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,
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
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