I’m finally shopping my novel around, so I have more time to take care of the rest of my life. There’s something about a book-length writing project that shuts out too much else from the range of my attention, so I’ve decided that unless I sell this novel it’s going to be smaller creative projects…
After the fires
The local birds seem to think our yard is a good place to visit while the last bits of fire and smoke die down, and they’ve come through in flocks as well as individually. At one moment this morning they seemed to be throwing a bird party in our side yard. I stepped outside and…
Who was the first poet?
I wonder, because reading so inevitably pushes me to write. I wonder, and I even worry. What if I’d never seen a poem? Might I burst apart one day from the pressure of too much held in too long? Could I have learned, even as slowly as I do, how to forge words into a…
Butterflies
This has been a good summer for butterflies in my little corner of the world. I’ve seen a lot more variety this year than in past years, and yesterday I sighted a Western Tiger Swallowtail in a pepper tree in the yard behind ours. It surprised me, and at first glance I thought I was…
Emily’s journey home
We had to say goodbye to our little gray cat Emily today. We think she was about 20 years old, but we’re not sure, because she adopted us just over nine years ago, appearing in our back yard to steal our puppy’s food. She had a lot of problems, resulting from having nearly starved on…
Growth
“Be the change that you want to see in the world.” — Mahatma Ghandi Growth 9 x 12 watercolor collage (click on image for larger view) This painting’s background sat in my file cabinet for over a year, a cast aside experiment. I reworked it a little, adding bits of blue, and I nearly threw…
It just got old
old thoughts sometimes wear grooves so deep they bury themselves before new ones can rise the buried old ones make good fertilizer Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Focus
Poetry turns an unshuttered eye on beauty, on ugliness, and everything between. It translates the profound through focus on the loved, the reviled, and everything between. Not the driest news, nor the most turgid melodrama have anything on this passion expressed in objectivity, objectivity in passion. Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Early morning in the country
Slick roads. A thousand tires stir the water in a broken rhythm echoing off concrete. Brakes squeal, a helicopter passes overhead, not the first or last today. All around me people start another work day that begins, and will end, in traffic. People say this is the country, but in the rain I hear city….
Compass rose
When you’ve lived near the sea you notice its scent each time you return from far away. Fifty miles from home I’ve caught wind of it. Once, driving west across the desert from Arizona, still a hundred miles inland and separated by mountains, we hit a bank of salty air thick as fog. The sky…