Memoir, Poetry, and Life Musings
There are several things I still need to do to finish the website, so I hope you’ll be patient. I’ll have PayPal buttons for the poetry chapbooks up soon. And as soon as the second memoir is on Amazon, I’ll include the information for that as well.
For now, I’ll post another haiku for. a Florida fall…
Longleaf Pines, backlit
by late October sunshine
glltter like tinsel
Grave White Ibis stalk
awkward as folded deck chairs
through lake shore grasses
Once in a long, long while, the thunderbolt…. coming through complete, my job not to foul it up, just hang on and stay out of the way
But usually, in the car alone driving through cattle fields and the Green Swamp, catching the dawn red-handed on the way to work, on a yellow pad scrawled from the need to watch the road
Playing with images the way a cat plays with a mouse, sneaking up, pouncing, tossing them into the air, and watching them scamper
finally settling down to crunch their bones and chew and savor, coughing up the occasional hairball
Sometimes, a fleeting image comes, embedded in dull, bovine, slatternly words with large flat feet and stringy hair
They remain, witless, where I push them; living fences to hold the image till I harvest it
Afternoons, before the home commute, I reread, groaning, laughing; a hunter who smells the game, and knows who’s got the gun
Finally, momentum builds, words come together; smooth against my tongue, singing in my throat
the only sweet I crave
(I see that this program messes up the line breaks in poetry, but I hope the commas help)
When I published my first memoir, it was during the height of COVID, and I never followed through with setting up a website. So here I am, five years later, figuring out how to do all this technology stuff.
Not without assistance, though. My Computer Guru, Lindsay, who helped with the first book while she was still in high school, is now helping out during her last semester of college. And Paul and Eugene Linzey, whose company, P & L Publishing & Literary Services, published my last book, are always ready to consult with me as we get the second book under way.
A haiku I wrote on my morning walk:
Graceful cypresses
sparkle with dawn-lit diamonds
gifts of midnight rain
A note about the graphics on the website:
The horizontal decorative elements you see have a complicated story. My husband Bill is a photographer, and we used to do lots of outdoor art shows around the country selling his work. At one time, I began to sell silk scarves at the same shows. To make them, I went out taking photographs of trees and plants, then manipulated them in PhotoShop, abstracting the subjects and changing colors.
Then I had the designs printed on 100% silk scarves, 18″ x 60.” When we retired a few years ago, I retained the designs in my files, and when setting up this site, decided to use them to add a bit of color to the pages.
For example, the top one on the Blog page is recognizable as a split-leaf philodendron that’s been stretched a bit and had the color desaturated. The second one was done from a photo of a dragon fruit, so that image was manipulated a good deal more. The image on the Connect page was of a dry palm frond lying beside the road, and the one on the About page is quite recognizable if only I could remember its name. Maybe someone can tell me!
Although I’m no longer making the scarves, which originally sold for $65, I still have some that I need to find homes for. Maybe I’ll put one on the Blog from time to time, at a reduced price.
Ann Dickinson Sargent 