dear May (what about a chapbook?)

Dear May 2014,

The website. A creative endeavor? Or just a popular distraction?

I haven’t written a real poem this year. I haven’t finished a new chapter on my novel. Those are just the facts, the drapes pulled back as you stand in nothing but your skivvies, the milk from the back of the fridge, the dirty laundry kicked into the center of the room with the suggestion that someone is going to do something about it.

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What about a chapbook? It’s an idea that been kicking me around for a while.

My heart is full of modern ambitions and yet cluttered with this strange connection to the past. I’m in the same situation as a lot of artists. I am exactly like musicians who don’t need to make real records anymore. Music is on the internet now, the digital there (wherever there is) in spots and clouds for streaming, for downloading, for easy and sustainable purchase and transport. Our creativity is alive on Tumblr. We’re living on only a handful of newspapers and magazines now. Everything else is clutter. I mean, c’mon, we’re trying to save the planet here. But there is still a magic when you hold a real record in your hands. There is still something to be said for holding a book. And maybe there’s always more than one way to save something, a planet or otherwise.

I made a choice this year to get this website together, to build something out of nothing, and however I feel about it now- a healthy mixture of shame and pride- it’s something I made on my own. I don’t feel like I haven’t tried to join the modern chorus of contemporary expression. I am still trying. And the truth is that I have a lot of ideas about what this website could eventually be someday. More than it is. Less about me. More about taking a look at the letters this generation is writing- about music, to their heroes, about the future, to politicans, and to each other. When I think about it growing, I see great things- but as far as something tangible- I am not sure what I will be left with. A tangible change. That’d be nice.

In the middle of sifting through my thoughts on all this, a good friend posted this video. It felt like a confirmation of everything I am feeling. I realize this is a conversation that my whole generation is having. We are coming to better conclusions every day. It’s nice to think we still have time to come up with more answers.

What about a chapbook? Something real to give away. People still need real things.

love and clutter,

Elizabeth.

plank-walking :

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north current crossed and tidal untimely
intent on swimming intimate disguise
sinking facades in errors sublimely
conversed in reverse and land-locked replies
calling all hands on battered deck regrets
blue memory voyage and horizon wits
beg bronze navigation to settle debts
to overboard throw constellation fits
while plank-walking poetry baits the sin
reducing, seducing fair-weather play
to salty sensations anchored within
mainsail mistakes on this showboat display

Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·

dear april (admonitions and apologies)

forget the golden rule
your silence has caught on
Mustard Corduroys (made in California)
the great wildflower wilderness
yellow as Spanish doubloons, American schoolbuses
hydrants, chariots, sixties Volkswagens
the Yoyo, the Surfboard
fallen plumerias
like this day with plans that fell apart
yellow as brick roads, jackets, submarines, pages
and the last light that is a ribbon
untied, out of a tide
Thoughts of you.
Draughts, a few.

– written next to a rock wall on the Kona coast.

Dear April 2014,

The first quarter is well in hand, like half the change needed for a phonecall, arcade promises, a giant gumball, but enough to flip over in your palm, if you can make heads or tails of it.

cloverA multitude of beginnings stir in the grass. Earthworms tunnel a proper sentence, a root, a subject waiting in the soil, a blade of truth and memories like clover flowers sprouted, sprawled in no particular pattern that a bee might buzz back and forth between before flying down another avenue entirely. A gust of April rain falls diagonally through the air and hits the world at an odd angle- to rest.

Life on the island rattles, groans and suddenly fans out like fumes from a cracked exhaust pipe. The weather sops, burns, chills, and blows itself away to other states. It is hard to feel like you are going anywhere. Your work sits like a garden ignored, penchant underbrush, poems like thistles left to climb up fencepost novels and ideas like fallen fruit with seeds exposed for passing brown birds.

I am much the same as I ever was. I am still hammering words into various structures and holding down some pattern of strings on the guitar. Day in and day out- these two things are rivals, remedies, some rescue, some relief. The island is still here and I am still on it and time is still caught on the day-breeze against the sandy grains at the edges and inside strange rocks and volcanic mountains. I still have my old fears and I love far more than I can understand and I still cry, laugh, speak at rather inappropriate pauses in my day-to-day existence. Insights and oversights keep my mistakes genuine and heartfelt.

My mind wanders back to last April. My imagination runs away with me, I catch myself offguard, oranges and apples, apples and pears, chasing the blues away, yellow as double lines, arguing and agreeing in the same breath, forgetting to walk or chew gum. I stop myself and start again- admonitions and apologies. I keep going in the wrong direction- every time I turn around. I have to stop thinking about the past like I always do and always have. I have to force myself to start dreaming about the future.

I forget. I remember. At the end of each day, I turn the shower faucets and I think about clockwise and counterclockwise, hot and cold, the future and the past, on and off, and what directions is the right direction to be going.

On some hot afternoon when nothing was going as planned, I stopped trying to follow my own plans. I think April started to get better after that.

twangyI have two guitars: ‘Twangy’ and ‘Barrel’. Both were gifts. Named for their respsective sounds, Twangy is my first love and what I play the most. Barrel sounds just like you are playing from the inside of an oak barrel- and also sometimes like barrels are dropping all around you- having just missed their aim.

Now, I keep meaning to decribe ‘M’- because she’s somewhere in most of my stories, calling shotgun or taking the lead, I can hardly keep track. For now, let’s just say ‘M’ confirmed that I was making no progress doing anything useful with my life on one particular April afternoon and advised that we abandon everything to take Barrel to the music store an hour away to replace his top peg. Somehow, two hours later, I wound up with twelve new steel strings on Barrel, instead of six- which is not so bad a deal as all that.

barrelKevin was blonde and I had heard him play the banjo in the past. This time, I noticed two matted dread locks lost at the back of his neck, and I wondered if they had always been there and whether I’d just missed them before.

M sat on a red Fender barstool, while I loitered under violins and ukuleles dangling from the ceiling. Halfway through the Barrel’s repair, a tall man in pale jeans and white hair walked in to do repairs on somebody else’s banjo. After Kevin finished up with Barrel and I embarrassed myself by making sure I could get a discernable sound out of the twelve new strings, I offered Barrel back to Kevin. It was my best decision to date. He jangled effortlessly, re-tuned as if he had answers to questions I hadn’t asked yet, and it was then that the other man grabbed some guitar off the wall behind me and before I had blinked, both men were lost in a rhythm, a metronome of wild instincts, a moment that so often happens when no one is looking in living rooms and garages and backyards. I was humbled again by the way musicians can comfortably sync harmony without having played together before. The music bounces back and forth without missing a beat, you get that feeling like the conversation is getting good, you don’t catch all the words, you don’t understand everything, you just know you are overhearing something great. You are just lucky to be there. And something flared in me, as before, a pang and longing to be part of that great sound, to be part of the great long conversation that is happening all the time in different places in countless languages.

Hawaii can feel like an abandoned studio. It’s just yourself and the sea wearing yourselves down, repeating mistakes and losing track of the time. Of course, you aren’t alone. You’re just playing with something much bigger than you are. Can you fall in sync with the old sea? Can you pick up the echo at the last corner of the world? Can you let empty miles play backup and can you find an answer for the harmony of mountains? I think it’s okay to keep asking these questions again and again. Life is about looking forward to new responses to questions you’ve been asking for years.

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April. Days in. Days out. It’s an old pattern I’m holding down, but to some song I’ve never played before, a rhythm I’m trying to sink and sync into, in a language I am still learning. I meant what I said. A multitude of beginnings stir in the grass. Hello again from some green sunset in April.

the rest and more than I can understand,

Zabe.

the mother of invention :

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I need the stars to take my mind off you
I need the Hellenistic drift of rife
yonder tenets swimming their own blank tract
resolutely, soon drowned out by the sun

I need insomnia and satellites
I need afflictions with post-modern heads
stationed nightly watch across obsessions
unhinged, unmoved by Psyche given space

I need angelic choirs led on by God
I need a pantheon of sound refrains
or anything you think instrumental
noted directly, to replace your myths

I need the swiftest arrows cast like nails
I need for Eros to build love’s walls so
I may have one thing other than your eyes
upon waking, to call my solid home

I need eternal words to burn away
I need brief annotations read aloud
thundering into existence and then
silence, rest, from all we spoke years ago

 Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·

cantabile :

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all cantabile moan, glory inflection
twisting barstools spin rack and pinion bards
where so bathed in creamy disaffection
language dismantled and spoken in shards
to circus-wire alarm, clockwork applause
chronograph polish of suitable sheen
mechanics in disrepair, praise jigsaws
where gears of luster motion or careen
to occupations we would make our own
sweating at heights we doubt we are made for
at home in costumes we hope will atone
us more than a passion played saviour
as time never prays for timely careers
as songs only play as prayers on deaf ears

 Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·

dear march (the roar of the west)

Return, return to the person that you were-
and I will do the same. (Bright Eyes)

Dear March 2014~

Big Sur is always like home in the early Spring. I just belong there- with the washed out roads, the smoking chimney of Deetjen’s and the highway rolling off the fog under your wheels. It’s good to let the cold air stain your cheeks and the roar of the west burn your earlobes as you stand on cliffsides overlooking so many futures like the tides crashing against the rocks, swept out in better judgment and then pulled back again the same direction.

yourcapricornfriendIt’s good to find yourself in the middle of the Henry Miller Memorial Library on a quiet afternoon. There’s been something great about the past trips I’ve had, pushing through the small doorframe to a crowd of men arguing about whether Henry ever meant what he said. This last trip was different though- in the off-season. The library was empty except for a young girl watching over everything with olive skin and green eyes. She left me standing alone inside for a good 15 minutes to attend to some installation outside. I tapped my foot to the old record playing behind me, track 6, and snapped a picture for Timothy before the song ended. I tried to send it with one bar of mobile reception in the middle of weather and redwoods and forgotten youth and honest writers. I never really knew whether it got through or not. And I have the book from this picture on my bedside table now. I wrote in a letter at some point afterwards: I wish we were brothers or at least as good friends as Henry and Irv. I love the way Henry loved people. I want to say I have loved that way- though, what way is that? The way someone has loved someone else before.

nowplayingBig Sur weather, wool, leather, boots, buttons and caps in the morning where you sit by the cold river and suddenly cough up the stars and collect yourself watching trees steaming in the sun from a large wood planked chair. Big Sur. Someplace I call home- and it feels like a real home- which I’ve tried to explain at different points in various novels, poems and errant short stories. Perhaps recalled and referenced in over fifty letters, were I to count. But Big Sur wasn’t mine to begin with. It’s where my best friend was concieved and someplace that I am lucky she introduced me to. What can I say? I’d like to go back and find the oldest tree in California. I need to go back, sit next to a roaring fireplace and imbibe upon coastline herbed earthy risotto and wild mushroom soup that always gives me dreams of things that have never happened or at least haven’t happened yet.

miller

I want to write more, but March has slipped by me again. The rest is a letter I found from some point last year, with a reference table from Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch.

I wake up the way Henry Miller did once, with the lines:

‘After a time I rose, found a notebook, and began inditing cryptic cues. It went on for several hours. I forgot that I had a cold, forgot what time it was. It was after midnight when I reluctantly laid down the pencil and switched off the lights. As I closed my eyes I said to myself: “Now is the time to tell about your life in Big Sur.”

I think about what time it is now and try to finish the sentence on my own.

“Now is the time to tell about…”

I open the book and read several different passages taken on their own. I get riled up. Then I conclude with reading:

“These are the kind of facts, needless to say, that one would hate to rub under a kitten’s nose by way of house-breaking it. Even a whiff of such facts would give a plover or an osprey mental diarrhea. Better not present them to your children until they are ready for their master’s degree. Better keep the young on lemons and lavender until they’ve reached the age of discretion.”

I study the reference table above and I think about the organizational skills required to sum up any season of your life.

Here is the tentative reference table of 2014 so far:

1. The Music Box of Gray Skies
2. Brass Hinges of your Rusty Heart
3. Unfinished Sentences of the Late Riser (squint and yawn)

love and passages,
Elizabeth.

From a magical abandoned day in March- A blonde man with blue eyes serenaded the still and the damp and made the day... memorable.

Outdoors, a blonde man with blue eyes plucked a melody and echoes from the still and the damp.

livemusic

‘Where Nothing Happens.’

typewriter

Taking a page from Henry.

 

 

(stephen) FRY

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Rosso Corsa in your midday complexion
you spoke no names for the bones in your hand
fire engine dashes, notes bled in the margin
out of hand, on the town, siren brain scan
like some bottled Venetian, whistling rages
you waited there like a red tea kettle
you waited in your unread paper pages
sipping rooibos, writing, tense, plural
‘life is ruled by fortune, not wisdom’, you sigh
noble o’er a vermilion keepsake
on the same day you find out you are like Fry
it’s in your bones and it’s a lucky break
toasting Sangria, there’s nothing to rupture
and you speak no names for the brightest colour

Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·

dear February (the rollcall of orbits)

it started with moons
the time-punched paperwork of the stars
the back-logged records of a sound from long ago
night pushed through tunnels of illumination
racing on tastes, an indigo harvest of ideas
questions around corners cut and unfolded into banners
of reasons you lost in cartons of exported blueberries
the rollcall of orbits
the comrade breeze of summer
the honeycomb of gratitude for you
born
immeasurably close, relatively far
like seasons poured into a jar

 (revisions on lines for Sheridan on his birthday)

 

Dear February 2014,

cherrytree

You’re a short and sharp month, dear Feb. A twist of lemon. A stab of eyeliner. A staple punched through two thin sheets straight through to your finger. You pop, shed, bloom too quickly and at the end I am left with the feeling that everything I can remember, I remember wrong. My month was a customary flash of pink through my little town’s annual Cherry tree blossom festival and into Valentine’s day. A deeper blush followed with NY Fashion Week and various high-impact hues of all-weather wear Wittengenstein. The former contending with truth, the latter with the ageless terms and trends of beauty. Or was it the other way around? I happen to think some lipstick shade of Wittgenstein’s ‘sheer brilliance’ would be a joy forever. Yes. We are all still trying to make a bold statement. We could all use another tool to draw a line between things. And what about Chinese New Year? Someone told me it was the year of the wooden horse. This immediately makes me think of a wooden rocking horse with a thick yarn mane. I think it means it’s okay to feel like a child and keep things simple this year. I have no idea what it actually symbolizes and refuse to research it, as I prefer to think of it this way.

Moving on, I came across someone’s post with lines attributed to Aristotle> No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. Well, I’m not sure any mind at all exists without a touch of madness. We’re human, we go mad every now and then, we let our emotions get the best of us (the very best) and maybe, we are all great sometimes. I am still trying to sort through the greatness and the madness of my mother’s life. I think it’s safe to say I am taking her death very hard. I had a lot of time before she passed to come to terms with the fact that she was dying. Somehow though, I am still trudging through definitions and struggling with perspectives that promise to take some lengthy employment. Is it my job to sort out life and death now? When someone dies, I think that inevitably becomes your job for a while.

lifeanddeath

Living through someone else’s death makes life ______ . Living on its own was never that easy for me. Much as playing table tennis for someone who has no hand/eye coordination is never easy and cannot always be deemed fun. Though, I have never played table tennis in my life. I may not be qualified to be so carelessly batting these statements around.

It’s hard to see February in the same town- to remember myself and my mother a year ago. I don’t know. Something in me was breaking this time last February. I know that. I remember it well. Actually, it’s one of the last things I really remember as my old self. It was pretty bad, but still somehow before things got ‘pretty bad’. I spent most of last February in the hospital with her. I remember grasping at straws of poetry splintering into my mind amidst bandages and needles and moans and dropping vitals and crazed blue eyes. I thought to myself, it’s not just a story or a turn of phrase- this is really breaking me. I am breaking and I’m not going to be the same vase, the same windshield, the same cathedral afterwards. Now, the fight is over and I can inspect the worst of it- like a broken nose from the hardest hit. But I tell myself I am more and more like Campbell’s hero. The hero with a thousand faces.

You hear a lot about the toll on caregivers. I guess that’s what I’ve been for years. It sounds strange when I say it though, a label on the wrong container. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I know when a word is not quite right. Or maybe that’s just how all caregivers feel at the end of it- that there never was a word for it while it was happening, and there can’t be a word to bear the weight of so many years of your life. Besides, I think I was just trying to be a good daughter.

February. Not a bad time to take a look around and find the many faces of love. Most of all, February is still for lovers. Recently, I had the chance to see an old picture of my best friend’s parents. It may be one of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen. Perhaps beacuse I know the love caught in this moment is real. This is what real love looks like. Yes, it kinda looks like a magazine ad or a freeze frame at the end of a movie. It looks like something you’ve seen before and had in your heart at some point. I’m sharing it with you, because after everything that has happened, I like to think you will forget most of the nonsense you’ve read here. I still believe there’s nothing you can know that isn’t known. Nothing you can see that isn’t shown. And this- is all you really need.

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Living through someone else’s death makes life ______ . How do I finish that sentence? Maybe that is also why getting through this death is hard for me. I hate blank spaces. I keep trying to fill them in. What word? What truth? Harder. Sweeter. Weighty. A dizzy thing. Mundane. Poetry. Real. More of a mystery.

love & wide open spaces,
Zabe.

a front man framed :

afrontmanframed

now a front man orphan for stardom frames
that drag your demons through a pardoned lens
behind sunglasses, slang and soundstripe aims
carefully adopted by stage-hand friends
or the rough canvas company of trade
who court you in bright palette affection
cast you in statue like sculptors of fate
escorts in some artistic discretion
a shape, a slingshot, a target, a band
unearthing buried talents on the bone
cameras the spitting image in hand
to capture the moment you’re first alone
perfectly evolved on spotlight stages
for a syllable birth on microphone
a hand-crafted word from empty pages
with a beautiful face we call our own

 Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·

(shawn) BEAUVILLE

beauvillescapes

on tour- out on the towns- left for invoking
old smells of someone you once loved, or love
still, or never had the chance to really love
in the way you imagined real love
to feel- a highway collision you passed

down the same handle- you stir- a firm grip
upon a mystic country ladle that
brews the salt grime gumbo magic of life
in a giant cast iron pot with a fire
underneath that smokes out demons for dinner

you kick- away clutter on the table- a gnawing sound
(a 1914 Indian V-twin electric start, you make your way)
calling hungry gods in with debut whispers of a sinner
(and you are better when you are not just spinning your wheels)

I hum your asphalt chorus- when you move across
small kitchens to span living rooms, life spans
waft, I write about you with Eternity over my shoulder
you shake the hands of every clock, and I am watching
you decipher everything from neon signs on the wall
and name every colour before you blackout on fire escapes
as you climb small bars to the top
to find a place of articulation, all with
a name you made up, or are making up
still, a different answer every time you are asked
-where did it come from?

a crack in the sidewalk the whole world grew out of
(a 1968 Les Paul custom electric, you break your way)
supplanting cities, America under your fingernails
(and you are better when you are stringing me along)

in the growing- body of a nation- globally adolescent
for a bite, let mortal tongues awake
I can hear you sing this country
in a blind taste test to win a future
I could convince you to have, or can convince you
still, that our human fruits are the salt of the earth
I said to you- We are going places

but there are no winners for solving life at all
it’s there to seep into our limbs, a secret ingredient
a fricassee over broken bread or a holy whine
life! every name we made up in the book
-it doesn’t matter which you heard!
no one has the answer for the chew
Life!- where did it come from?
Some place old. Some place new.
You said to me- Places are never the same.

Copyright © 2015 · Elizabeth Ganot · All Rights Reserved ·