The Best Party Ever

50 years ago now Truman Capote gave the best party ever The Black and White Ball was Credited, I say, with breaking the old order He invited everybody And Everybody came Moguls and novelists Divas and divines The inspiring and the almost expired Urbans and provincials in the same clutch Capote married Art and Politics…Read more »

August

August August My father died and I went down to pick his figs Thinking to make a simple jam sweet enough to absorb grief Inside the humming tree – mid August and hot enough to make snakes mad I held a dancing communion with yellow-jackets, red wasps, midge flies, bumble-bees, hornets, cow-killers; working around the…Read more »

Living Alone

Living Alone My grandmother Lilly Grew up just light enough to pass But not to matter; married at 13 Made her life a torch of love and raised 8 babies on nothing But what they could scratch and raise and kill Buried a husband in her 60s Come live with us! Her children chimed, but…Read more »

In a Community of Women: 2012

  I am a member of 6 diverse women’s groups. None of these groups started out explicitly as women’s groups; three are public boards. It’s just that often I find myself in a happy serious working coven of strong women, going about the restorative work of the commons, doing what needs to be done. Having…Read more »

On starting a blog, maybe.

Outside my window is a whole world of Piedmont Carolina woods. Tulip poplar, red maple, loblolly pine, sweet gum, water oak, eastern red cedar, persimmon, winged elm, sweet sassafras, black cherry . . . These are the vertical lines that measure my daily life, teach and inform me. They house scarlet tanagers and cuckoos and…Read more »