. Spinning .

Sometime around nine o’clock last night, I left this comment on Loretta’s weblog:

Loretta, this story has a word count of 1,671. There is currently a Writer’s Digest short story contest going on, as well as others that you should seriously consider entering, with either this piece, or the life drama of 5/5 (?).

Do it.

At Pomegranates and Paper, Loretta writes some of the loveliest little vignettes of her life I’ve ever read. I don’t always remember what she’s written, and we have often questioned ourselves in what we reveal personally in our weblogs, but the feeling of who she is stays with me, not the details. She needed a gentle push, I felt, above and beyond my simple words of praise.

We were online at the same time, I suppose, when I received an e-mail from her telling me she would check out the Writers Digest website. Then another, barely a minute later exclaiming that she had to rush—I hadn’t mentioned that the deadline was in three hours!

I read this, smiled, and sent no reply. She would be busy, I assumed. Sending spouse and children scurrying out of her way. I left her to her writing.

I wonder if she met the deadline, although it doesn’t matter. The contest I’d referred to was in the Digest magazine, and had a deadline date of December 1st.

I hope that she’ll forgive me.

Sometimes a word gets stuck in my mind; today it’s naked. A good part of this past week was taken by perception. Sometimes it’s a phrase that whispers, or a bit of poetry that sings. Sometimes it is written down several times before it loosens up its grip and finally fades away. I wonder if it means that I’d discovered what it tried to tell me, where it took its place among the paragraphs of a story, or stanza of a poem. It gives me peace, I think, only when I’ve listened to its voice, and heard its story, all it needed to say.

David, of Ripples asks if I can find my place to write; my house of paper on a hill, a cabin in the woods where inspiration is the air I breathe, and words grow from the ground.

Yes, oh yes, I can. It is the very first word appearing in my mind, the very first picture I see. It is fragile, like a bubble, alive with swirling colors yet a shelter where no one else can find me. I let them enter, but they don’t remember being there at all. Memories and fantasies are mixed so well together that I feel and taste the salty ocean on naked bodies, and feel the cool wetness as we saunter boldly down the quiet street past darkened, sleeping houses at the shore. But that was youth, and there was laughter, and the four of us were never caught except in the mind, forever.

I live within the house, the house lives within me.

In a comment, Denny of Book of Life suggests that I allow my natural urge to “express itself through some objective correlative in poetry…”

Rather, I am sure, than pirouette across my morning backyard without a stitch on. My words would be more lovely and hardly raise an eyebrow either. I am channelling, it seems, as poetry in unrefined but flowing form directs my thoughts today. It takes me over, and I know you know the feeling, to a point where someone asks a question of me and it sounds as if uttered in a foreign tongue, like Poetrese. I sift the words into translation before I answer, knowing that the look of consternation I am getting will only deepen if I speak out words such as these.

Poetry then, is in itself another language, I believe.

Some things to say, but don’t know how to say them yet. My constant thanks to those who offer the encouragement to continue, the bright thoughts, the friendships that end up woven through the words we write.

Poetics strike again, and so I let them in, and out again. Sometimes in other moods I return to read them, surprise myself and wonder what I meant…

The writer as a reader; lost control regained.