On Hiatus

Dear Readers - A Driveable Feast is going on hiatus. I'm not sure for how long but I will let you know when I know.  In the meantime I want to thank you for these 3 years (!) I have loved writing for you, reading your comments, listening to stories of things you and your family have done or read or watched or learned more about after first discovering them here.   Thank you for sharing yourselves with me and lovingly accepting the parts of myself I have been privileged to share with you.

I leave you, for the moment, with some interesting news.  This week,  Governor Brown appointed Juan Felipe Herrera as the next poet laureate for the State of California. Herrera is a poet, an artist and a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. He is the author of 28 books including several for children.

You can, and I hope you will, find his website here.

I Am Merely Posing for a Photograph

By Juan Felipe Herrera

I am merely posing for a photograph.

Remember, when the Nomenclature

stops you, tell them that—“Sirs, he was posing

for my camera, that is all.” . . . yes, that may just work.

My eyes:

clear, hazel like my father’s, gaze across the sea, my hands at my side, my   

legs spread apart in the wet sands, my pants crumpled, torn, withered, my   

shirt in rags, see-through in places, no buttons, what a luxury, buttons, I   

laugh a little, my tongue slips and licks itself, almost, I laugh, licks itself   

from side to side, the corners of my mouth, if only I could talk like I used   

to, giggle under moonlight, to myself, my arms destitute, shrunken, I   

hadn’t noticed, after so many years sifting through rubble stars, rubble toys,   

rubble crosses, after so many decades beseeching rubble breasts—pretend I   

came to swim, I am here by accident,

like you.

My face to one side.

Listen to gray-white bells of rubble, the list

goes on—the bones, hearts, puffed intestines,

stoned genitalia, teeth, again I forget how

to piece all this together, scraps, so many scraps,

lines and holes.

The white gray rubble light blinds me,

wait, I just thought—what if this is not visible,

what if all this is not visible.

Listen here, closely:

I am speaking of the amber thighs

still spilling nectar on the dust fleece across Gaza,

the mountains, the spliced wombs across Israel, Syria.

The amber serums cut across all boundaries,

they smell incense, bread, honey—the color

of my mother’s hands, her flesh, the shrapnel is the same color

the propellers churn.