Night, village, snow

Home Sweet Home

Santa's Cottage in tiny Farkle Park
next to the 1802 Tunnicliff Inn 

Kiosk in Farkle Park
with clever snow-shedding roof.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Ranking board at the Baseball Hall of Fame

Village Library

Main St. house

Clark Foundation offices,
Main Street by Cooper Park

 Night-walk pictures by Michael, my husband

Hysteron proteron

Mother Nature: "Let us have spring, and then a good winter's snow!"

Small imp: "Let us have first colors, and then freeze them into crystal."

Smaller imp: "Spring magic and then tricksy snow magic! Snowflakes as big as quarters, and close together, so that nothing can be seen but the crows on the white roofs and a few black branches!"

Me, 8:00 a.m., thinking: What a starry, thickly-falling snow out of a dead white sky... onto the just-opened daffodils, the carpet of scilla, the brave little crocuses, the head-bent Lenten roses. Drat, where are my boots?

Snips of tinsel and gold

Follow Marly's board Glimmerglass on Pinterest. 

Life and trala: Here's the hot Facebook post of the morning: "Sometimes it's just great to be a teenage boy. Child no. 3 driving to school by himself for the first time (new license!) and last night pinned his opponent in the wrestling dual with Unatego--third meet, fourth pin. Rah!"

Highly important Yankee gossip (aka the weather): Everybody's talking weather after two snow days off from school... And evidently we are already at 25 inches for the season, which is supposedly 8 inches above where we would be normally at this time of year. I've been here for the last 15 years (plus an extra stray year earlier), and this is the slipperiest winter I can recall.

Life-in-letters: Next up event is December 16th, 7:30 at CANO, the Community Arts Network of Oneonta at The Wilbur Mansion on Ford Ave. Oneonta, New York. Here's a public invitation. Please send a link to friends in the area if you have any... If you're on Facebook, you can invite friends directly.

from the deployment series

Thank you x 3: To the many readers who have shared Glimmerglass and other recent books on facebook, twitter, and other sites--I've been very happy that you did so. Also thanks to some people who reviewed on Amazon or goodreads. I am grateful, as those things are critical for a writer now playing in the world of university and small presses. Even indie bookstores use Amazon for research. And thank you to those locals/regionals who turned out for recent events in Delhi and at the Fenimore and the Village Library and for the open house / book signing / open studio with painter Ashley Norwood Cooper, as a good crowd is much appreciated. It wouldn't have been nearly so much fun without you!

Marketing: I've just updated my Pinterest board, and it now gives a good, sweeping look at the new book, along with a lot of the gorgeous artwork by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and immaculate design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt. Please take a look by clicking the images above. And there are some interesting Amazon customer reviews and blurbs from writers and publishers here. Sample from a writer:

 Beautiful Inside and OutBy G. S. Thompson on December 2, 2014Format: HardcoverThis novel is beautiful inside and out. The story feels like a modern fairy tale with writing that dances on the pages in a way that can only be created by a spectacular writer. If you read this book you will know that Youmans is one of the most gifted writers living among us today.If you enjoy the twisting and building of words you will love this author's beautiful writing. If it can be called writing, because it seems more like she's pulling the whispers of angels down from a place we haven't been to yet and gently placing them on paper.

Here's good St. Nicholas of Myra,
who has just saved three boys
from the bad butcher--
now they need clothes
and a good book
for Christmas.

Morning after foolishness

Clive Hicks-Jenkins decoration for Thaliad

It's the day after April Fool's Day, and I am just the same size of fool as I was yesterday! I may even be a little bigger, given all those Easter basket chocolates. I find these things slightly disappointing but no surprise... Quite impossible to pack all one's foolishness into a single day, after all.

The foolishness of April 1st is compounded by the thought that the date marks the beginning of the absurd, hopeful thing, Poetry Month. I have been writing a lot of poems lately, but I almost feeling like not writing any at all in April because of this terrible bone of charity, the once-yearly reminder of an art most people think already dead. Never mind. Art is the phoenix that returns burning from the grave, whether anybody notices or not.

In fact, art is that strange creature that is always re-inventing itself, starting from nothingness. Every book of energy, every painting of life has to be started by somebody who does not know how to make what needs to be made.

In the realm of absurdity, the sky snowed on the snowdrops yesterday, and it is snowing on them today, though the sparrows and juncos and mourning doves are hunched on the ground under the feeder or combing the air from rose canes to hemlocks. One dove chases another on foot under the roses, heads bobbing, but it's far too bitter for springing love on one's mate.

I must hie me to taxes once again (alas!), so I just shrug and wave and go on.

Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for review clips and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more.

Rabbit with a pocket watch--

Tenniel's White Rabbit

It's barely Maundy Thursday, the taxes are not complete, sleep is needed, and there's a heck of a lot of choral singing lined up for the next four days. I feel like a panicky soprano White Rabbit headed for an appointment with the Duchess. I must say that though I resisted being part of a choir at first, I have learned a great deal about music and added a new gallery to the chambers inside my head.

Despite the fact that the snow is still deep around town, the afternoon sun burning on the front of the house has warmed the beds and revealed snowdrops and aconites. Little shivering souls, my heart goes out to you. You are so desperately sweet and brave. I hope it is your time to drink in the sunshine, although it may be time to be covered in another white blanket.

In important No'then news, I saw two titmice perched in the broken lilac, looking adorably as though it might be time for spring.  Juncos and cardinals and mourning doves and the ever-enduring sparrows pecked at the snow for dropped seed. Lovely.

Illo from Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for THALIAD

In personal news, I heard six bubbly-sounding words from my husband and two from my youngest, coming from deep inside that giant rabbit hole of the Grand Canyon. So that's good. Bit small, but good. I am guessing that they'll finish the rim-to-rim climb late tomorrow and be back on top of the world after four days in the canyon.

Also, "An Incident at Agate Beach" appeared on one of the 10 Awesome lists yesterday. (Timely, as it will be online soon, in its fourth anthology publication, first online publication.) Thanks for fb-tagging, Jeff Ford!

. . . . . . .       . . . . . . .       . . . . . . .

Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for review clips and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more.

Birds by snow-light--

It snowed all night on Sunday. It snowed all day on Monday, and then on through the night. And now it is snowing still, and the heart of the big rugosa is cheeping like mad, its branches shivering but not losing snow as juncos and chickadees and sparrows take lovely, dipping flight. They practice evasive maneuvers against the shadow of the kestrel, quick-sailing in groups from rose to hemlock. The rose hips hold up toques of snow, and the canes are thickly outlined. Lighting and pecking, the birds rock the feeders. Now and then a chase weaves right through the densely-packed rugosa canes, more marvelous and intricate than any CGI speed chase through a film-forest.

I woke to the strangeness of snow-light through my lids, feeling that all was hushed and stopped. And I had a weird feeling of being alone, the only person awake for miles. Perhaps I was still dreaming because I had some dim sense of being a medieval monk, holding up his little candle against the dark and the barbarian hordes, that everything I cared about was beautiful, gracious, and full of light but under assault by the world.

And then I surfaced a little more, and rolled out of bed to pack lunch for my youngest and roust him to do a little chemistry homework before school. So now I am having a cup of tea and watching the wandering snowflakes and the birds puffing themselves up against the cold. For now, the kestrel is nowhere in sight.

Morning snow, with books--

Time for some Sendakian morning cake! And in the wake-up news, I'm glad to see the lead-off book review in Arsenio Orteza's "Notable Books: four notable works of fiction" from worldmag.com: A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I'm especially glad to see this at the moment because in my scurryings-about to help the adventurous Thaliad, I am always in danger of forgetting my other two 2012 books. It's not easy to juggle three books in the air at once without letting one drop.

Addition. Since the link has altered and I can't figure out where the entire piece has moved, here's a clip:

Pip Tattnal, the memorable protagonist in this Depression-era, Southern gothic coming-of-age story, flees from an impoverished orphanage a year after his younger brother’s murder there. Plagued with migraines and autistic tendencies, and gifted with an incredible memory and love of language and history, Pip is an oddity among the hobos he meets crisscrossing the country by train. He encounters cruelty and odd strangers who are kind—but he always searches for something he can’t name and only occasionally senses. Youmans’ evocative writing and colorful characters make this novel a rare pleasure that beautifully depicts the power of love.

Elsewhere in the pleased-with-itself Cooperstown, some woefully disappointed children and teens are snug in school, despite the fact that every other school round about is closed for the snowsnowsnow that descended all night and is still racing down, falling fine and fast. But neither rain nor snow stops the buses when a stalwart Canadian is your new superintendent...

The birds are in the rose canes; the feeder is magically empty once again. And those passers-by who don't have their heads down wake up to that intricate tracery of twig and bud (spring pent-up in those, I hope) and branch outlined in snow against a sky of faintly bluish milk. I am oh-so-ready for a season with flowers and no more of the winter viruses that have plagued us this year, but I will probably never get over the Southerner's romance with falling snow, and fresh snow on the boughs and shrubs.

To see samples from the three 2012 books, hop to Scribd. For more information, see tabs above...

Snowy morning with books

Nemo

Mike and I rolled from bed at five to shovel snow and send your youngest off to Syracuse for a wrestling tournament, as he wanted to see the seniors wrestle in sectionals. My brain is full of light, fluffy stars this morning . . .

Reading Yeats's Ghosts: a few quotes from Yeats I did not recall

I began to wonder whether I have and always have had some nervous weakness inherited from my mother. . . . I escaped from it all as a writer through my sense of style. Is not one's art made out of a struggle in one's soul?

She read no books, but she and the fisherman's wife would tell each other stories that Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and laughing together over any point of satire.

I have a great sense of abundance--more than I have had for years. George's ghosts have educated me.

Reading Ink and Spirit

There is something about the best poetry that is above time. So when we talk about literature, and put it beside the word 'millennium', there is a danger that we will forget literature's great gift of getting to the heart of things outside the dimension of linear time. In this, religion and literature share a room; poetry, with its sharpened point of word-choice, and polished crystal of rhythm, does it very powerfully. --David Scott, "Religion, Literature, and the Third Millennium"

Boot Scoot Snow Charm

The secret to nabbing a snow day when the weather turns out to be not nearly as history-making as the weather mavens declare: wear your pajamas inside-out in the accepted snow-day-wish fashion and do the boot scootin' boogie for your snow dance. Now you know.

Anatomy of a Snow Day

• 

• Youngest child wore his bright red plaid pajamas inside-out, surefire guarantee of the snow day.
• Mama and said boy did the Wild Happy Snow Dance just to make sure, with appropriate whooping and wheeling about... It looked rather native American this time. Must've been the 1/16th Mohawk popping out (his, not mine, but evidently contagious.) I would think the snow would obey even a bit of fierce Akewesasne Mohawk, and it certainly did.
• Visibility: dratted poor, especially when shivering and wet at the bus stop.
• Snow: deep and falling fast, at the moment fine flakes but filling the air with an artistic southward slant.
• Plows: excessively busy, buzzing and jingling and getting stuck on our corner with a great racket. Cheerful.
• Schools: all closed it seems, from more than an hour below us in Binghamton to Delhi to Elmira to Cherry Valley and Adirondack points north.
• Except: our neighbor Milford (getting out early) and us (nobody's saying.)

Now I go off to write and make podcasts...

* * *

Photograph credit: snow lion courtesy of Nikola Hartmann and sxc.hu.

An Eye for Snow

The next 12 Readings in Advent will be up this afternoon. In the meantime, go see the wonderful snowflake photographs taken by Kenneth Libbrecht of CalTech. Found via poet and novelist Jeanne Larsen on facebook.

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16170-snowflakes/1

Treasures in books, the Messiah, the Big Snow

What is the strangest--or the most grotesque or the most beautiful--thing that you have ever found in a book. Pressed flowers? Old letters? A beaten tissue of gold?

Recently I felt the decided impulse to read The Messiah of Stockholm. What should I find inside but a letter from Cynthia Ozick, which I immediately devoured in the way that one does, when surprised by finding something in the book--some possible mystery, some welcome curlicue in a bland day.

It was not the original but a xerox of a letter from November of 1985, full of sympathy and charm and heart. The letter held compliments for a dead man, no longer useful to him but sweet to share with others, and some for the living as well: hence the xerox. The words clicked and sang well together.

Had it been there along? Had I seen it once before and then forgot? And what do I do with such a thing? It was a bit naughty to read the thing. Do I keep it, send it to the author, bury it in the Messiah until the next time I take down the book to read again? And if I forget it, will I have the same marvelous sense of chance and discovery, or will I simply think that my mind is gone, gone, gone?

What is, I wonder, the most wonderful thing that has been found in a book? The words, of course, but what about the most wonderful thing that was not supposed to be there? Money, old baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, and prayer cards: these things are often left deliberately. But was is the loveliest accident ever to befall a book?

***
Illustration: a self-portrait of Bruno Schulz, artist and author of The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and the lost book, The Messiah.

***
It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father's death than for his father's tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars's father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in 1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars's father was bringing home a loaf of bread.

--from Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm

***

Thanks for the notes and emails--we survived the storm. Judging by the snow on the van, we hit right at a yard in Cooperstown. Pretty impressive for a day. Close by, Roseboom had 38 inches and beat us. With that sort of fall, ramparts rise up after the plows come through. At midnight Wednesday we staggered down to the lake, wading through waist-high snow on the sidewalks. The stairs up to the townhouses were flowing Gaudi-esque slides, and the village library's bactrian made of steel ribbons was buried in dunes--the ribbons of his upper body sending long twisting shadows over the snow. I may be a Southerner, but that was a snow worth seeing! It was pristine, thatching every house, making sculpture out of the ancient crabapple trees, filling squares of lawn outlined with fence or hedge as neatly as sugar in a box. N has been having fun quarrying tunnels and snow caves into the mountain ranges thrown up by the plows.

So far the bad side of a snowstorm at my house means: that the snow's weight broke a window, promptly repaired; that I didn't leave on a trip; that when the boys and I dug out the van, the brake line was damaged; that nobody can do a little auto repair because they're inundated with banged-up cars and half the mechanics can't get in; and that three children have made a cheerful wreck of the house. Must climb up and clear off the porch roofs, but I can't even begin to think about the Other Car, down an alley and under another big shining hill. That one can wait until the big thaw! Should come by April or May, I'd guess...

***

Cromlechs of snow

It is 24 degrees below zero, counting the wind chill factor. This is not the clime for magnolia blossoms. I have a great desire to sit under a magnolia tree in July heat and listen for the petals arching open.

Today I wore my immense Blueberry (a jacket so fat with feathers that it can stand up on its own like a great blue headless dwarf) on an outing to Oneonta--a queenly procession to Royal Chrysler. The solenoid has not been my friend of late.

Despite the fact that taking cars for repairs is one of my least favorite things to do--and that I spent eight aggravating hours doing it last week--I had a marvelous drive. Delicate white falls tumbled from roofs on either hand. Snow whipped in streams over the road, and on the way back I saw fairy-like snow devils and huge rings of dancing veils, like light, effervescent spirits released from some Megalithic cromlech. Long ago I remember seeing the stone circle called "Dancing Maidens." Local folklore declared that young girls had been dancing on Sunday and so were turned to stone . . . I pulled over by a field of snow and stubble to watch three ethereal merry-go-rounds of snow flying up and dissolving and forming again. The scene was utterly joyous and lovely, with a touch of the dangerous, and seemed to speak of the everlasting vigor that pours through the broken, beautiful world.

***

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--Yeats, again

***

The pictures are from the Fairbanks Ice Festival, and are among a large batch that landed in my email. If anybody knows the proper source to credit, please tell me! The rest are wonderful, but both of these are right for today because they are cold but "dance."

***

If you missed my piece on Drum Hadley, please pop down for a read . . .

Stars & ice, with Postscript

Snowflakes in the hair: so very romantic, six months straight. Or seven, or eight. Fall swept by too quickly. The last colored leaves are a transparent, thin red that lets the sun right through.

Hard for a Southerner not to feel a tinge mournful by the fall's fifth or sixth light snow. This year I missed the yellow wood that materializes in Cooper Park. All those half-invisible trees become wholly visible in October. But this year the leaves were not so bright and fell early. I wished for the yellow wood; I wished for the bright yellow pools that lie around the trees on emerald grass. The weird autumn twilight this far north goes straight to the heart, a message one can't help reading.


Here's a little poem I wrote long ago, about a young woman who lived on the shores of Mirror Lake, Lake Placid. She and her boyfriend lived on either side of the lake. One evening they told her family that they were going to marry. Then they crossed the lake to tell his family the news. As they returned, she fell through the ice.

The story felt entirely kindred to me, back then. I tried to write this poem many times. Once I typed my long hair around the platen* of my electric typewriter (so long ago!) when I tried to write it. Eventually it emerged very easily. But of course it never matched the dream in my head.

Now I live by an often-frozen lake. Last year Susquehanna the chocolate lab fell through the ice while walking with my husband (2:00 a. m., naturally.) Suppose I ought to write one for her as well!


Snow House Stories
To Michael


Our district's bedtime tales of snow are cruel.
The steps of toddlers, moving back and forth
Between two doors, the sled runs to a pond.

At Mirror Lake a woman slipped through ice
And drank the cold. In blue twilight she saw
Lucent souls of lost unlucky children

Suspended in the ice, or floating past
In sodden hoods and gowns, unharmed by smiles
Of pike. Claire spoke; then she forgot all words.

The man detected nothing. Logged, his sleeve
Now strained in silence that the blackbirds fled.
He felt the world attending as he fished.

Next he could feel the stars kneel at his back.
And he could feel the planets stare to think.
Then particles were getting in his eyes.

And afterward he proved the orphic voice
To be a kind of choking, stop and start.
The leastmost tendril crept across his wrist.

She didn't want to come. She didn't want
That birth. Claire wanted nothing. Still, she was
Upraised by hair from water's placid womb.

It seemed there was no link with nature's dark.
And after all, she lived. The neighbors sprang
From shining homes to help him lift her forth.

The snow kept on, tireless, wide spaced as stars.


From Claire (Louisiana State University Press, 2003); originally published in Carolina Quarterly

Slip down the page for the last batch of poetry aphorisms. Perhaps I'm done with those. Thanks to everybody who let me know the ones they liked best--and any more comments in that line will be welcome and interesting to me. And thanks to all for reading.

CREDITS: Chris LaCroix of London, Ontario took the picture above, "Ice shots on Lake Erie 3." He says: "These are shots of ice formations, taken about 300 yards out from shore on Lake Erie at Port Stanley, Ontario." Thanks to him and www.sxc.hu/.

****************
I’m a ‘Spotlight’ poet for the second time at The HyperTexts. This means that Mike Burch says some attractive things about my poems on the Current and Back Issues page, and that Spotlight links there and on the home page will take the reader to a group of my poems, most already published elsewhere. You can see a goodly selection of other poets who like to fool with form under the “Contemporary Poets” section on the home page. Other interesting things appear as well—poets of the Holocaust, poetry in translation, and more. Links to poems by the editors appear at the foot.

*Thanks to my dear mother for writing me that "a typewriter has a platen, not a patten." I thought it wasn't quite right, but unfortunately there are sooo many people on the web who think that it is a patten that I figured they were right. Next time, the OED.