Loose Leaf Notes

1. I was playing Old Maid with my youngest grandson and wondered out loud what a comparable word for an old maid would be for a man, and he suggested, “Old Butler.” It took me a moment.

2. As we played cards, my eldest grandson played some Master of Puppets Metallica on guitar.

3. Thug Life or Pub Life?

4. There was a lot of green to be seen at McDaniel’s Tavern at Buffalo Mountain Brewery last night and a new brew called Lucky Charm. I was already lucky because I had just come from The Great Clover Hunt with Muriel Alderman at Floyd’s Center for the Arts and found my first wild four-leaf clover. Ninety-year-old Muriel had a pop-up exhibit at the Center displaying her decades of luck finding the four-leaf rare variations of the common three-leaf clover, known in Ireland as the shamrock… Read all about it and see pictures HERE.

5. Faintly green / still spending its luck / a lottery shamrock / crisply pressed / Like a thousand dollar bill / of whimsical windfall / rich with what is possible / and suspending all doubt… Read In Clover in its entirety HERE. 

6. “Shamrock, or “seamrag” in Gaelic, means “little clover” which is so fitting because shamrocks and flour-leaf clovers belong to the white clover plant family. You can easily spot the difference between the two because shamrocks have three leaves (or leaflets, technically) while four-leaf clovers have, obviously, four leaflets. It takes a rare genetic mutation to get that extra leaf which is why it’s so difficult to find a four-leaf clover. Research places the difficulty at 1/10,000, so if you’re trying to find one of your own, you’re going to need to scan a large area.”

7. The older I get the more I have Déjà vu because it really did happen before.

8. Soul or solo?

9. The piece below, showcased at the Fibers of Nature Floyd Center for the Arts exhibit, is titled ‘Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn,’ but I think it’s more a ‘Cinderella’s Ball Fairy Godmother’s Creation.

10.  LOVE THIS. 

11. She said death is a launch / into another new morning / into an embryonic heaven / in a sea of outer space / where our cells defy gravity / and our minds lose their grasp / where dark matter pulls us together / and dark energy pushes us apart… Read The Speed of Light in its entirety HERE. 

12. “Poems meet the raw needs of our most vulnerable inner selves in a disarmingly primal way, using a simple tool no other sort of language mobilises in quite the same manner: predictable, physical, rhythmical repetition. Poetry chants and incants; it excites and lulls… Metred words, treated with reverence and care, have the unique potential to meet us halfway, uniting mind and body, conscious and unconscious self… From How poetry casts a spell through the rhythmic magic of metre

13. I’m looking for new focus / Some good luck / A power-up / A brainstorm to build on / A combination to unlock / I’ m searching for the next step / A sign to point the way / A word play / A game change / A poem to hold my place… Read Fill in the Blanks in its entirety HERE.

____________Thirteen Thursday