novel lean

Photo

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:42:45 -0600

I’ve been wishing this existed, so I made it.

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 17:35:00 -0600

I’ve been wishing this existed, so I made it.

You’ve been warned.

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:25:00 -0600

You’ve been warned.

Spring is here, kind of.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:12:15 -0600

Spring is here, kind of.

Santa Fe Plaza

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:07:00 -0600

The men walk as if through the Arch of Constantine

riding their legs like chariots

conquistadors of the beaten path

clearing the unwild in saddle-soaped boots

The women swish and pause as if their denim were flamenco skirts, intuit the tempo from their dance partners admiring the bejeweled

portal, swish and pause, they demure at Puebloan knees, Navajo hemlines, they swish and pause to the beat of reverential disinterest

Our family and the Arizona book bans

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:19:09 -0600

Our family and the Arizona book bans

I learned how to do a breakout photo.

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:50:30 -0600

I learned how to do a breakout photo.

Home Editing

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:51:00 -0700

Kill your darlings is one of the writing terms which has become a mantra to me over the last year of homemaking.

You’ll hear in writing courses and author’s workshops across the nation: Kill your darlings. Supposedly advice from Faulkner, “kill your darlings” means letting go of your work—even when it is beautiful, hard-won work—in order to make progress in a piece of writing. That beautiful landscape description your readers will simply skip? That character you spent months developing but turns out to be unimportant to the plot? Off with their heads. On with your work.

Kill your darlings is one of the writing terms which has become a mantra to me over the last year of homemaking. It is a cliché, but one which forces me to recognize that I’m hardly the first person to paint nearly the entire room only to realize I hate the color. It comforts me with the idea that I won’t be the last person to stop wasting water on a garden that isn’t panning out. Let it dry and die. Sorry, darlings.

Making a home is writing. It combines what is already available, like a blank sheet of paper, with human creativity and work, work, work. The longer you work at it, like writing a long story, the harder it seems to start over. Even if I hate how my work is turning out, there is the moment when evaluating the loss of time and effort makes me cling to the work stronger.

Yet like writing, taking care of a home is a practice in which you never truly start over; you are always building on the work you have done. When you wipe the surface clean, the work remains in what you know, the way you carry yourself forward; it is in your fingers and flows through the next project.

Last year, which was my first year in my first real home, I spent the summer moving gravel from the backyard to the front yard. Tons of rock—as in weight, not hyperbole. I built a sieve and separated sandy soil from grey rock one shovel at a time. After nearly a year’s work, the new area of rock in the front yard looked like a modern, clean, maintainable entrance to our home. It was perfect.

Less than a month later, as spring neared, I realized the new rock was the only strip of land suitable for a garden on the entire property. I had a few minutes of mourning my darling before grabbing my shovel. I’ve now spent two months back at the sieve, and as I have shoveled I have come to realize something: I do not regret a single thing I have ever written. Not one dramatic diary entry, not one meaningless blog post, not the memoir pieces I’ll never pursue publishing because they are too close to my heart. For each I suffered, in the moment, some form of disappointment, embarrassment or confusion on which way to move forward. In time, each has seemed so obviously like the sieve and muscle I built over the course of the past year. It doesn’t matter where the rock is because I already know I have the power to move it. Should I lose this home tomorrow, I would not regret the hours lost standing over that sieve.

A poetry professor once asked my class when a poem was finished. Authors like Emily Dickinson are famous for having several versions of poems for which there is no authoritative final version. We concluded that a poem was likely never finished. There are obvious milestones, like line 14 of your sonnet or the first publication, but an author could tinker with a line break for the rest of his life and consider each edit to be the true poem. Such it is for my home: always a work in progress, yet always the best version I’ve come up with yet.

Inventory

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:05:00 -0700

Some days, the museum smells like rawhide bones in a pet store, not rotten but paused in a stage of decomposition ideal for shelving and inventory. Some days, the air is foul and new specimens can be tasted the way saltwater air belies the ocean long before it is seen. Today, the doors open wide for bones on grey carts, then bones on grey carts, and the museum smells only like sand blown in from the mesa.

Rooster walking through Albuquerque’s North Valley

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:54:17 -0700

Rooster walking through Albuquerque’s North Valley

Walk to Chimayo

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:12:00 -0700

We trod to Chimayo on earth the color of sunburned flesh that refuses then fuses with the sky. The horizon is as blue and bent as an egg. The feet we follow swing outward in long, regular strides; sand crunches in time with the strumming of his guitar. The song is neither joyful nor mournful but simply requests from the hills: El Señor, El Señor.

Mock banner ad for practice

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:03:34 -0700

Mock banner ad for practice

I had to take this down and fix the color, so this is a repost...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:26:00 -0700

I had to take this down and fix the color, so this is a repost from me. I’m slowly feeling more in control of Photoshop, though I still make silly, project-ruining mistakes. I’m looking at you, CYMK.

Mine all mine.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:06:00 -0700

Mine all mine.:

“No one puts stickers on Mama’s aquarium! NO ONE!”

Bug guard.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:04:25 -0700

Bug guard.

duckpondhouse on Flickr.

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:30:52 -0600

duckpondhouse on Flickr.

Sappy poem, or, Our Piñon is Dying

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:47:00 -0600

Our piñon poses as if to fruit this afternoon, threatens the horizon with sticky fists of prenatal cones, the fetal mummies who will dry at the tips of Piñon’s fingers. It was going to be a boom year.

Change in Plans

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:03:13 -0600

I want to let you know, I will no longer write poetry as I’ve come to understand everyone knows

long hair is as important as rainfall, is rainfall, And we won’t be needing my iteration

since science, Thank God, has us covered

Suffering looks gaudy in that ornate frame I’ve got it in, hand me a pencil thin margin of silicon grey.

Ah, that is crisp.

Delamar 1

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:48:04 -0700

The gentleman cursing his hollyhocks leaves a sack of their seeds on our doorstep, You’ll never be rid of them. Lois recalls her 1965 Boston arrest for standing up, feminine and angry, Mind you with a microphone. The newspaper clipping is gone, but her refrain leaves no doubt, One more thing before I go. The baby wails, welcoming the coo of the northern fence shadows, Been more than twenty-five years. What do you say we throw the black confetti west, water the sand and hope for years of pestilent harvests? I’ll start at the apricot stones, we’ll convene among the barren trunks set to be pulled out in spring.

Lines for Benito

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:53:00 -0700

I grew up where Spanish moss was velvet swag,

every yard a parlor draped in heavy old-world style

The canopy over sloshing ground, a second atmosphere,

a fort of kitchen chairs and blankets

under the roof of a childhood home.

I was born into air so faintly less steaming and thick

than the amniotic fluid I left, you were sure I had gills

those nights you lay beside me, gasping.