Myth of Arrival

Marion Stone's sonnet, Petratch on West 115th Street won first place in the The 2005 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest. Congradulations, Marion!

Here is a photo I took, peering at myself in the mirror of my bathroom. I think it is appropriate for turning 36, don't you? I mean, it looks like I am thinking, "who are you, strange person in the mirror?"

Or maybe I am just wondering how I will shave that morning. Something like, "do I really have to do this again? I just did it yesterday!"

Thank you, all my friends, for helping to make this life wonderful. Thank you!

Today is my birthday. I am 36 years old offically. How curious. I suppose I normally would go on a long ramble about life; how being 36 is both frightening and exciting … but today I will hold off. I won't even post a new poem, though if you have a birthday poem (it doesn't even have to be about me) I'd love to see what you'd want to share.

Anyway, this morning I woke up and stumbled downstairs to feed the noisy birds, wild cats that live in my garage and make coffee. The stray cats get fed in this big bowl I keep by the back door. They are still scared of me (or all humans I guess) but know around the right time of morning I usually stumble out to feed them and hide in the corners of the yard to wait until I have left their food and moved off to re-fill the bird feeder that hangs by my kitchen window. I usually get sparrows and grackles and other dirty-brown birds but there are also a family of tufted titmice (which is fun to say in mixed company) and a woodpecker and a junco which all look like small black and white birds of one shape or another but have fun being messy and knocking all the seeds to the ground so the fat squirrels can lazily gorge themselves below. All this time I have the coffee pot brewing the magic liquid that keeps me going … coffee-like sludge! I like my coffee thick like mud, that way I know I might not get a good breakfast but can eat my coffee if need be (plus I am usually awake by the second cup).

I am going to Columbus, Ohio, for the weekend. Who knows what adventures await me? They say it will be mostly cloudy and windy, tempratures ranging from 41 degrees to 54. Yum! This leads me into the other point I think I should make; there was no snow today as I opened my door and wandered outside. This might not be as exciting to you as it is to me, but the thunder storms last night seem to have brought in warm air and all the water melted the three feet of snow we had on the ground! Now the world is a muddy drab, and all the dead leaves and trash blown in from the neighbor's backyard that had been hidden under the clean white snow are visible for all to see. I think later today I will go out and pick the worse of it up. It is rather bedraggled looking, to be honest.

The stereo is on. I found this wonderful CD at the library called something like "Torch Song Divas." I always thought if I could spend the day as someone else, it would be a diva. I don't mean a squeamish prima donna, someone who throws rages temper tantrums, but an old school diva, a fabulous operatic or jazz singer. In other words, someone with a better singing voice than I have who croons along in the beer and cigarette smoke of some cabaret or cocktail lounge and belts out torch songs to break all the hearts of everyone listening. I love all those sentimental love songs, all those laments about unrequited love. But since I am not such a person, the close I get it is when I get to go to a poetry reading and read poems about unrequited love, which doesn't the have the same charm as a torch song I know, but you got to work with what you got, I suppose. The following is a bit I stole from one of my own letters to a good friend. It goes as follows:

I think I wrote to you that I was going to perform last Sunday at a local bookstore (or was it two Sundays ago? My weeks seem to blur into each other and I don't have my calendar in front of me … oh, how terrible to have such a short term memory like I do!) but after it was over I was sort of not impressed by my performance. That isn't to say my fellow wonderland poets (Robert Rentschler, Ruelaine Stokes, Sam Mills) weren't terrific. Oh yes, they were! but I quickly decided never to bring up the subject again (my usual tactic when dealing with things I'd rather not have to, lol) until Sam sent me couple of photos yesterday he took of me at the microphone and I thought, "hey that's cool!" I figure I would send this to you because, of course, you can't hear me … only see me, so you can just imagine I have a great deep speaking voice (wouldn't be cool to sound like Darth Vader/ James Earl Jones? I'd speak a lot more in public if I did, that's for sure) and am not tripping over all the long, complicated words in my poetry. (rule #38 in poetry writing: never use words you cannot pronounce in mixed company … especially if you have a high, fizzy lisp!) well, there will be more readings this year. I can always start practicing.