The Monthly Overview for February 2021 is live on my Patreon! This is a Patrons-only feature: three cards and three runes to give you a preview of the month ahead.
Thank you, as always, my wonderful Patrons!
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[Image description: A teaser screenshot of the Monthly Overview spread, with just a hint of the cards and runes showing.]
Today’s poem speaks to me on a deep level. I have almost 40 blank notebooks and journals, patiently waiting on the shelf of my study for their turn to be of service.
Notebooks
—Allison Joseph
What good are notebooks?
—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
I crave them as if craving something carnal,
blankness of pages erotic, clean with sensual
possibilities and ready to be dampened
by my insistent ink, swirls of language
made plain on thin blue lines taut
as tightrope. I collect them like other women
collect shoes or boyfriends, fingering pristine
pages while standing hushed in aisles
of bookstores and stationery shops,
stroking plush-covered ones with a single
finger, loving floral-print ones more
than actual flowers, needing another and
another until my house is overrun
with them, and they start arranging
cocktail hours and support groups—
for the ones I have not written in
grow lonely, and the ones managing
the burden of my desperate handwriting
need someone to talk to, peers to confide in
about these dog-eared secrets and semi-scribbled
imaginings, covert half-truths, outright lies.
How they congregate around my bed,
waiting for me to pick one up, start
another hazy page of scrawls and arrows,
cross-outs and restarts, confessions
that will never be confessions until
I judge them fit for judgment. Sometimes
when fate has flattened me with its one
hard fist, only the black-and-white
composition notebooks of childhood
will do, marbled covers unchanged
from when I first learned cursive—
one letter reaching for the next
in the crazy tilting of my untested hand.
Only those wide-ruled lines will do,
those patient beginnings.
[Image description: A stack of notebooks of various sizes and colors.]
Weekly Insight from the Oracles for January 25, 2021
The Weekly Insight from the Oracles for January 25, 2021 is live on my Patreon!
Many thanks to my amazing Patrons!
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[Image description: A teaser screenshot of this week’s Insight from the Oracles, with just a hint of the cards and runes showing.]
Today, I woke up in a country that is led by people who understand that science is good and fascism is bad. What a wonderful morning!
[Image description: A double rainbow against a blue sky, over green field with trees at the back.]
The Snow Arrives After Long Silence
—Nancy Willard
The snow arrives after long silence
from its high home where nothing leaves
tracks or strains or keeps time.
The sky it fell from, pale as oatmeal,
bears up like sheep before shearing.
The cat at my window watches
amazed. So many feathers and no bird!
All day the snow sets its table
with clean linen, putting its house
in order. The hungry deer walk
on the risen loaves of snow.
You can follow the broken hearts
their hooves punch in its crust.
Night after night the big plows rumble
and bale it like dirty laundry
and haul it to the Hudson.
Now I scan the sky for snow,
and the cool cheek it offers me,
and its body, thinned into petals,
and the still caves where it sleeps.
