O Write: Marilynonaroll's Blog

A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way? Funnily enough I discovered I had tucked this poem by Patrick Rosal in my poems-I-might-put-in-my-blog. So here it is, from an issue of Orion magazine in 2025.

Prayer for When I’m Lost

Patrick Rosal

We know the ancestral sailors could navigate
without stars, by sound alone, rhythm, a history

of blood and sea and sex, a devotion to the indelible
text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

the body entirely, along this epoch’s vast axes of loss,
zenith to horizon, amid the artificial gales’ emphatic
hammers, a tyrant’s merciless gavels. Let me be the hinge

swinging in swells, rocking in sacred undulation, plunged
from crest to trough, both terrestrial and aquatic.
I’m barely a blip, a pelagic circuit, and my only compass,

prayer: give me a language for grief, jubilation, the gamut
of danger in waves. Let me name it aloud: Give this trouble

a shape. Let me travel to silence, sanctified by the mysteries
of listening, a storm turned song–and its song, my freight.

I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay. And, having trouble sleeping of late, I’ll take that “little tent in space.”

Song for the Song of the White-Throated Sparrow

Don McKay

Before it can stop itself, the mind
has leapt up inferences, crag to crag,
the obvious arpeggio. Where there is a doorbell
there must be a door – a door
meant to be opened from inside.
Door means house means – wait a second –
but already it is standing on a threshold previously
known to be thin air, gawking. The Black Spruce
point to it: clarity,
melting into ordinary morning, true
north. Where the sky is just a name,
a way to pitch a little tent in space and sleep
for five unnumbered seconds.

Just enjoying this piece over again. A friend said she’d just listened to the recording, so I went back to it, and share it here once again. The headshot is “self-portrait with iceberg.”

Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.

Porcupines

Aidan Chafe

The boy staring at me
in the checkout line

with snot and ice cream
running down his face

may one day become
president.

A father cradles his baby girl
like a football

while his attention
is pacified by football.

Every child matters
is made of matter.

Algorithms attribute
the rise of junk males

to the persecution
of the junk male.

A man in uniform sets fire
to a house

he’s sent to rescue
like a man in uniform

murders another man
he swore to serve and protect.

A sports headline
you don’t have to worry about:

“Two Fighters
Enter and Octagon

and Open Up
About their Feelings.”

In other news,
porcupines

can hug
other porcupines.

https://onlypoems.com/poems/aidan-chafe

On a whim, because I found myself in the vicinity, I went for a hike I hadn’t done in a while around a small pond fed by a few trickling streams and dammed at one end for some purpose I do not know. Cedars bent themselves toward the water, and small islands sat covered with the reddish branches of low bushes. A fallen tree’s old root system sat half-skyward and bleached mid-pond. I’m not sure who startled whom the most: me or the frog in leaf-strewn mud. The colors were all the greens and duns and browns and rust and ocher. The sound: low gronks from geese at one end, a jay scree, somewhere far away, always, a motor, even here in this middle of nowhere. Slowly the mind-nattered plaints fell away and I was huff and humidity and the swing of legs and soft stump stump of the perfect walking stick I’d found, and all eyes and notice — lichen like a congregation! trees all knees astride a rocky beast! knobs like balls at the base of that cedar! — all pleasure. Then I slid on a hidden root, twisted my ankle, fell, had to sit and put my head between my knees because I thought I was going to faint, hobbled up and missed the trail’s turn to the parking lot so added fifteen more slow minutes on the sore leg, castigating myself all the while because I KNOW not to hike in low boots with no water and how many times am I going to have to learn this lesson. In other words, my “everyday self,” back again. And in echo, here’s this lovely prose poem by Miriam Drev, translated from the Slovene by Barbara Siegel Carlson. I found it on the recent edition of Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.

Prose poem by Miriam Drev, tr. from the Slovene by Barbara Siegel Carlson

Ko hodim med drevjem, me ni. En del mene ni v napoto drugemu. Nikomur nisem v napoto.

Odmaknjena od vsakdanje sebe; samo koraki nog. Drevesa me predihavajo od vrha navzdol. Želodi trkajo ob veje. Moja pljuča pomanjšava krošenj, z vsakim dihom samoumevnih.

Nekje v drevesni duplini se v svoja žarkasta peresa podnevi stiska sova, ko spi. Ne bo se še kmalu znočilo, ko bo tiho, tihceno šinila v zrak; miši, rovke, krti so v tem pogledu zdaj varni.

Kot bitje nisem do kraja razkrita, to vem. Poznam svoj dnevni svet: obzorja, motna v megli ali odprta v daljavo. V večernih urah je drugače: dih in čas in pojave teme se gibljejo po svoje.

V noč, kjer ni umetnih luči, stopim redkokdaj, čeprav me kliče. Zahuka snežna sova, na lepem budna v votlini med mojimi rebri.

Del divjine, moje lastne, se hoče spreleteti nad črno jaso in nad reko, zgrabiti plen. Kremplji so naostreni v britev, oči pronicajo v pritajene oblike, krila so razprta kot nebo.

V resnici nikdar nismo zgolj naš dnevni jaz. Tisti, ki je viden in poznan.

Wilderness

When I walk among the trees, I disappear. One part of me doesn’t hinder another. I impede no one.

Removed from my usual self, just footsteps. The trees inhale me from my head downwards. Acorns rap at the branches. My lungs diminutive tree crowns, self-evident with each breath.

During the day in the hollow of a tree, an owl huddles into its fan of feathers, sleeping. Before long at nightfall, softly, very softly it darts into the air: mice, shrews, moles are as yet safe in this respect.

As a being I’m still somewhat concealed, that much I know. My daily world—the horizon, dim in the mist or opening in the distance. But come evening all is changed: breath and time and the phenomena of night have a trajectory of their own.

I rarely step into the dark devoid of artificial light, although it calls me. A snowy owl hoots, wide awake in the hollow of my ribs.

Part of the wilderness, my own, would fly above the darkened glade and river, grab its prey. With talons razor-sharp, eyes probing each shrouded shape, wings spread spacious as the sky.

If truth be told, we are never just our everyday self. The one who’s visible and known.

I was struck recently by the pathetic persistence of my ego needs, that little creature inside who is constantly wanting to be seen, heard, applauded. “My god, creature, will you never stop?” I scold it. “Surely we’re of or approaching an age when we can be beyond all this,” I suggest to it. “Oh yes,” it says, “of course,” it assures. But next thing I know it’s having another little fit over a rejection, a perceived slight. Recently it was in a small tizzy over a competition we lost, even though we really didn’t expect to win in the first place. “But still,” it declares stoutly. I bemuse myself with all the ways I try to be seen — my poetry, art, opinions, and all the conversations I insert myself-talking-about-myself into. “Can you just shut up,” I demand of the ego. It makes that locking-the-lips motion. I don’t believe it for a minute. Can I blame society’s focus on productivity, success, competition — does every freaking thing have to be a competition? Competition means winners, yes, but it also, by definition, means losers. It occurs to me that I identify always with the losers. Does that doom me to self-fulfilling prophecy? “No, no, it’s not my fault!” declares ego. I think about how early trauma informs lifelong twists of thinking. “Yes,” cries ego, “it’s my parents’ fault!” Oh shut up. Just keep doing the creative acts, I tell myself, and ignore the ego beast. It blinks at me, unreadable.

Anyway, then I found this amusing poem by Matthew Olzmann (“so much better known, better published, a real success story in the poetry world, not like…,” mutters ego) and felt momentary kindred, as a poem can do. And then the ending! That’s what poetry is all about.

Portrait of the Poet as a Painter and Musician

Matthew Olzmann

            We don’t need children. I have your bad art to hang on the fridge.

            — My spouse, Vievee

How to classify the curious artistic productions
of Matthew Olzmann? Early Cave Drawings?
Postmodern Stick Figures? Witness
the savant who believes mustard stains
on Detroit Lions sweatshirts are an aesthetic statement.
Mingus says, Making the simple, awesomely simple,
that’s creativity, and few artists are simpler than this guy.

Not to brag, but Olzmann is also a national tragedy
when singing in the shower. The concept of “notes”
eludes him, and making him understand lyrics
need to be sung in a specific order
is like explaining Vasiliev Equations to an aardvark.

This is a poem about failure.

If you zoom out far enough, your life
will get smaller and smaller
until it’s a speck of nothingness inside a greater nothingness.
How do we make this meaningful?

The first instrument I tried to play as a child was a drum.
The teacher said, The inside of the drum is hollow.
There’s only emptiness. To make the sound, you hit it
as hard as you can. You mean hit the drum? I asked.
No, he said, You have to hit the emptiness.

https://onlypoems.com/poems/matthew-olzmann

Last week I found myself grumpy. And ebullient. Weirdly hopeful. And apocalyptic and counting my canned goods. I’ve been bored by conversation and rendered delighted, sometimes in the span of five minutes. I’ve been too alone and not alone enough. Labile is a term for such shiftiness. Its derivation is Latinate, labi, meaning to slip or fall. But that word does not reflect the bounding up part, the leaping up to greet the world, the way my obnoxious friend Darla leaps at the window of her glassed-in porch and barkbarkbarks and her amiable friend Mack’s stubby tail wavewavewaves. It’s spring in the northeast US, though, so all of this is understandable after a winter in which we all, metaphorically or really both slipped and fell. I told someone recently I didn’t “feel quite myself.” But that’s a lie. I am nothing if not all this barking and waving, this restless boredom and comfortable curiosity. I found this poem by Basque poet Leira Bilbao through some accident of boredom and curiosity, and love the strange becoming of its narrator. I love too that the original Basque seems more complicated than the translation, a bit longer, more words. I like that there’s something I don’t know here. I like that I’m not sure whether the narrator’s transformation is a good thing or a cautionary tale. Tales of metamorphosis are often cautionary, after all. But not always. It makes me wary. And cheerful.

Poem by Leire Bilbao, tr. Joana Urtasun from Basque

from Between Fish Scales, World Poetry Books, 2026

Goiz arrunt bat zen.
Harri konkor bat igarri nuen bizkarrean.
Hasieran ez nion garrantzirik eman.
Egunak joan ziren bizkarra
sahats baten setaz
makurtzen zihoala ohartu nintzen arte.
Besoak luzatu nituen atzerantz tentuz
haztamuka
korridore ilun batean oinez doana lez.
Zutabe sendo bana eskapuletan
egonarria sorbaldan
harrizko hormak eta
beirarik gabeko leiho bakan batzuk.
Molusku bilakatu nintzen
bizilekua gainean zeraman animalia irristakorra.
Herrestan jarraitu nuen aurrerantz
oskolezko etxe hari egin nintzaion.
Eta beste leiho bat zabaldu nuen
euria egiten zuenean begira jartzeko.

It was an ordinary morning

I felt a stone skim my back.
At first I gave it no thought
but days passed, and my spine
began to bow and arch.
I stretched my arms,
groping the air
the way someone ambles
down a dark hallway.
I had become a mollusk,
a slippery thing lugging a roof on my back.
I crawl the seabed
getting used to this home,
sometimes I open a window
to look at the rain.

Here’s a review of my new writing manual, so I thought I’d take a moment and celebrate it and the book. https://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/opinion/columns/read-in-the-blue-line/2026/03/what-im-really-trying-to-say/

Available at WordWorksBooks.org.

Artwork by Jen Sattler!

Its origin is unclear: it may or may not have been Oscar Wilde who said a net is just a bunch of holes woven together with strings. He may or may not have been quoting some ancient Asian wisdom. But I like the notion. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by John Irving, but I loved the books of his that I loved because of how the strings of things in the stories would wander around then come together in the end not in a tidy bow but in a weave, the weft bending to the warp of all the crisscrossed lines, the gaps suddenly making sense. I try sometimes to think about my own life that way, to catch a glimpse of some fabric of it. It’s hard to see the fabric of one’s own life, so close are we to the weave, trying to peer through the holes, missing the overall pattern often. I like this poem by my friend Jessica Dubey because of its filaments, and how they dangle and tangle, and how by the end something unexpected is woven, and something is caught in the net.

Lifeguard

Jessica Dubey

My son never cared that we didn’t have a pool.
He couldn’t stop thinking about doggy paddling
in other people’s piss. And there’s my daughter,
a girl who wanted a different
bathing suit for every day of the week,
high-cut bikini bottoms and necklines that plunged
like silver dollars dropped in the deep end.
Every male child for two miles would have shown up
without a dry towel to his name. One of them drowning,
the least of my worries. So, no pool.
Instead, I skim dead bugs out of the birdbath.
I am more comfortable around small bodies of water.
I am a small body of water.
I learned to swim between 2 and 4 p.m.,
the time posted on the neighbors’ gate.
Most drownings happen at the end
of the day. It’s called lifeguard fatigue. Who isn’t tired
of saving lives. Some days I don’t
have the energy to scoop the spider from the rub
and ferry it outside. It’s easier to make it rain,
to watch the spider be overtaken by the rush
of what it cannot control. Anxiety
is an undertow I can’t swim beyond.
Before I learned how to tread water
I wore a lifejacket that floated up around
my ears in an orange stranglehold. It made me
hold my breath even though I was above water
the whole time.

Fishbarrelreview.wordpress.com

Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.

[untitled/missæ]

Pádraig Ó Tuama

I bless myself in the name
of the deer and ox
the heron and the hare
evangelists of land and wood
and air. The fox as well, that red
predator of chickens, prey of cars.
And the salmon and the trout
sleeping in the reeds.
When the wren wakes, I’ll ask
her blessing, and if she comes out
she’ll bring it. The squirrel buries
when she thinks no one else can
see. I bless myself in her secrecy.
There’s a field mouse I’ve seen
scampering at dusk, picking up the seeds
dropped by the finches and the tits
throughout the day. Some nest of frenzy
waits her kindness and her pluck.
I go in the name of all of them,
their chaos, and their industry,
their replacements, their population,
their forgettable ways, their untame natures,
their ignorance of why,
or how, or who.