The Hummingbird

The hummingbird leans from flower to flower, branch to branch
high above the pages of sunlight scattered on twigs and chewed up leaves
still damp with yesterday's dew,
high above the silver, shaded chain-link fence and the gardens it divides,
quietly.

Cerulean

This afternoon, I was walking down the hill to Wiley Hall when I noticed something moving in the bushes to my right. I stopped to look, and saw a bird sitting on a branch. It quickly flew up into the shadows of the olive thicket, and all I saw was a blue streak across its back, bright like a cerulean crayon.

I thought of the last lines of Frost's "A Passing Glimpse": "Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close."

"Walk the earth (!)"

Donned in an earth-colored suit, a dark brown reporter’s hat, a matching tie, and a gold earring on his left ear, writer and musician James McBride hopped into the Fermanian Conference Center today on a pogo stick while dancing the bunga bunga. After answering a preliminary question by professor of American literature Dr. Karl Martin, McBride described the experience of screenwriting his first novel, Miracle at St. Anna, into a movie, and gave writing advice to the Literature/Journalism/Modern Languages students and professors seated in the room.

“It’s all about characters,” he said. “Characters, characters, characters. It’s all about rewriting. . . . Writing is rewriting.”

McBride said that characters, rather than plots, sell books. In her book on Christian art Walking on Water, author Madeleine L’engle also describes an effect of characters: “We name ourselves by the choices we make, and we can help in our own naming by living through the choices, right and wrong, of the heroes and heroines whose stories we read.

"To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which help us to be more named also love us and help us to love.”

Although he’s never won a major writing award, McBride said that his reward is talking with students. “I want to, by the end of the day, be a blessing to somebody. That’s why God gave me this gift."

McBride honored the role of journalism in developing writing skills. “Journalism forces us to get out into the world and hear people talk, particularly in the west coast, where people drive around in cars all the time.” McBride half-condemned downtown Los Angeles for lacking a pedestrian environment, and then nodded to the atmosphere of walking and talking in downtown San Diego. “Walk the earth (!) if you wanna write. Don’t go to grad school. Do that later. Be a missionary.”

McBride distinguished cynicism from skepticism. "If you stay in journalism too long, you lack imagination, all your creativity comes out of your shoe. . . . It’s important to be skeptical because you can’t be a fool.”

The attendees followed McBride outside before scattering. After autographing one student’s book, McBride dropped the student's pen, apologized, and bent down to pick it up.

Open Doors

October air is always kind to me.
Santa Ana winds bring more than
Heat: baby butterflies learn how to sing.
June bugs look for shade in anything.

Just when winter seems to clap her hands,
October slips a foot into the crack.
Soon, we’ll eat and need to eat no more,
Here where now we write by open doors.

Spanish Brass Quartet

1
Tubas, trombones, and trumpets clang like swords and cheering men.
I see their heads behind the pairs of pairs of double doors,
quietly watching.
Out here, seventy light bulbs glisten to the air conditioner.
A door opens, then another, then another.
The sky conceals its lips, and they applaud.

2
How do you get such a tangerine blazing
on a sleeping lavender lake?
And how much water do you use,
which direction do you lean?
How do you smear the yellow black so that
we remember your poplars are only paint?

3
Like eyes, water hangs beneath the wooden beams.
From the marble column, reacquainted stains slide down like snails.
Steam rises from the plate of a ground lamp,
a thousand fish scattering together.
And as they rise, drops of eyes like meteorites fall through lights.
Rain is less water than light, and water still roars down ramps below,
still smokes up in starry flight.

4
Pyuh! Pyuh!
The round mouth at the foot of the building spits dirty water.
Pyuh! Pyuh!,
which foams in spreading trails down sidewalk cracks.
Pyuh! Pyuh!
The building drinks, the building spits.
It does not sing, it does not play the flute or blow the horn;
It does not teach, preach, or profess;
It eats no food, and nothing less.

Pyuh! Pyuh!