Durum wheat

by Lisa Martin-Demoor

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.

“Durum wheat” by Lisa Martin-Demoor, from One Crow Sorrow. © Brindle & Glass, 2008.

In addition to the big things (Easter, Earth Day etc.) There were a bunch of interesting things going on to distinguish the month (as if the beginning of wildflower season wasn’t distinction enough around here). I don’t know if they are interesting enough to actually get me to participate – which is probably why it took me so long to mention them – but definitely interesting enough to get my head going around a bit. Helping out with the Yosemite Sentinel brings a lot of these random events to the surface, and is one of the most rewarding things about working on it.

April is Poetry Month!

I usually think of poetry readings as one of those ‘city things’ that I used to do when I live in Berkeley, but the public libraries in Wawona and Mariposa are doing special poetry events this month in celebration including compiling a local 2009 anthology of poems. Personally, I’ve been treating myself by reading the poem of the day published on The Writer’s Almanac.

Everyone! Please submit your original poetry, art, photography, songs, and
stories for display at the Mariposa County Library during the month of
April. All entries will be included in our 2009 anthology. All participants
will receive a copy of our book! Entries should be suitable for all ages.

WAWONA BASSETT MEMORIAL LIBRARY: As T. S. Eliot stated, Is April indeed the
“cruelest month”? Find out for sure Weds. 4/15 from 6 – 7p.m. at your
library. T.S. Eliot and the month of April will be our subject. Then,
Sat. 4/25 from 1-2 p.m. we will dig Kenneth Patchen and the SF Beats. All
are welcome to join our verbal feast, or poetry potluck, and bring some
verse to share.

MAIRPOSA: Cowboy Poetry: Come celebrate the 8th Annual Cowboy Poetry Week
at the Mariposa Library on Thursday, April 23 from 3:30–4:30 p.m. Cowboy
Poet Wendy Brown-Barry will be performing and giving suggestions on how to
write your own Cowboy Poetry.

April is Script Frenzy Month

Script Frenzy is a writing challenge, similar to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), to complete 100 pages of a script, be it screenplays, regular stage plays, or graphic novels, in a month. Specifically, the month of April.

I haven’t even read that many screenplays, so it’s hard for me to imagine just exactly how this would go, but after discovering the rewards of the 40 day blog challenge that I set for myself over Lent this year, it’s easy for me to imagine how rewarding participating in this type of challenge could be. Mostly, though, it got me to think some more about NaNoWriMo – a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Tom and I randomly came across Chris Baty’s book, No Plot? No Problem! while wandering happily through the book store a few years ago, and it has been kicking quietly in the back of my mind ever since.

I doubt there is any question that writing obsessively for a month would change my perspective on, and relationship to writing, but there are so many other things that I could happily obsess over for a month, that I’m finding it hard to commit.

Other Goings Ons

Wranger’s Reunion
In addition to being the Earth Day Celebration in Yosemite (a subject that deserves its own space), this last weekend was the annual Yosemite Wrangler’s Reunion. Wranglers (guides and packers) from NPS, DNC or Curry Company gathered together to hang out and swap stories in Mariposa last Sunday, as they have been (and this is the amazing part) since 1951.

El Portal Spring Fling
Not sure if I want to make a whole day of it, but I bet this one is fun… maybe combine it with another visit to Hite Cove to look for Fairy Lanterns.

April 25th 2009 8am-Midnight. Events throughout the day include Lion’s Club pancake breakfast 7-10am, Spring Run-Off 8am, registration at 7am, town photo 9:30am, flea market/arts and crafts all day an amazing variety of food vendors serving lunch, dinner and late night snacks, and YEA and their famous beverage service. Music Starts at 4pm ($15-20 Sliding Scale after 5pm). Performers include Dogon Lights (with members of Hamsa Lila featuring Yacuba Diarra from Burkina Faso and Tmomo from Giunea), Something Different (Live Rock/Electronica), Hometown Zeroes (Hometown Heroes), Rob I (Breaks and Dubstep), The Akoustic 2 (Country/Comedy), and the Local Music Showcase. Please NO OUTSIDE BEVERAGES. Volunteers are needed. Free admission available to volunteers.

Annual Day Care Benefit Center
May 9th is yet another El Portal party, from 5:30 until late, this time benefiting the local Day Care Center. This is, I’m told, the Day Care Center’s main fund-raising event for the year. Raffle prizes include an iPod, dinner for two at The Ahwahnee and a painting by local artist, Penny Otwell.

Up From Out of In Under

I lately lost a preposition:
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: “Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!”

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: “What should he come
Up from out of in under for?”

-Morris Bishop (who would have turned 116 years old today)
poem published in 1947 in The New Yorker