"Out here is the sky..."

So wrote Willa Cather in "Death Comes for the Archbishop." If you live in Oklahoma, on the Great Plains, you gotta be fascinated by the sky.
First storm of the season arriving now...thunder, lightning, threat of hail, wind, threat of tornadoes, and beautiful clouds.

San Angelo Sojourn

A week ago, in San Angelo, with Vance and Kerin Clark

after the girls were in bed.

 A favorite photo...Sarah, Katherine and Neysa heading for a playground, at San Angelo State Park.

Energy galore.

Smiling Clarks.

 Another favorite photo.

Poetry of eternity and Oklahoma

Awe.
When you find writers, artists and others  you should have known about but missed out.

I hate the overused word "Awesome," but that's my reaction to the worlds opened by "From the Extinct Volcano A Bird of Paradise" by Oklahoman Carter Revard.
Published by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish's Mongrel Empire Press, this 84-page book of poetry and thought goes beyond my words to tell you about.  
It is deep.
Revard is an nationally-acclaimed Osage scholar, writer and poet. BA, Oxford (That's England). Ph.D., Yale. Why am I now just learning about him? Click the link on him  and you'll be stunned.
Yet he is as Okie as you can be. It's a book of storytelling, and more because it opens you to the Native American view of the universe, existences and spirituality where all life is united.
The poems reflect his  belief that song, speech, poetry and community making are all linked.
This author will put you in touch with eternity and  Oklahoma. This book is a coup for Mongrel Empire Press. Every time I read part of it, I discover something new, about myself, about Oklahoma, about existence. There is science, mythology, literature, and the author's essays all intertwined.
Consider a few titles, author's comments,  and nuggets.
Titles--Dancing with Dinosaurs; In Chigger Heaven; Driving in Oklahoma; Over by Fairfax, Leaving Tracks; Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus.
Author's comments--

• "I suspect singing began from weeping and from laughing, turned into choral tragedy and comedy, kept time with rhythms and rhymes of tropical sunlight and starlight...."
• "Without song, no nesting."
• "I wished once again that the anthropologists who keep digging in the earth for our bones would listen for our songs in the air. We are extinct as dinosaurs, are are alive as birds."

Poems-- 

• From "Dopplegangers: A Nativity Ode"--

In this dark house there are no
stars but there is song, the hands
have warmed a bottle, there is milk,..."

• From "In Chigger Heaven"--"We grew up crossing

the bluestem meadow full of flowers
in May, when butterflies were coming out to meet
the flowers at last as equals,...."

• From "Living in the Holy Land" (at St. Louis for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial)--

"Forty score and seven years ago, 
give or take a few Heavenly Days,
our Osage forebears brought forth
on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to
the proposition that all beings are created equal."

• From "Over by Fairfax, Leaving Tracks"--

"The storm's left
       this fresh blue sky, over
Salt Creek running brown
and quick and a huge tiger
    swallowtail tasting the brilliant
orange flowers beside our trail....
"Makes me wonder,
 if archaeologists should ever dig these prints
    with possum's here, whether they'll see
the winged beings who moved
         in brightness near us, leaving no tracks except
             in flowers and
      these winged words."

135 countries!

This blog has reached readers in 135 total countries today, when someone from the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis clicked on. Wow. May will be the seventh birthday of  Coffee with Clark...I had no idea.
Here's the record of countries with new readers in the last 10 months:
5-14--El Salvador
8-14-Albania
8-14--Liechtenstein-
10-3-14--Macau
11-19--Samoa
11-21--Angola
1-17-15--Seychelles
1-23-15--Netherlands Antilles
3-5-15--St. Kitts and Nevis
I was  trying to do a short post about each country and its flag for a while, and I'm way behind.
Here are the three countries' flags from this year:

Seychelles

Netherlands Antilles

St. Kitts & Nevis

I note on this cold March day that they're all from wonderful warm areas of the world, with beaches and great scenery. Sigh.

Consider these stats of where the blog readers come from:
Europe--47 countries
Africa--29 countries
Asia--18 countries
South America--10 countries
Caribbean--9 countries
Central America--8 countries
Oceana--8 countries
North America--3 countries
Indian Ocean--2 countries


Footnote: Notice the flag counter gadget on the blog doesn't include that many countries. I only added it this year.

Of dreams and Okies, a deep mapscape

I feel like I'm reading dreams when I thumb through "Streets as Elsewhere" by J.L. Jacobs, a new book out by Mongrel Empire Press.
Like dreams that you write down afterward and may not necessarily make conscious sense at first, a jumble of thoughts and images, these 56 poems in 74 pages will jar your traditional map of Oklahoma.
You have to read them more  than once as they captivate your imagination.
"History, story, thought, place, space, objects all woven together and meshing/messing with time," wrote publisher/poet  Jeanetta Calhoun Mish  when I asked her about the poetry and poet.
The cover is a photograph of her grandmother on an old map of far southeast Oklahoma, a woman who lived to be 100 and was a midwife, and who inhabits many of the poems.
"Ancient maps stir the coals of our memories, letting us see  from whence we came," writes Jacobs in an afterword.  The title and title poem travel those kinds of maps, a unique feminine view of life here.

Poet J.L. Jacobs

This is Oklahoma storytelling of a different sort, sometimes strange, sometimes mentioning dreams. They are the stories of people with rough-hewn lives shaped by Oklahoma's timber country. How else to explain poems like "A Theology of Soil," "Indian Head Applique," or "Of wash rooms"?
When I read a book of poetry, or anything else for that matter, my habit is to mark those lines that jump at me, that make me wonder at the language, that catch the spirit of the book.
One line, in the poem "Call it sky" caught my eye immediately, capturing the spirit of the book:
"This empty house listens to the landscape ."
Mish says Jacobs writes in an inward, lyrical style. I think that style transports me inside her head, as though I was looking at her dreams.
There is also lyricism that is Whitmanesque: From "Are there only avenues in the Holy Land?" for instance--
"(Far off among the trees a night fisherman wades upstream.)
He crosses under the moon   and sees
a girl standing by ferry rail."
Portions of other favorites:

"A stream of dead water and a silk hankerchief"
"Slow over stones.
to know your noise    as a moth beating a curtain.
You wrap yourself at night
until you happen to dream...."

"Small upon the Sill"
"I wanted strewn rooms.    A delicacy of words.
Doorway to follow the road. One by one....
"Rain against the sills
in liquid arrows   pierce
our many partings...."

"Of wash rooms"
To see your own gray hands wrapping...warping.  Light
veers under fingernails. She sensed a direction
of washrooms      years ago."

"Are we far to the forest?"
"Imagine where landscape begins.  Beyond deserted walls
faces behind chimneys...."