| Copyright: Burning House Press, 2005. All rights reserved. |
| California poet BILLIE DEE at the Esalen poetry workshop with Sharon Olds, May 2005, an intensive 5-day writing experience. |
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| Billie Dee at the Esalen Poetry Workshop with Sharon Olds May 2005 |
| A five-day intensive writing workshop mentored by Sharon Olds,with emphasis on the special comaraderie found among poets creating new work, sharing the magic of Esalen. |
| Big Sur Love Song A sea otter bobs in its oily fur, and untangled locks of kelp sway on their moorings like teenagers drunk with ballad; now clatter of shore rock, sea glass tumbling, tumbling itself back to sand; and pelican, wise pteradactyl, wings itself parallel to shore, leather sack folded, benign; and turkey buzzard delicately shifts the tips of wings, mid thermal soar; now walking the road, creeper and tendril; the love-sick musk of jasmine soaks the sponge of my lungs. Now back to the cabin; the shower is cold, and in the suitcase we usually share, two of your pink oval heart pills. Now in the phone booth, my tense body wants the sound of your voice; pick up, pick up, pick up ... Plato's Garden The ideal garden is simply made: plant, water, dirt, bug. Everything else is shadow. The rural mammal in me craves a fleshing out: a raised bed of fever few, pearls of damp on the dandelion's teeth, frog pond silt, a damselfly preening. In the city a strip of grass will do. Summer comes, and so the water hose, a plastic turtle sand box, a military corps of ants drawing lines across National Geographic. In the office, another kind of garden: silk begonia, Extreme Lemon Ice Gatorade, coffee grounds spilled in the lounge, dust mites breeding exponentially in the carpeted cubicle farm. But here within the prison walls, my cellmate needles a new tattoo, a thorny rose entwined aroung the bleeding heart of Jesus. And there's the sink that drips, drips, the fillth that fills my mind. Each night I dream the dream of a thousand albino black widows. Everything Makes Me Think of You The gentle way the orange koi nibbles at the lily's ear: your nibbled lips, my love; a cascade of rabbit mint, playfully rugatious: your nipples in the wind; how rosemary fits into the spaces it can find: your accomodatiousness; the waterfall's long hair: yours is short, so is mine; the magnolia's blousy-wimple bloom: your love of fresh white linens; two stellar jays gabbing: the way you tease me when I'm cross; the heady scent of jasmine: no explanation needed; a cypress reaching out over the precipice: the risks you took to love me; how beautiful a wall of weathered clapboards: you and I, we're getting old; a cloud bank in the distance, moving this way: the interposing end, my love. |
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| 100-100-150 |
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