The poem-writing mojo has been a-hibernatin'. I managed maybe a half-dozen lines during all of July, none of them compelling enough to coax into a full-grown pantoum or even a micro-story.

No, wait, I did write a couple of postcards in reply to Jessi's. Even so, I don't have more than two handfuls all told to show for July.

I'm okay with that, though. Sometimes you just have to tend to other things with all you got, and there just isn't more than that for anything else (last week I bailed on pretty much everything unrelated to work).

And then sometimes you meet the deadline, give yourself the rest of the night off, sip a martini with dinner, laugh at the dog, get laughed at by the BYM, nearly fall asleep in the bathtub, read a couple of poems from a friend's chapbook -- and lo, the mojo pokes its head out of its cave for an hour. And this happens:

My love has only one name, one form. Everything disappears. -- Robert Desnos

Everything disappears, even in this house
where nothing moves unless I move it. ... Every thing
stays busy with its work of disappearing ...
-- Dawn McDuffie, "One Name, One Form" (Bulky Pick Up Day)

Not Only for Breakfast

Even in this house, where nothing moves
unless I move it, every day
a bit of the sky sneaks in, feeding
the cracks in the ceiling, curling the page
on which I'd scribbled "flour" and "more plums,"
the rest of my list a puddle of intentions
cooling along with the forlorn stick
of butter still waiting for the flour
since it can't become pie by itself.
Some days -- some years -- get going half-baked
and all you can do is save what smells sweet
and feed the rest to the ghosts, and the dogs,
and then start again. And even in this house,
sometimes the plums do stay in the icebox,
waiting for the heat of the stove, and your mouth.

- pld, 8/3/11 (third draft)

From Paris, May 2009