Photo by flickr user Evil Erin.

My amateur photo session finished, I was at the window with a book about poetry-writing. The wooden seat beneath me was worn and heavily grained, and this reminded me of a photographer friend who takes a lot of pictures of woodwork. I mused that she would have taken better shots than I did, since I was not a photographer in any significant sense.

What surprised me was not this moment, of knowing I wasn’t photographer, of admitting it almost fondly in my ponderings, and silently admiring my friend. Rather, my surprise came when I opened the poetry-writing book.

“Did you think it would be easy?” the author asked, meaning, did I think that being a poet was a simple thing. The answer? Yes, I had. But suddenly, and forcefully, I understood my error.

“I am not a poet,” I said to the room, and the dog shifted a little on the braided rug near the fireplace.

Truth be told, I was not really making my statement to the room. I was dropping it into a timeline that I now recognize. I was experiencing these audible words as a turning point, or at least the offer of a turning point.

As it goes, I accepted the deal.

How long did it take to come to that point? Decades perhaps? Could I trace my poetic life back along many moments and claim a series of markers? If I wanted to make a memoir of it, I suppose I could.

But that day is when the ship began to turn, in a way I could actually feel, and I needn’t write the memoir (at least not now). On that day I took action, determining to buy more books on poetry and read more books on poets and criticism. When I returned to New York (and after I got the dog hair off my black sweater), I also began writing poetry in earnest. I opened myself to possibilities I could not even yet imagine. The imagining was not the important thing; it was the opening that counted. I had already published a book of poetry with International Arts Movement, but this was different. It was a looking forward, potentially to an entire life of poetry ahead— an odd pursuit, it seemed, considering the odds of how little renown and financial support it might lend; yet, as a professional writer, I had to consider these odds, because a person only has so much time to give, and a person must have a livelihood (though not renown, and that is probably a good thing).

Unexpected outcomes followed. That sounds so business-like! And yet that is exactly what it should sound like, because poetry is now, in significant ways, my business. It is my business in the reading and the writing of it. It is my business in the acquisition of it, for a small press I started just a year after my recognizable turning point. It is my business on Facebook, where I am happily gathering an audience for poetry. And it is my business for a daily-poetry subscription, which takes a great deal of delightful work and which I must charge a small annual fee for (99¢), to cover my costs.

It remains to be seen if I can actually live off of poetry as a business. Few have done it. Many entities that sponsor poetry are, themselves, sponsored by grants and donations. I feel unusual, focusing on a business model instead of a non-profit model. I wonder if people will think my efforts are counter to the very spirit of poetry.

Still. Once a ship begins to turn, it is exciting to stand on her and look to far-away waters, open to where you might travel—to lands of coconut trees, and jingle-shell beaches, or groves of oranges and new-ripe peaches, or even back to an old inn in Pittsburgh, to pick up some purple-bottled poetry for the uncharted days to come.

I wasn’t sure if the reviewer was trying to put Kingsolver down, but his words raised a good question: why devote a year to a stunt? Wasn’t there something inherently suspect about that? Might it not be a waste of time? What if a person’s motives were, I don’t know, stunty or something? Could a person who would do something like that be trusted?

Still, when I later came across a different year-challenge in Jim Merkel’s book Radical Simplicity, I decided to ignore the evaluation of Kingsolver’s experiment. I decided to do my own stunt, which involved nothing more than a yard, a red sled, and a cup of tea. (Okay, and zebra wasps, guerilla mosquitoes, architect spiders, and blueberry bushes whose leaves turn brilliant crimson in Fall).

Photo by Maggie Stein.

Merkel had challenged his readers to spend a year outdoors– just an hour a day,in the same natural space. We nature-stunters were supposed to try to learn about a patch of ground about 20 x 20 feet. Learn its flora and fauna, and try not to eat anything poisonous along the way.

I was tired of my indoor patch of ground, tired of a certain emptiness that had been haunting me, and tired of life feeling amorphous. So I planted my stake (or, more accurately, my kids’ plastic sled) in the ivy under my single backyard pine tree and hoped for something.

What I got cannot really be put into words (although, technically I did put some of it into words in two different books—one a poetry book and the other a spiritual memoir). Still, how does one capture a true epiphany of the sort I had during that year? How does one plumb the depths of daily solitude and what it bestows? Can it really be communicated, the discovery that a year is an invitation to return to yourself and your deepest thoughts? It goes without saying that even the annoying mosquito bites cannot be fully communicated. We are talking about raw experience, and that has an elusive quality all its own.

The year went by, as years do, day-by-day and month-by-month, until it was gone. I got rained on. I watched a peach night sky. Pine needles used my teacup as a heliport. A single feather drifted down one day, white against the backdrop of the moss-dark pine tree. It was like the gleaming detail one might find in a film. It said everything without words. It said this was no stunt, and I was loved, and I was learning to love. It said a year is always an invitation, and don’t wait for Jim Merkel to ask you.

Since then I’ve done more time. One year for a visual art pilgrimage. A year exploring dance. Twelve months for tea and now twelve for music and bread. It doesn’t matter anymore what the reviewers say. Give it a year? I’m in.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” says Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The statement is so stark. Is she really serious? Can she be that immune as to continue, “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster”?

Photo by Kelly Sauer.

The poem is a villanelle. It repeats certain lines in a set pattern. At intervals, we hear the assertion again, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Losing. Isn’t hard to master. No disaster.

Is it the promise of such poetry that tempts my daughter Sara to steal away with my new Norton Anthology, The Making of a Poem? What does she hear that convinces her it is worth reading about forms like sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, sestinas. These words sound intimidating to me, and like too much work to tackle.

The next day she asks, “Do you want to hear my villanelle?” I do not know what a villanelle is, though I remember once quoting Lauren Winner, who said she stopped blogging because she’d rather learn the art of something like, say, the villanelle.

“Sure.” I want to hear my girl’s villanelle.

Over the next few days, the conversation repeats itself in a fairly predictable pattern. “Do you want to hear my sonnet? Do you want to hear my pantoum? Do you want to hear my sestina?”

“Sure.”

I am astonished by all of it, especially the sestina. Thirty-nine lines, six end-words that must repeat in a changing pattern throughout the entire poem. I take Sara’s poem and compare it to what I see in the book. It really is a sestina. Not a flawless one, by any means, but a sestina nonetheless. My girl is a middle-schooler, and she is working harder than I am at the art of poetry.

When we possess a little natural talent for writing, we might be tempted to coast along. Why try to master these things called words? Isn’t writing an art? Doesn’t that mean we can just let things pour out as they will? I know a lot of writers who don’t work very hard, thinking this is no disaster. They set down the first thing that comes to mind, and they want that to be the end of it. I have sometimes been this kind of writer, especially when it comes to poetry.

My girl is a middle-schooler. I am not. She is working hard at poetry. I am not. So I steal away and work to change the situation.

I write about Pittsburgh, and the snow melting on Penn Avenue. I write about a booted print of water, near the head of a crow (I do not know how this head came to be lost from its body, but I write of it anyway). “I wonder if this man wants water,” I write of an accordion player, who is sharing a tune at the street market. There is an ocean and a ship, and a “Heinz red neon sign / drifting ’midst lost tune of accordion on Avenue / fading, fading like the light of morning over water.” I work very hard. It isn’t flawless, but it is a beginning.

“Do you want to hear my sestina?” I ask Sara.

“Sure,” she says.

An excerpt from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing.

Despite my feelings about firearms, I am just now thinking of buying a pistol. Because, today, my stove unilaterally changed its clock to military time. I don’t remember this option in the user’s manual. (Just what, I ask, must a stove be planning, to take such measures?)

Is the microwave in on it?

This week I have been dealing with clogged drains, a leaky ceiling, and even a flat tire on the way to the library. Thankfully, I have a Volvo, and, like the stove, it has a way with language. “Tire needs air now!” it silently observed, with a huge exclamation point above the message.

Sure enough, the Volvo was being forthright. The front tire did need air. I could see a nail with a little piece of my neighbor’s roof still attached to it, slowly causing the car to communicate in exclamation points. I paid the service station down the street to remove the nail, with a gun-like implement, and patch up the tire. This calmed the Volvo considerably, and it has gone back to talking about the weather. (“It is 50 degrees today.”)

I suppose I am overreacting just a little bit, but I can’t help thinking that the stove has less honorable intentions than the car. I wonder if it is considering vengeance for the unjust treatment of its former kitchen companion — the old sink we left under the hemlocks. After all, we thought that location would simply be a temporary shelter. We thought we’d surely sell the Depression-era appliance at a good price, to a peaceful home.

The sink is (or was) white. It is made of iron and has a built-in washer board. The drain is filled with pine needles that are morphing into mud. Where the faucets used to be, there are two holes. Sometimes I imagine a woman’s hands turning the long-gone faucets. I imagine her washing a piece of meat from an animal somebody may have shot. She turns and smiles. “Can’t you see?” she seems to be asking.

I am not sure what she wants me to notice. Is it the ease with which she turns the straight handles? The way she doesn’t have to worry that her sink will communicate with her, beyond a squeak in the left faucet? Does she want me to know that her husband shot the animal, and brought it home in a vehicle that only spoke in tail-pipe smoke signals?

She turns back to the sink, and I feel at a loss. I want to ask her, should I buy a pistol? Should I be afraid of the world I live in? Or should I just go to the basement, reset the kitchen fuse, and hope that the stove will surrender to Eastern Standard Time — without a fight.

It is not particularly in the nature of cabbage to pressure people who have too much to do and too much on their minds. Cabbages are rather humble things, yielding to knives for the sake of coleslaw and to peasant hands for a laying open to receive stuffings of onions, rice and ground beef.

The other day I met a man who knows about stuffed cabbage. He and his wife like to eat it. They also like to eat pierogies. I ate both as a child, because these foods were part of my stepfather’s Eastern European heritage. I still like the pierogies and have recently taken to buying them, but I never learned to like the glumpkis, which is what my stepfather called the stuffed cabbage, or maybe just what my mother called them because that’s what she thought he had told her.

I don’t know what the man I met called them. The word he used also began with a “g,” but it was different. I admit I was lost in my own memories and so didn’t pay close enough attention to the sound, or ask for the spelling. I was busy recalling how I had been forced to eat them, and now I’m remembering just part of why I resisted.

After all, we also dubbed these rolled packages pigs-in-a-blanket. There is no pork in the cabbage (at least there wasn’t in ours). It’s just the way the stuffed rolls look when you lay them side by side in a long glass dish: little pigs in blankets that, once baked, turn to wilted translucence, absorbing the red sauce on their backs, to finally reveal a pulse of gelatinous rice and fat innards. In contrast, I always preferred pierogies— dough half moons fried in butter, their coverings browned to a crisp, their hearts of potato and cheese kept secret, until I chose to reveal them with the pointed application of knife and fork.

Like I said before, it is not particularly in the nature of cabbage to pressure people. But I’m feeling the push, because I have a theory about something I call writing-in-place, and I want to show that is not just an idle idea but a real technique that actually works. Enter the cabbage.

At my bedside is the new print issue of Englewood Review of Books. The winning painting for their food-art contest is on the cover. It is a beautiful, artful rendering of… cabbage. The artist took a top-down view, which shows how cabbage is a fist that keeps losing its sense of holding on, as the outer leaves gradually yield to gravity and lay themselves down to sun and dew and a painter’s keen eye. In this way, a painter can capture not just the ruffles and the layers and the variance in tone, but also the very veins that thread through leaves and somehow seem to be part of the opening process.

As fate would have it, I am on the cover with the cabbage. In delicate sea-green print, I am noted to be the subject of an interview on play and prophecy in poetry. There are a few other names on the cover too, but mine is closest to the cabbage.

I remember the day I first saw the cover. “I’m on the cover with cabbage,” I observed in a Facebook status update. It amused me to say this, but now I know it has become a somewhat more serious issue. For the reality of the placement has invited me to prove my writing-in-place theory, on a day when I am overwhelmed and cannot think of a single thing to write about. Me, beside the cabbage, is a challenge to tell the world that the writer is never at a loss— nor the dancer, the painter, the musician, nor maybe even the scientist or the mathematician.

Because, somehow, rooted in place, even in place with a lowly cabbage, we have everything we need to get to the heart of things, to open the hand of time— to reveal our past and maybe to shape our unsure future.

I hadn’t known she was married, that she had eloped three years ago. She and her husband live in a small apartment and have access to a garden. They grow potatoes, chard, and zucchini by the bushels. They are researching, planning, figuring. I watch her talk about their hope like it is already reality, but the conversation feels like a dream.

My grandmother could have done it, lived off the grid. She farmed ten acres of suburban land single-handedly. The zinnias alone, not necessarily a requirement for off-the-grid living, would have impressed you with their bright abundance. They were wheels and wheels of yellow, pink, magenta, red, orange . . . colors like a dream (the kind in which you promise someone you’ll skip rope eternally in exchange for lollipops and orange soda, until you’re too old to remember you don’t like lollipops anymore).

Unlike the demands of the dream, my grandmother required nothing in exchange for the privilege of admiring her zinnias. I touched their petals, stared at the way they overlapped like huge velvety fish scales.

The zinnias were one thing; the berries, fruit trees, and vegetables were another. Once, I ate so many mulberries I stained myself and my dress purple. My mother was angry, as the story has it, but for me it was a child’s dream. Berries upon berries upon berries, until I could eat (and stain) no more.

The whole ten acres was rather like that. If the world markets had crashed and the supermarket shelves gone empty, I could have survived off the grid at my grandmother’s house. Strawberries, blueberries, cherries, plums (both yellow and purple), lettuces, string beans, cucumbers, and an acre of corn. (Once, she even offered me turtle soup, because she’d caught and cooked a snapper from the L-shaped lake that lay on the west side of her property. I didn’t eat it.) What we couldn’t finish eating fresh, for the sheer abundance of it, we could find later, lining the shelves on the way down the slate and concrete basement stairs. I have never since tasted three-quarter-inch fat sweet pickles that were anything like her signature canned (glassed?) goods.

“Where could you live off the grid?” I ask my married-three-years-now friend. Somewhere in South America, she tells me. Farming.

I laugh.

Not at her, but at the thought of me trying to do the same — live off the grid. Granted, last winter I single-handedly fed an unplanned lunch to a group of twenty snow-stranded parishioners. I found two sugar pumpkins left over from a harvest festival sponsored by the church. I peeled and chopped them (a real pioneer woman’s job), borrowed an onion from the lady next door, found some canned corn and salt and pepper and nutmeg in the cabinet (who knew these things existed above the sink before that day?), and put everything together in a surprising soup. People seemed impressed that I’d made something out of nothing, just when they thought they’d have to go hungry while waiting for the storm to abate.

The truth is every year I plant cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and other promising vegetables. I dig, prune, water, wait. Nothing much happens. I must be the only woman alive to reap a single zucchini from six plants. I put this year’s bumper crop in a sauce, since it was too small to stand on its own. In fact, my daughter asked me what it was, being that its size didn’t betray its vegetable identity.

Right now I should be planting winter rye and red clover — cover crops, to build the soil for next year’s vegetable dreams. But I know it doesn’t really matter. Come next fall, I will be looking at my gardens that pretended all summer, until they wilted into fall.

If I could find the farmerly-grandmother gene I seem to have misplaced, I might be able to move to South America and live off the grid with my friend and her husband. I could impress people with pumpkin soup made from the flesh of my own sugar pumpkins. I could harvest onions and corn. We’d have strawberries for breakfast, or plums. I could quote Willliam Carlos Williams and pretend to apologize for eating the plums someone had set aside for himself in the fridge (though perhaps there would be no fridge if we lived off the grid).

You should not be alarmed at my wishes for another reality, or the thought that you might knock on my door and find I’ve eloped with my zucchini plants to South America. Unlike my grandmother, I couldn’t feed a single person for a day with my agricultural skills. Unless dreams themselves could feed.

Morning meets our faces, lights our shoes
traipsing past chrysanthemums on Avenue;
I wonder if this smiling man wants water
even as he fingers tunes, accordion melting
Pittsburgh into Italy like blue crow bird
balancing on wires, pointing like a sign

to better days or worse days, unsign
my heart in city’s morning, under shoes
like memories of Italy if I were crow bird
coming faster than a ship to Avenue,
bringing back a tune for you, melting
from the sun, off my wings like water

and you like red accordion, under water
moved with motion slow, muffled sign
of lilting love trembled fingers melting,
lay your undulating heart like shoes
skirting ice, skirting mud on Avenue
tipping toes to sky tapping like a bird

against a building, aged, flocked with bird
and bird and bird, flicking winged water
at a golden sun, over market on the Avenue,
daring with their beaks a silver studded sign
directing cars to park like spotted shoes
that walked the day, trod your memory melting

like reflections on the glass, Pittsburgh melting
old against the morning like a crow black bird
in final flight, mocking if he could your tap of shoes
that crack and split the concrete, splash the water
of my heart, poured out like Heinz red neon sign
drifting ‘midst lost tune of accordion on Avenue

fading, fading like the light of morning over water
dreaming, dreaming for the surety of one last sign
clapping, clapping like a shoe or bird on melting Avenue.

Photo by Kelly Langner Sauer

On the third of July, I sat on my back porch with a cup of English Breakfast. I was there to write an essay about the Fourth of July. As is often my way, I look to the things around me to inform my writing path at any particular moment. It makes my life simpler to write synergistically (if you do not want to become part of my essays, you should probably leave the room, or the porch, when I begin putting words to paper).

In any case, for that patriotic day, I was searching for something just right. Nothing too controversially free-wheeling, nothing too hard-line nationalistic. Simply something to celebrate without making any big political statements.

This, of course, is the problem with letting your surroundings determine your writing path. I had brought a cup of English Breakfast to the porch. As I sat to collect my thoughts, I could not escape the irony. Why hadn’t I brought mint? Must it be English Breakfast for the Fourth of July?

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was also considering the imported orange tropical flowers in my herb garden, Benjamin Franklin’s technically “immigrant” status, and the diverse mix of people I had photographed at an evening fireworks show the night before. From a don’t-rock-the-boat standpoint, my morning writing got completely out of hand all because of the English Breakfast.

Tea can be like that. I say I drink it as a daily ritual to comfort me. But in the next moment, I say it is filled with anti-oxidants, it reduces your risk of getting cancer. Green tea helps you lose weight. Red tea helps you sleep. Tea from Granada reminds you of how you walked cobblestone streets, and bought three kinds of tea and powdered saffron in the open square. Kombucha will boost your immune system. Japanese bancha will show you listened to a Mr. Scott Calgaro’s preferences and decided to try them on, to good effect (this is the third box you have bought for yourself, organic).

That is important. The organic part. And the Fair Trade part, too. You feel a twinge of guilt wondering about the Granada tea. Who picked the oranges and dried meaty peels into little curls that smell so fragrant amidst grey-green pearls of dried leaves and petals of lavender? Who, in fact, grew and picked the lavender, too?

I say I drink my tea as a daily ritual to comfort me, and it is true. Also true are the health benefits, the Granada memories, the social connection element, and the fact that I prefer Fair Trade tea but do not always drink it because I can’t (and don’t want to) follow the path of every leaf and petal. How can it all be true? This is a source of recurring argument in my home. I say I did this or that, for that or this reason. I say five things that all seem different, and they are all true. It is like trying to wrap one’s head around the stories of ancient peoples. It is like trying to read Genesis and Darwin and come out unscathed, not once rocking the boat of truth.

When I was a little girl, I lived in a difficult family. My stepfather hid the car keys from my mother. He took the knobs off all the lamps and appliances so we couldn’t use “his” electricity. Once, he choked my sister until she turned beet red. My mother threatened him with a knife, and today, I still have a sister with whom I can drink regular old Lipton. I have long since moved on from that brand, but my gentle mother still requires it when she comes to my house for a visit. She takes it with a bit of milk and hesitates when I offer her the evaporated cane juice sugar. How can it be real if it isn’t white like the milk?

A long time ago, my mother gave me the ritual of tea. It was a comfort, like the poetry she read to me each day before the school bus came. She taught me to drink black tea with a little milk and two teaspoons of sugar. Somewhere along the line she stopped using sugar, so I did too. Today I sometimes add honey. Mostly I let the flavor of the tea stand alone, except when I add milk to something like an Earl Grey, which surely benefits from the adding. My mother is diabetic now, maybe because she started using sugar again and eating donuts alongside her tea; so, when she comes she uses just a half a teaspoon of the evaporated cane or, if she has remembered to bring it along, she uses a sugar substitute.

Today I am drinking Kombucha. I am drinking it because I feel the need for comfort, and I didn’t want to eat chocolate without the companionship of tea. I am also drinking it because my throat feels mildly sore. Kombucha is good when you are sick. So is elderberry syrup, but I put a tea bag in my fat white mug and poured steaming water over it instead. This was more artful than taking the elderberry syrup. Besides, I knew I was going to write about tea, or something altogether different.

But here is the end of the matter, or perhaps the beginning. I am drinking Kombucha tea for five different reasons. All true.

Photo by L.L. Barkat.

I close my eyes,
blot out one hundred
and fifty shale driveways
pickup trucks, Ford
pintos, trailers barely
tied to this ground
by wires, gas lines
cable TV.

I can still see
dirt road, Queen
Anne’s Lace, goldenrod
blue chicory,
field mice nesting
under leaning timothy
and the apple orchard
rooted beyond tall firs

where a woman
in navy sweat pants and
red Budweiser t-shirt
is just now hanging laundry
to drift upon the wind,
sing with ghosts
of spring white
blossoms, honeybees.

Photo: Kelly Langner Sauer

walls, square bedroom to myself
that shut out sounds of a new place
and trouble I found in line after gym
(she kept nudging, named me
Vanilla, so I stared hard, whispered,
“Chocolate bar!” and was called
on a different kind of carpet,
not golden, not soft).

Just when I learned my times tables
we went back; the house and our things
were gone (I remember no talk of it)

Photo: Kelly Langner Sauer

and we lived in a trailer, its linoleum
golden brown—meantime, they topped
soot-covered stones with plywood,

Photo: Kelly Langner Sauer

raised studs, put sheetrock in place
(after Scribner and Sons, men with
tattoos and nipple rings ran wires,
smashed cigarette butts into mom’s

used-to-be pink petunia garden).
All the while they were spackling,
cementing, whitewashing walls,
sister had begun collecting the mail

Photo: Kelly Langner Sauer

for a couple who lived half mile up our
straight dirt road. Bills, letters, ivory-
backed bird book with the prettiest
cardinals, jays, sparrows– a guide–
until someone found the whole
stash under her bed. Didn’t anybody

understand then that she and I
had, each in our own way, simply
been grasping for words.

Photo: Kelly Langner Sauer

Poem by L.L. Barkat, author of InsideOut: poems. Photographs by Kelly Langner Sauer.