Quarter Moon's excuse.

One librarian from Queens, N.Y., saw the adventure's appeal. Michelle Ray, 30, had posed as a life model for art students during her college days, and she was still contemplating hiking naked herself. "God forbid I run into a pack of Boy Scouts and scar them for life," she said. "A naked librarian? They don't need to see that."

Leaving other hikers with such a startling memory might violate the thru-hiker's vow to "leave no trace" behind in the wilderness.

And yet, Ray said, it could honestly be worth it.



abigail.tucker@baltsun.com
For information about the Appalachian Trail, visit appalachiantrail.org.

I would match up the evils of the self-righteous over-tanned and under-fed American ‘edges’ to god-fearing fatties in the middle any day. Sure, the average Michigan quick-n-shopper will probably be a blissfully unaware iceberg lettuce eating moron, but how is that any worse than the other side of the magazine rack, where the Paris Hiltons of the world can’t survive a single day in the joint and it is, ironically, “in God’s Hands” – a battle cry normally heard in the middle of the country – and any more meaningful? Unlikely. The truth is that most Americans are neither, and they probably think the coffee is bad too. But Starbucks ain’t any better, it’s just on the other end of the spectrum, where they burn it BEFORE they brew it. The 'average' overfed and under-read American is certainly a sad example of one of the many permutations of American life – and being fat in a part of the country where the food isn’t good anyway? Downright depressing (there certainly are well-cultured happy fat people in Europe – where you’d be hard pressed to criticize them in the same way for eating too much world-class prociutto) – BUT not necessarily a recipe for disaster. Certainly not the exact case in New Orleans, one of the fattest places in the country. When has fatness ever warded off investments? If it’s anything, it’s the rusty cars, and the better quality of life on the north side of the lake. There are fat people in Canada, too. Sure, going into the wrong diner can mean burnt coffee. But to suggest that Michigan just suffers from poor or nonexistent marketing? This is short sighted. Today’s mudflap girls could be tomorrow’s hot new thing on the catwalks of New York City. Wouldn’t be the first time the snobby east or west appropriated ‘trucker’ chic and made a mint, ala Ashton Kutcher. The travesty is that no one in depressed Michigan would benefit from the "largesse."

doh!

When yeast refuses to eat the nice organic sugar you carefully put out for it, you get slices of what I will refer to as, architecturally speaking, “walls of wheat.” I could tilt them into place and landscape behind them. It is plenty good with a pound of butter, but I was hoping for some bubbles in the crumb.

It’s a rainy Sunday so instead of building a garden wall, I have baked two loaves of the densest white since Dan Quayle. Maybe I would have had better luck making “potatoe” bread. I could carefully construct a ‘Mr. Potato Bread’ perhaps, with whom I will discuss my lifestyle choices. I anticipate a hefty shelf half-life for this bread-friend. I might just get the band saw out and make 420,000 2-atom wide slices of melba toast…

Just eating it seems trite.

I sure would like to be better at this, and a hundred other things. How could a neolithic tradition be so simple and so difficult at the same time? Certainly scone baking druids and Egyptian boulangers were pulling their plated hair out simultaneously miffed and puzzed at the unpredictability of this persnickety pastime. Or…or! The unknown is what makes it beautiful.

saying grace

Grace comes from the latin Gratia, or Gratus, “pleasing.” If you please or are pleased, something graceful is going on, hopefully, on the other end. Perhaps grace is a mirror for good deeds. Maybe you are witnessing grace in someone, but they do not know it- clandestine grace? This is tricky. Some puritanical notion dictates that it’s more worthwhile somehow if it is not celebrated, or even acknowledged. Throw out the religious connotation for the sake of finding grace without prejudice, and it conjures images of dancers, perhaps, and certainly the assumption that with it along comes that scene-stealer, beauty. So quickly the mind wanders to physical grace, and then down the slippery slope to vanity. But there is something about being thankful that goes beyond the dogmatic or the divine.
I think entire communities search for it but end up confused, and just tie hymnal ribbons on various things, in effect removing the grace from the place, or the memory in mind. Grace can be identified, perhaps, where it is absent.

burning in a stream bed

that blood-drum that might be a spector train
out of habit, swishing til sunrise in the hall
(for nothing to do with eternity)
loco-motive and calculated so you think

it's just your own pulse silly
or a mill or a waterfall or an errant drunken bee
(and love will do this to you anyway why the hell are you even asking me?)

foot cracking a branch and my voice startled me
I laughed out loud, one ha! that every bough is a mercy seat
every cardinal a sentinel and my palm even looks at me with great instruction
it-will-do-this-to-you so please walk in the mud if you can

the pleats of a skirt that take every bit of grimace to un-pleat
regrettable verses, and well worked hands
tearing down each pastry thin promise
in order to be more real than the wrinkles

it is no matter in the folds of a good bed
or so she said-
it is so different walking this way with you.

sweet demon north carolina

Any decent bluegrass tune will profess that the Blue Ridge is lovely and sinister, a sinewy spine of mist and prehistorically proportioned rhododendron, little whitewashed cottages perched lonely and dark on hillsides that seem otherwise empty save a path of bruised grass - perhaps the owners are long gone, or standing sentinel in a trout stream.

This is a lonely place, a soul-and-soil rich place. If you are in it, you are on train tracks, purposeful steps and a worried brow facing away from the hoot-hoot that you think you might hear, a rumble and a slow, slow tobacco burn in your chest. You are drenched, you are lost, you are going in circles and out of your mind. So far away from the spoon playing and foot stomping caricature you thought you knew. Easy orphan.

fortunate fruit related incident caught on film

the borrowed stitch

I met a man struggling with an addiction, though I did not know it at the time
he was so astute at keeping it dear to him.
I meant no harm in my ignorance, but
I felt harmful in my un-knowing.
I felt, in a word, responsible.
I think perhaps to
know even for an instant someone's plight is perhaps
more intimate than knowing
delight with them.
I could have kissed him having just met
with less shame than when I looked away
the instant he said, "because."

We are all peculiar, too.

We are suddenly stitched to each other's sleeves,
staring at our elbows and wondering
how we will give back our very personal spaces,
how did his glance not know my glance
was radiant black and no more than feather fine
somewhere I searched my thoughts
to make sense of the senseless
and went on my way, some excuse or bill to pay.
so nice to make your acquaintance

rusted roses

dancing with yourself

would turn away, girl
if she knew any better
give epaulement and
disbelief for tomorrow

shrug off the sorrow
come about, ankles in rain
and turn to face the refrain

after all that measuring
coup de pied, go or stay
mark-ed by mellow disdain