Now, in my house of one thousand paintings

I salt my soup with the dust of colored chalk.
I have bright green fingertips
like ten live spirits in ten forest robes.
My fingers are flowing with green
like a woman who suckles ten children.
Now my children have grown tall as trees.

-Excerpt from Penelope Scambly Schott's  "How We All Came to Survive”

Penelope let me into her poetry workshop even though I mistakenly inserted an "r" into her middle name. What would it mean to be scrambly? A bit confused and messy, certainly fast-moving. Very lively.

Tadzio has wrapped up his second year at the French school and summer has finally arrived. I promised myself that at the end of the school year I would start working on my application for Canadian residency. I'm a little afraid of it. I'll overcome the fear and the paperwork and start gathering up my documents. Not the sort of task that one usually picks up at the start of summer, but timing is important.

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cowbells collect the evening

 

Cowbells collect the evening. We are pulled

to the bare kitchen bulb like large moths,
while milking-shed cats curl into straw.

At a rosewood table in a paneled room
middle-aged men in wide leather chairs
sip twenty-year-old single-malt scotch.

Under the white kitchen light
clover honey melts into biscuits;
nobody is starving; nobody weeps.

The men in their nail-studded armchairs
caress their knuckles and nod their chins,
quite certain they have never been wrong.

The chorus of cowbells ka-bong rattle-rattle,
the chorus of crystal shot glasses set down,
chorus of moths beating powdered wings,

while out by the bins behind the Club
a woman who stole one sharpened pencil
is carving this song into her skin.

-Penelope Scambly Schott

Incidental Music for the 6:00 pm news

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