Alison McGhee's Blog, page 51

Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)

[image error]See those flowers to the left there, depicted in my usual crappy cell-phone photo way?

You, unlike me until early this morning, probably knew immediately that they were delphiniums.

You, unlike me, would probably have remembered that three years ago you chose a packet of perennial flower seeds the way you choose most packets of flower seeds - because they are perennials (why not get the most bang for your buck?) and because of the beautiful non-cell phone photo on the front of the packet - and ...

You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

[image error]Last weekend she found herself behind the wheel of a medium-sized automobile, driving north an hour and a half from Westchester County Airport to Route 22. She had a sheaf of directions with her, because she had only been to the cemetery, Irondale Cemetery, once.

"It's a quick left," she had been told. "Keep a sharp eye out. We usually miss the entrance and have to turn back."

She kept a sharp eye out. On the way up Route 22 her sharp eye saw a sign on the left that read "McGhee Hill," so she s...

French Roast

[image error]This morning she read about a new ice-cap sort of thing that you put on your head if you're going through chemo. It's supposed to freeze your hair follicles so that your hair doesn't fall out.

And then she read her favorite blog - Your Man for Fun in Rapidan - which, from day to day, can be about anything in the world, and it too was about hair. Facial hair. Check it out: Your Man for Fun in Rapidan.

She took this as a sign from above that she, too, should write about hair, partly because...

Prompted by a line from a poem by Wyn Cooper

"The stars have fallen onto the sheets, fallen down to sleep with me."

Lines from poems scroll continuously through me. Beginning at dawn, when I wake up, and throughout the day, lines from poems come to me, recite themselves silently in my head, in my voice, like song refrains spoken not sung.

Without poetry I would be a lost person. It's these remembered lines and fragments that translate the wildness of my heart and make it bearable. Corral the inner chaos.

Without poetry I might have to set ...

"The cook cares not a bit for toil, toil, if the fowl be plump and fat."

[image error]Your best friend taught you how to knit, and your mother sort of taught you how to purl - she's lefthanded, and she kept miming the motions of purling with her hands and then trying to reverse the process in order to explain the whole thing to you, which gives you an idea of why that "sort of" precedes the "how to purl" above - and then they sent you out into the world to make your own knitstuffs.

Leave that word alone. If foodstuffs is  a word,  then knitstuffs should be one too.

So here is...

Wouldn't the boat also be able to go by itself in the water?

[image error]She had just turned eighteen. It was the fall of her freshman year at that college in the mountains.

The college was famous for its language classes, and she was good at languages, so she signed up for Russian. It was the weirdest, for lack of a better word, language offered.

Then she received a letter stating that Chinese would now be offered. Chinese? she thought. Well. That certainly outdid Russian in its unusual-ness.

She signed up.

Chinese I met every morning from 8-9, and again every...

It Was the Spring of 1983

[image error]

[image error]She and Ellen wandered the cobblestone streets of Boston.

They stood in sunshine that fingered its way down through the tile roofs and alleys of the old brick buildings.

They went to Man Ray on the weekends, the club across the river where they were the straight girls amid the gay men.

They danced with abandon and without worry. The music was loud and they absorbed it into their bodies and their bones. It pulsed in their blood. The watched the beautiful men dancing with each other under the...

"Some Things I Say to My Dog"

[image error]There must be some reason why I originally typed in "Some Things I Say to My God" above.

Once in a while I post something from someone else's blog because I love it so much.

This is one of them. Enjoy.

Your Man for Fun in Rapidan

From a line by Maxine Kumin

And life was bleak and sweet and you

conjured yourself up inside me, a
something that began to be
and which I imagine now
still being, a grownup, much
older than I was at the time.
There you are now,
tall one, head full of curls,
turning in the doorway to smile at me.
I imagine you, all these years later,
having grown up without me
in that faraway parallel world.
This would be your birthday, and
I send my love to you
over the bridgeable divide:
You drew yourself together
from a blue wool blanket on a narrow ...

Family Circus

This is how it was:

You sat on the couch
and I climbed in your lap.
You shook out the paper and
then folded it in half, and
again into quarters, and
then smoothed it straight.
I leaned back against your
giant chest and waited.
You pointed to each panel
and read the black and white
marks above the bright picture.
When you finished one quarter,
you turned the paper over and
read the next, refolding,
smoothing, and turning.
It was Sunday.
We called them the funnies.
Your voice was a bass rumble
reverberating in...