The Abandoned Forest

There is no gauging
your direction. The forest stands on a gorge,
so you climb to the horizon.
The sun is dim, and the pines are the purple of a canyon
standing in a faded dress.
Patches of snow dot the ground.
I know the tree roots to hold, how to test my feet
as they find another spot. I could go on taking tender steps longer than the light. We always did,
when we were twelve and found it.
Now I stay in one place a long time, and don’t have
a pine lot free from cars, dog walkers, lawns.
I wouldn’t walk past Posted signs.
I haven’t listened to my feet crunching in the snow
or felt the moisture of my breath through my scarf
for years. I don’t have my sisters on the slope with me.
There is no plastic sled
dragging behind me on a rope.
It was an ordinary place we got to on foot. We left it the way it was,
and turned back many times squinting in the white grey purple, to see each other, bright life in that sleeping place.
The pale orange needles underneath us
bound to me now because it was just an afternoon
and we lived nearby.
This February I am gentle even with myself and say, “remember?”
I would rather tell you that I stand up
all of a sudden in the kitchen many times
looking around at what is there and I worry for the future that I must plan, and conceive of, and carry out, and live inside, and fill up, and in which I must earn
something from strangers that no one ever gets: their good specific opinion.
Maybe I want to be a tree and be cut down for paper.
Tonight there are deer standing in the brown cords
of snow-rumpled orchards by the gorge where
my abandoned forest is. Raccoon and rabbit might stray to the slope and stand where we did. In the morning, grackles in the trees will call out their strange songs. Look how I tell you everything: that the shadow of a pine lot
will be purple as the trees age! That there must have been
other trees but pines, young trees I held the roots of, trying to move forward,
to climb up. Must be I need to tell you
that I will get over my present panic;
that I already know how to fall away from myself,
fall away, and come home.

-Amy D'Amico

Small Book Press Fair, zines, too

http://www.slipstreampress.org/index.html



Slipstream is out of Niagara Falls, one of the best poetry reviews I've read. They are hosting a Small Press Book Fair in Buffalo, NY, in March. A booth is $20 for an individual. I'm terrified to go, of course. It's so far, she whined. And I have school!



But I thought some stranger wandering down this corridor should go. Meet other zinesters.

Maybe sell a couple pieces a paper.



Info on the event is at the above website.

website for Rochester NY, also Mastermind

http://www.davidpascal.com/wir/index.html takes you on a virtual tour of what Rochester NY's writing scene has to offer. I had heard of Hazmat and Boa, but the rest was new to me.
And apparently there are 400-some bloggers dishing out info on Rochester and writing. I feel like I just got here. I knew about Writers and Books, and there's a free workshop at St John Fisher every month called Write the Nite Away (which blows in my opinion), but its part of the scene too.

Someone I want to mention is Robert Ricks. I did some of the editing of his first book Mastermind, so I'm biased, but if you really want to know what it's like to live here, Mastermind delivers the package.

Momo

The best strange book I ever read was Momo. It's an out of print book about a band of children fighting the Time Insurance industry. Everyone in the town buys the insurance, and start to owe it Time. You can never catch up. Qualities like craftsmanship are deemed unnessary, because your Time is no longer yours, and no longer enough. Sitting around telling stories or just spending Time with each other is considered beyond wasteful. Practically illegal.

This book is more in touch with the reality of day-to-day life in America than any I have ever read. Our Time is not our own, we can't catch up, we are always behind, and we can't spend our time with our families without sacrificing the heat bill or the rent.

Writing a poem for three hours or three days is the only way to sustain the brain's connection to the powerful truth below the surface. I suppose other people have found other ways. Meditation. Doing anything slowly and well. Gratification and suffering hold hands.

In between the poems, the driving, the schoolwork, the meetings, the sycophant relationships with people, Laura gives me Momo and I am again comforted that others--this writer I can't remember the name of!-- are looking for the odd translation of what is going on.

Two kids later I don't edit forty times. I write what is necessary, gliding from poem to poem and wondering why all the unsteadiness.

"I" begins to sound young. "You", demanding. "She", pretentious.

I don't have enough material to start a blog, but I start one anyway. Something to force me out the door, to wander from poet to poet, to share what I have found so far.

A FEW BOOKS or POETS THAT SAVED ME FROM DESPAIR OF THE AMERICAN POETRY SCENE

THE DOLLMAKER'S GHOST
YOUR WHOLE LIFE
Ruth Stone
THE HALFBREED CHRONICLES
Jim Daniels