The Pancake That Saved Silicon Valley and other NaPoWriMo Poems 2013 Read online

The Pancake That Saved Silicon Valley

  and other NaPoWriMo Poems 2013

  By Anna Scott Graham

  Copyright 2013 by Anna Scott Graham

  These poems are works of fiction. Names and characters, incidents, and places are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This volume is respectfully dedicated to Richard Brautigan, Ted Hughes, and Susan O’Neill. And to my beloved husband.

  A word about this collection

  Long ago I wrote poetry, but had fallen out of the habit. When I learned of NaPoWriMo on the eve of the challenge, I decided to participate, even though I was already committed to writing a novel for Camp NaNoWriMo. As verses emerged, I was reminded of the utter bliss that poetry affords. A few days in, I began an epic poem, based upon an idea I had discarded for a novel. The first three parts of “The Hounds of Love and War” are featured at the end of this collection. Thank you for taking the time to ponder these poems, written from the depth of my heart, if not always from the edges of my gray matter.

  Table of Contents

  Not the End of the World

  Tears in Your Eyes

  Ode to Linda Ronstadt

  A Different Kind of Rain

  Dark, But Not Cold

  Ninja Hat Poem

  Late Evening Sun Reminds Me Of…

  Juror #18

  We Call Her Gracie

  The Pancake That Saved Silicon Valley

  Living Inside the Work

  The Way She Curled Her Toes

  Like It Was 1988 All Over Again

  I’m Not Feeling Poetic Today

  Very Low Tide

  The Cost of the Written Word

  The Hounds of Love and War: Part 1

  The Hounds of Love and War: Part 2

  The Hounds of Love and War: Part 3

  Not the End of the World

  Walking about three streets

  from where I live, I heard

  Winston Churchill’s indelible words – we will never surrender.

  We will never surrender.

  We will never surrender.

  I was listening to Supertramp’s “Fool’s Overture”,

  an iPod in one pocket,

  my smartphone in the other.

  Does Generation Y know about

  Churchill, Supertramp, World War II?

  Top of my Gen X class,

  I’ve had tunes in my back pocket

  since Sony Walkmans were pups.

  World War II hovered in my childhood

  via two German uncles, one of whom, during the war,

  was not allowed to drive five miles from the ranch he tended.

  The other thought Hitler had a good

  idea about the Jews.

  Oh mon, he’d holler to my younger brother. Uncle was

  mostly deaf, listening to baseball turned up loud

  on a small red plastic AM radio

  while in the kitchen his wife, my grandmother’s eldest sister,

  played solitaire against The Chinaman.

  I was eight or nine then, with no idea what The Chinaman meant

  except that was who Auntie played cards against,

  as Uncle railed about baseball and God knows what else in German.

  Auntie ignored him, while my younger brother hung on every word

  but he couldn’t understand Uncle any better than I did.

  I’m forty-six now; the German uncles are long dead,

  my grandmother’s sister, my grandmother too.

  My brother died as a drug addict in 1997; Uncle left the family inheritance

  to him because our father was dating a woman with two

  half-black children.

  Uncle thought the same about blacks

  as he did Jews.

  Or as Hitler saw Jews, I suppose.

  My brother didn’t care about colour. He just put the whole legacy up his nose,

  then a bullet in his head,

  breaking my heart, our father’s heart, our siblings’ hearts too, who might be half-black

  but are just as precious as that brother was to me, to Dad, to Uncle.

  Uncle loved my brother, but spite kills just like any other weapon.

  My Generation Y offspring are

  vaguely aware of that unpleasant nugget from our familial history

  which runs deeper than snapshots from

  smartphones tucked in back pockets.

  Yesterday relatives gathered, but the past resonates like Churchill’s words,

  as one niece carries our brother’s name.

  Currently her age group has no title,

  but the sensation lingers through the generations; we will never surrender.

  Whatever the cost may be,

  we will never surrender.

  Tears in Your Eyes

  Formed in the corners,

  sorrow or joy or a mixture of despair and bliss.

  He’s not certain how she feels,

  but she does; something is causing

  this reaction.

  He didn’t intend to illicit such deep feelings,

  not maliciously.

  Or perhaps in the back of his brain

  he was hoping.

  He ached for her to reveal more than shy smiles,

  fleeting glances.

  But this wasn’t expected.

  He had no idea she’d break down.

  He’s in love with her,

  can’t seem to say it in words.

  He wants to tell her through his eyes, which are dry.

  Boys don’t cry, but

  he’d kill to spill more than just a wide grin.

  Reaching for her shaking hands, he trembles too

  like water poured down his face.

  Words leak from her eyes, rolling along her cheeks,

  which he captures with eager thumbs, tender

  fingers, wishing to say more than I, You know,

  Uh-huh.

  He’s dying to convey more than Uh-huh, but the

  words, and his tears,

  don’t come.

  When she takes a breath, he exhales,

  passing air into her, like language travels via

  his lungs into hers, floating along a separate

  but shared bloodstream.

  She blinks away a few last tears,

  which he now finds edging his eyes.

  He blinks once as delicate fingertips trace his temples.

  Uh-huh is all he says, all he can manage without breaking down.

  She repeats it, still tracing his dry eyes.

  Ode to Linda Ronstadt

  A record spins on the turntable from

  when times were simpler,

  when the biggest technology

  was men on the moon.

  I was a kid then, drinking Kool-Aid

  while older cousins downed Tab and Fresca,

  people and times long gone, but as

  Linda warbles, it’s so close,

  just past my fingertips,

  in some far corner of my brain.

  She thinks she’s gonna love him for a long long time.

  She didn’t have any more idea of what was coming

  than I do today.

  She’s an older woman now, retired from music,

  but easily conjured by setting a needle to vinyl.

  Does she pine for those days, when youth was a

  new bud, the future some hazy but shiny dream.

  Or is she relie
ved for retirement,

  pleased to be removed from a life of performing.

  I set her album on the record player

  and 1970 slips from speakers into my 2013 living room.

  Honky-tonk music swirls, prompting my twenty-year-old

  to ask what I’m listening to.

  A piece of my past, I say, as that daughter gathers

  her cell, keys, and purse.

  Silk Purse sees her off, early Ronstadt, country Linda

  before stadium tours, Nelson Riddle, and Canciones de Mi Padre.

  Just a girl singer wishing to make it big, hoping for

  immortality.

  Forty-three years on, I think she found it.

  A Different Kind of Rain

  Rain in California doesn’t sound like English rain.

  California rain goes drip drip drip from the downspout

  right outside my bedroom window.

  How I know it’s raining, when I wake;

  drip drip drip.

  It’s an odd noise, like a blessing from some old

  fragrant church, precipital incense wafting from

  the rafters of heaven.

  In California rain resounds like the sweetest gift

  God might bestow.

  In Britain, it’s not that way.

  In Britain, rain is oxygen, breathed in and out,

  night and day; rain or shine, it still feels like rain.

  Rain seeps into the rain when no one’s looking,

  it creeps into the night like another layer of slumber

  and you never hear it in the morning.

  You’ve been hearing it all your life

  it sounds like daytime, or tea time.

  It’s the aural backdrop of English existence

  it smells like the cuppa poured as yet another rain falls.

  I lived in Britain, Yorkshire England, for over a decade.

  I grew up in California, yet England became

  my home, my blessed beautiful green home.

  I found rain as pleasant as tea

  as the BBC (no commercials)

  as granary bread and clotted cream on scones and…

  But rain, oh rain, we never had rain when I was little,

  well, we did, but not the sort of rain

  that fell without regard to season or

  barometers or any particular mood.

  English rain makes no sound, no thunder to

  announce it – that would be cheeky.

  English rain, or Yorkshire rain, wouldn’t dream

  of drip drip drip – strictly a California additive.

  California rain requires an entrance,

  like taking a bow

  and we bow too, thankful for one more

  chance to fill reservoirs

  and perhaps green up the yard.

  Some pray to rain gods, some erect statues,

  or they think about it.

  It’s that precious a commodity.

  But in England they wake, dress, have a

  cuppa, go to work or school and rain

  falls around them like a blanket, like

  slightly pesky younger siblings you

  know won’t be sidetracked.

  I miss rain, pervasive British rain.

  Drip drip drip in my California downspout

  just doesn’t cut it.

  Bring me a cuppa love,

  bring me a cuppa rain.

  Dark, But Not Cold

  When my oldest daughter was two

  her first words were Cold Dark

  leaving my parents’ house on a November evening.

  Cold Dark is a phrase my husband and I use

  at times

  when we’re smiling at each other

  trying to recapture not 1990 specifically

  just any random moment

  that hearkens back to

  when we were younger.

  This morning, 8 April, 2013,

  it’s dark. It’s 5.10 a.m.

  Two PBJs are waiting, cut in halves,

  in his lunch bag

  along with three apples, two oranges, a bag of

  jumbo raisins, and a large faux Tupperware

  (Ziplock brand perhaps?)

  of PFR (pork fried rice) and chicken curry.

  We’re morning types

  due to the afternoon commute.

  I’ve always been a morning type

  (Cold Dark)

  but he changed six years ago leaving

  Britain for Silicon Valley.

  In Britain it’s often Cold Dark

  but here it’s sometimes just Dark.

  Rarely is it Cold.

  (Today, that two-year-old

  defends her thesis

  at a fairly good

  Southern California school.

  It’s now 5.13.

  I don’t think she’s awake

  but I’m writing this poem for her.)

  Cold Dark.

  She was two

  with tiny feet.

  Now she’s married;

  Someone Else’s

  we joke.

  But the smile is inward.

  Cold Dark;

  what does that matter now

  even if her feet are still small

  and she has a masters in Blah Blah Blah.

  She’s now the age we were for

  Cold Dark.

  But she’s Someone Else’s.

  She’s a big girl and we’re old people

  and not even a poem can relate

  all that Cold Dark means,

  a toddler in your arms

  depending on you for everything.

  Cold Dark;

  one day her baby will string together

  two or three words

  and she’ll be thrilled

  telling her husband how they’ll always remember this.

  Blah Blah

  will be their code

  for youth, bliss, wonder.

  Meanwhile my husband fiddles with his new PC tower

  while I finish this poem

  at 5.19 a.m.

  It can take nine minutes

  to explain two words

  and one moment

  perhaps a little back-asswards

  but better than nothing.

  Cold Dark; or was it Dark Cold?

  It was 1990; that was a long time ago.

  Ninja Hat Poem

  This morning, while I tackled the WIP,

  my husband went to get tires

  for our daughter’s car

  or the car she drives while living at home.

  As I wrote about teenage heartache,

  he killed time walking around the mall

  (where teenage angst runs thickly)

  as tires were installed.

  My husband doesn’t mind shopping

  especially when he finds a place

  that catches his fancy.

  Like the Japanese store

  where he purchased the .5 mm black gel pen

  that I am using to write this poem.

  And

  the ninja hat that graced his head

  when he came home.

  When my husband came home

  I was reading through that morning’s writing

  which had nothing to do with new tires

  or ninjas

  just teenagers in love,

  although not at the mall.

  My current novel is about as opposite of

  ninjas as one can get.

  Which seemed to add to my immediate

  explosion of laughter as I stared

  and hooted

  at what sat on my husband’s head.

  He’s not usually a hat-sort,

  but he loves silly things.

  He also has a fondness for ironic

  Japanese items

  (think the Engrish website).

  He also likes to buy me presents – he had called

  while I was writing,
/>   (and he was passing the time at the Japanese store)

  inquiring what kind of gel pens I liked.

  I like .38 or .5 mm, black ink.

  He said they stocked several .5 pens.

  And .8

  and .9

  which I had not heard of or seen

  in local shops.

  Although this is America, he was lost

  in a Pacific Rim wonderland

  where Hello Kitty

  and Moshi Moshi rule.

  And ninjas, of course.

  I, however, was in southern Washington State

  in 1990, in high school,

  which is very far away geographically,

  and time-wise,

  from 2013 Silicon Valley

  or Japan.

  I was glad for his phone call

  and even more pleased for his queries –

  I always love getting new pens

  with which to write new poems.

  But I had no idea what today’s poem

  would be all about

  until I saw his hat.

  Black, with thickly sewn characters in white.

  As I laughed, he said,

  “It means ‘ninja’.”

  Which was also sewn in white into the left side

  in smaller American lettering.

  “Ninja,” I said,

  still giggling.

  I don’t remember what else we said,

  as I followed him outside

  to inspect the new tires,

  which weren’t Japanese.

  He only bought the hat, my pens, some Moshi Moshi stationary

  and soap at the Japanese store.

  Tires were purchased elsewhere at the mall.

  By the time he got home

  our youngest daughter was awake,

  thrilled for the tires’ installation,

  for which she didn’t have to manage,

  although she’ll pay for them.

  She liked her dad’s hat,

  and that her parents still help her out

  (she just turned twenty).

  She also likes it that we are a bit silly,

  what with ninja hats and teenage

  love stories and such.

  I snapped some pictures of my husband,

  who can be very silly, at times,

  then sent those photos via texts to our

  other daughter, who did pass her thesis.

  She lives far away,

  although not as far as Japan.

  Even though our family is separated

  certain things keep us together.

  Texts do it,

  as do mitigating circumstances

  (like a youngest daughter who moved back home

  to get her general ed done)

  and of course

  ninja hats.

  And poems, about Cold Dark and other sweet moments of life.

  Late Evening Sun Reminds Me Of…

  Wide grassy fields

  black walnuts on the ground

  filled gunny sacks were worth two dollars each