ice pane

bake-off

So it's time for spice cake, a family recipe, from grandmother

to my mother to me. When I was young I hated it.

Raisins, nutmeg, pecans weren't my food groups.

Now I actually don't mind it. It's eggless, butterless- dense!

Not too sweet. Maybe a good kind of cake

for the darkening days. I'm listening to lots

of medieval Christmas tunes.

You can feel the cold seep into the castle.

The dark skies fold down around the village fires.

Why they sing and tell stories- to push back the winter.

Here's the spice cake - from my old spiral notebook

where I keep odd scraps of this-and-that recipes.

Tangled

Sometimes getting into the Xmas
spirit isn't so holly/ivy, this year especially.
But there are little road maps to lead one
through the hardened forest of the heart.
Like time in the city. Looking, first
at some art in the painter's studio
for an exhibition I'm co-curating on words
and pictures. Then at MoMa where I saw

















and wandered into the water lilies, which now
have their own room and it wasn't too crowded,
though as usual people pose in front of the paintings
as if they're at the Grand Canyon, and maybe looking
at his paint and colors and light is kind of like staring
at the expanse of that place.
I walked a lot and of course the city is packed
with tourists, but NYC is not all glittering lights
there's always an edge, a con gone wrong
thus the cop with machine gun.








A good day...I'm ready for the tree.

mirrored

Faux Self-Portrait of You

You are a very uneven person.
You, on the other hand, the one with not quite
five fingers, are a very uneven person.
Look me in the eye I say with conviction and say
you are a person of complete unevenness.
I look away to look for the surface of something
whose unevenness is its main attraction.
Very uneven person, I address you haphazardly,
you are a patchy, jerky lurcher.
You are nonuniform. You are subsubsubstantial,
I say to you of the fluctuating essence of uneven-
ness. No, I say, I am not a triangle, I do not
fit in the corner. I am an uneven piece of furn-
iture. There is a sirocco in you today.
You are a difficult table. Anything that rolls
rolls off of you almost immediately.
You're not good for a broken string of beads,
Is this not so I say uneven person that you are.
I look down to watch the beads roll where the floor
leans. An odd lullaby passes through my hair.

BY DARA WEIR

archeology

Of fern bed:
crow feather, shell fragment
chip of bone then petrified
tennis orb, further down
shard of soccer sphere
treasures I uncovered
this morning burrowing
through the mess and mulch
of fall's leavings -
the annual excavation of ancient
Octobers when the yard
was fodder for kick or hide
chase/pretend -
thankfully the skeleton
days have returned
it's fossil time again

work

Some poems at this cool journal.

La Fovea

travel

I was here and there
and now am back here.

body clock

Out of sync, off kilter

wide awake

though around and about

is asleep, including I imagine

even the gargoyles of Notre Dame.

snooze

Even the cats in Paris are aristocratic.

One of sights as I walked for about five

hours along the Seine,

into Nortre Dame,

through the Luxembourg Gardens,

also browsing ubiquitous book

shops, book stalls, as well as people-watching

in a cafe, got lost finally,

figured the route out (I'm directionally challenged) and collapsed.

What a sea change from July's red mesa-scapes.

Tomorrow I'm thinking BatOBus.

flight