Cats, sticks, ducks, geese, fish, Time Immemorial and oatmeal, with nuts, berries, peaches and milk

I've just got to move along, get this blog out of the way and get on to other things. Yesterday, after I posted the series that ended with beautiful Molly, I took a decent walk, and then a fifteen-mile bike ride.

On the walk I saw Jessie James, peering at me through the sticks.

I saw that the ice had melted off the tiny pond the kids named "Little Lake" when they were little. Geese and ducks had stopped by to visit, perhaps to make goslings and ducklings.

Melanie and Charlie invited those of us who were not in Arizona over for an Easter dinner of salmon, halibut, salad and potato salad.

Oh, my goodness... was it good!

Poor Bear Meech. He wanted it but he couldn't have it.

Then we went to the play, Time Immemorial, written, directed and acted by Allison Warden and Jack Dalton. 

Here is Allison and Jack, after the play.

I wish I had time to write more and to edit and post a few pics from the play, but I don't.

This morning, just before I woke up, I got a call from Niece Sujitha in Bangalore. She asked me what I was going to have for breakfast. Oatmeal, I told her. She wanted to see proof, just in case I changed my mind and went out to breakfast again.

So here it is: my oatmeal, with black berries, peaches, walnuts and milk.

Jim joined me, but didn't eat any.

Or maybe he just used my knee as a stepping stone, on his way to another place.

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Speak, Poet!

One week from today I leave here to go north and I have a HUGE amount of work to do between now and then and so, when I finally settled back into my office late Monday after driving Margie to the airport, taking a bike ride, etc., I had determined that I was going to keep other distractions to a minimum. 

Even this blog. It is my real work, yet it can be a distraction. I planned to keep this blog extremely simple for the remainder of that time - perhaps one, no more than three, photos a day with simple, brief, narrative - perhaps nonsensical, so that I would not have to spend time thinking at all. I would not go off and do anything new. If anybody contacted me with a request that I do this or that, which they surely would and already have, I would just have to say "no, not now... too busy!"

Maybe I would skip two or three days blogging altogether. I just was not going to let myself be distracted from this work I must do.

So I came home from my bike ride and immediately opened up Facebook and the first thing that I saw was a picture posted by Allison Akootchook Warden, Iñupiaq poet, playwright and actress. Five poets were pictured, included her and Leah Frankson, another Iñupiaq poet who is also a hair stylist and who now cuts my hair - which these days is beyond styling.

The caption read simply:

Epic gathering of Alaskan Poets in Palmer...

This gathering was going on at that moment.

As it happened, Allison plays a part in the project on which I have a huge amount of work to do, so I thought, "I will go see what this epic gathering of poets is all about and maybe I can work something of Allison there into my huge, huge, impossible, project."

So, not knowing what it was about, I rushed to Palmer, expecting to find maybe a couple of dozen of Alaska's most venerated and accomplished poets walking around, speaking in verse, uttering wise and clever utterances.

What I found was in some ways even better than that. It was an epic gathering of high school student poets from Palmer and Wasilla, gathered together to participate in a Brave New Voices, a poetry slam. Allison, Leah and the other noted adult poets that had been in the posted picture had spent the day in the schools of Palmer and Wasilla working with the young poets, preparing them for the slam.

Unfortunately for me, all the students participating in the slam had recited their poems - except for one, Collette Bailey, pictured right here, who was just stepping onto the stage.

She raised her hand into the air.

"Speak, poet!" the crowd shouted.

And so Collette Bailey, Poet, began to speak. To be quite honest, I knew I would have very little time to try to figure out a picture and so I did not catch the full meaning of her words. I did catch the cadence and atmosphere, though, and it felt surprisingly deep to me - as if the words that had been written and were now being spoken had come from the mind of someone who had lived long, had experienced much, had felt deep pain and had wandered long through both the darkness and light of life.

So that is all that I can tell you about the poem written and recited by Collette Bailey and hers was the only poem of the slam competition that I heard at all.

The judges, who paid strict attention to every word that she spoke and who, of course, are all brilliant people who understand all the nuance of poetry and who have read and wept over all the master works ever written since God struck verse onto stone tablets and even before that when God chastised Cain for spilling the bloods of his innocent brother Able to vanish into the dirt, never to spawn future generations, were mighty impressed.

When I saw these numbers, I thought perhaps the last would be first.

We wouldn't know for awhile. Even though they had cast their numbers, the judges had some things to figure out before the winners could be announced.

So, for a spell, poets milled about and posed for pictures.

Then there was a short period of open mic, where poets could recite for pleasure and not competition. One of those who did was Kat Chudnofsky. For some reason, when she took the stage and gestured with her hands, my mind went back to India, to Soundarya's wedding.

Kat took her bows.

Allison, Leah and Leah's daughter Kavi Pearl listen to the open mic recitations.

The judges still needed a little more time. So the crowd began to sing, "There's lots to do at the Y-M-C-A..."

And then the winners were called onto the stage. Kat had taken first, Allie Harrington, left, second and Collette third.

The winning students poets then posed with the adult accomplished poets who had worked with them, they include, from left to right: Trey Josey, Leah, Allison, Kima Hamilton, B. Hutton and the current Alaska State Writer Laureate, Peggy Shumaker.

A post such as this should just be dripping with verse, but I figured that if I could get a small sample from each of the three winners, that would have to do it. So I tried to pull them together, but Collette had disappeared immediately after adjournment. Allie took down my email address which she was then to share with Kat and hopefully they might get it to Bailey as well, so that all three could send me a sample of verse.

As it worked out, I heard back only from Allie, who sent me three lines from her poem, Feeling Unreal.

Three lines, from all that verse. Yet, somehow, as a dreamer, these three lines strike me as just perfect, the very lines to close with:

"I want you to feel unreal.

I want you to be excited to wake because

dreaming is beginning to seem boring."

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How yesterday's fictitious post oddly foreshadowed today's true one; shoe in the wire, death beneath the jet trail, the street sweeper and the King James Bible

Here's the truth - I completely made up that story yesterday about Margie wanting to eat Jim after she grew so hungry that she became somewhat irrational but came out of it after I fed her an orange. Yes - I hate to shock and disillusion my billions of devoted readers who dote upon my every word as absolute gospel truth, but yes, I made the whole story up.  

But, leaving Jim out of it, that story in some ways became true after we went to bed.

Somewhere between 3 and 4 AM, she woke me up with these words, "Bill, what is happening to me?" A story that is a little too long and complicated for me to tell here in its entirety then unfolded over the next 45 minutes or so. To keep it simple, she had been so tired at bedtime that she had slept right through the symptoms of impending diabetic shock that would normally cause her to wake up and treat them before they became a problem.

When she awoke me, she was deep into that shock - worse than at any previous time in her life. So much so that I feared she may have suffered a stroke. She was completely disoriented, her torso hot and her legs and feet cold and hardly movable.

In the end, I gave her some orange juice. She drank it.

It took a little while for the sugar to kick in, but once it did, everything was okay after that.

As to the shoe in the wire, we saw this astounding sight in Anchorage, where we had stopped at a red light on the corner of "C" Street and Sixth Avenue. The light turned green, just as I took the picture.

On our way to Anchorage, Margie had called Charlie so that he could meet us with a jacket that Melanie had been keeping for Margie to take to Arizona as an 81st birthday present for Margie's mom, Rose Roosevelt.

Having been spoiled by Alaska's Kaladi Bros. coffee and left unable to enjoy the coffee they can get locally, Lavina's family had also requested that Margie bring some down for them. So Charlie picked up two big bags and brought that, too. Our intent was to reimburse Charlie, but he refused to accept the reimbursement.

Those two bags probably cost at least $20.00 bucks each, but Charlie said Jake and Lavina had fed him plenty and there was no way we could force him to take reimbursement.

Here is Margie, waiting to check her bags in at Alaska Airlines. There is another complicated story here that I am not going to take the time to tell - save to say that, when it comes to air travel, I miss the days before paranoia became official policy.

Anyway, thanks to the very helpful lady at the Alaska Airlines baggage check in, everything got worked out, Margie entered security, got through, boarded her plane and, after a layover in Seattle, reached Phoenix a bit before 11:00 PM last night.

Her original ticket would have put her there a little over two weeks ago and she would have come home this weekend. However, Mariddie Craig, the wife of my late friend, Vincent Craig, called me a couple of weeks back to tell me that they were going to hold a one year memorial in the Apache way for Vincent on May 14 and she asked me to come.

So Margie changed her schedule so that she would get down there in time for her mother's birthday and then stay through the memorial. She will return with me on May 19.

A week ago last Sunday, at this very corner in Wasilla, I photographed an impending nightmare that I feared was about to come true. Indeed, yesterday, it did come true. Yesterday, we had to send in our income tax and we owed.

I fear we might wind up living on the street yet.

That fellow dancing at the side of the road while I wait for the red light to turn green is the Liberty Tax mascot. It would be his last day at this job. Unless he already had something else lined up, as of today he is out of work.

Before I reached home, I stopped at the Post Office. I did not find any mail in our box, but I did find this dog in this car, patiently waiting for its human.

That's what dogs tend to spend huge portions of their lives doing - they patiently wait for their humans.

Some dogs do get pretty impatient, though.

Especially little dogs.

After I got home, I parked the car, got my bike and went off on a ten-mile pedal, which included the usual stop at Metro Cafe. As I pedaled up the bike trail on Nelson Avenue, this guy commented about my camera so I stopped and we chatted a bit.

He said he is a commercial fisherman and fishes out of southeast. He speculated that I must have plenty of good things to photograph while pedaling around Wasilla - moose and wildlife, mountains, etc., and said if I had been here just days earlier, a young man had died just beyond from crack cocaine. That would have made some photographs, he said.

I told him the jet flying overhead with him standing just beneath would make a good photograph and he agreed. So here it is.

As to the death, I checked the police reports up to today's April 19 date as reported in the online Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and found no mention of it. However, the most recent date referenced in the April 19 report was April 10, so maybe the reporting is delayed. I will check future reports, but at the moment I cannot confirm it.

I suppose that I could call the Wasilla police department and see if I could confirm it, but that would be too much like I was trying to be a real news reporter here, instead of just a guy pedaling around on his bike with a camera, taking superficial note of this and that, interested more in impression than hard facts.

Anyway, I am too lazy and I have too many other things to do.

I will leave it to the Frontiersman and see if they come up with anything.

I had my iPhone with me, my headphones plugged in and I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR. There was a story on about the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible.

In recent decades, other language-dumb-downed versions of the Bible have become more popular, but none carry the beauty of language that can be found in King James. The reporter made that very point and showed how the language of the King James Bible has permeated the culture in everything from popular music to the speeches of Presidents in times of national crisis, from Lincoln to Obama.

Several quotes were aired and all were beautiful. At the very moment I pedaled by this street sweeper, the 2003 quote of President George W. Bush speaking to the nation after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster came into my ears:

'In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power, and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.'

I do not like much about George W. Bush. I do not generally like the sound and intonations of his voice.

But I have to tell you, in this instance, speaking these words from the King James Bible, I heard nothing but beauty.

Pure beauty.

After I got home, I gave in to temptation and opened up Facebook - an amazing tool but also the greatest time-waster and destroyer of productivity ever invented.

On the page of my friend, Allison Akootchook Warden, I saw a picture of her in the midst of other poets, including Leah Frankson, Iñupiat poet of Point Hope who now cuts my hair in Anchorage.

Under the picture was this title:

Epic gathering of Alaskan Poets in Palmer...

Whatever the gathering was about, it was happening at that very moment.

I was hot and sweaty from pedaling my bike and hardly presentable, but, without knowing what the gathering was about, I hopped into the car and dashed off to Palmer.

I missed most of it, but got there before it ended.

Check back tomorrow if you want to know what it was all about.

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Two Iñupiat poets who did a reading in Anchorage

For almost a week now, I have been delaying this post on these two Iñupiat poets, Cathy Tagnak Rexford and d g nanouk okpik. That's because on the Monday after they did their reading at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, as part of the Still North series, they drove out to Wasilla and I met them at Kaladi Bros. 

It was then that I came to understand that, not only were they superb poets, but they have led amazing lives.

I wanted to tell at least a tiny portion of their life stories, but to properly do so, I needed some time that I did not have. I kept thinking that I would find that time the next day, but each day would pass and the time would not materialize for me.

And now I am about to leave for Barrow.

I do plan to tell their story in a special edition of Uiñiq Magazine that I am working on. I do not think that I will have time to write it until I put the issue together. Perhaps, after it comes out, I will find an excuse to revisit Cathy and d g and put the story here, for readers who will not see Uiñiq Magazine.

So, for now, I will just say this: they are close relatives, who grew up not even knowing about each other. d g did not even know she was Iñupiaq. As a baby, for complicated reasons, she was adopted out to a white family in Anchorage. Her adopted parents never told her she was adopted, they raised her as if she were white, but she noticed that she wasn't.

She wanted to find out who she was and therein began a long story that took her to an Indian college in Northwestern Montana, where she learned the spiritual ways of the people from that part of the country. Due to privacy laws, she could learn nothing about her origins but, after prayers and a sweat with her friends and mentors in Montana, she set out on a journey that took her to see Senator Ted Stevens and that ultimately led her to what might seem a chance reunion with her mother, or perhaps one that was not chance at all, but guided. Later, she met Cathy at a Lower 48 powwow and then wound up going to school with her at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Both are accomplished and published poets who work to find and encourage other young Native writers.

The reading of poetry that they did was from their works published in the book, Effigies.

With their generous permission, I include a poem from each here.

A Wind Drives Over the Waters

by Cathy Tagnak Rexford

A small brown Dukha girl

offers her hand

bearing black medicine

to a short fine haired reindeer

a wind drives over northern Mongolian taiga.

A round aged Inupiaq woman

stretches wet sealskin

over white driftwood

lashing tightly with oiled sinew

a wind drives over Northern Alaskan tundra.

A stout fearless Inuit boy

sits on softened spruce branches

daydreams of spearing the land

as lichen islands surface in salt water

a wind drives over treeless Nunavut plains.

A tall agile Yuit man

treading on fragrant wet moss

watches breathless - a rusting of the soil

A wind drives over Chukotkan sedges.

Cathy Tagnak Rexford, reading.

Cathy Tagnak Rexford takes her bow.

The standing-room only crowd listens, some with eyes eyes closed to better to see the mental images evoked by the words of the poets.

Foist

by d g nanouk okpik

Bones surfaced on the old land

as the earth thaws and cracks.

In Kuukpik area we find them,

let no one be in any doubt,

of the remedy from Anatkuq,

for the red illness. She prepares

the poultice in the mortar bowl,

Cotton grass, seal liver, rainwater.

The soil rattles with bleached

ivory bones, bones clack and claw,

at the walls of glaciers melting,

crossing all darkness into grey.

I roam in a sideslip of clouds,

I paint a sign used in music,

algebra, marking in the direction

of light-shadow, as if for a fossil record.

I meet her bringing lead pieces

for making spark, pumice burns slowly.

Coldest moon reacts to the equinox,

the age of the earth is already intact.

d g nanouk okpik reads.

d g nanouk okpik takes her bows. She made her beautiful deerskin and fur outfit, which reflects both her Inupiaq heritage and that of the Lower 48 Indians who gave her guidance, herself.