Sunday, October 20, 2013

Never Mine






Never mine


I held you once,
a small miracle
attached and expelled
from the most intimate 
part of me,
but you were never mine.

You dreamed beside
a yellow cat,
flailed your tiny arms
beside a warm mouth of 
purrr,
soft and unafraid
each.

You gave no cry
for attention,
small specks of dust
and wee clenched fist
held your interest,
and the clamor of activity around
absorbed your need.

As you grew 
a map unfolded behind
your green gaze
that passed me
and traveled away
into distant dreams.

There
you listened and spoke
with many voices 
before you learned your own.
There
time granted you grace
to fill up the space
your soul occupies.

I watched as you
accepted the miracle
of moon and stars,
made things happen
with your hands,
grasped truth,
were angered by deception,
knew love,
accepted failure
and discovered the strength
of determination.

I held you once,
a small miracle
attached and expelled
from the most intimate
part of me,
but, you were never really mine.

Still, wanting to touch some part of you
I reached out to grasp your hand
and through some trick of time and mind
you had become a man.

Friday, October 18, 2013

Don't Talk to Me of December


Don’t talk to me of December
when the trees 
oh the trees color me
the way I am brown and gold
and I fall still through the air
waiting for wind

The sky is melting
see how it passes the fold
and eases out the wrinkle
like time
swift the night falls

Sundown is like wings now
scraping the edge of the ocean
I can see it beginning the curl
and then darkness haunts the edge
and I wonder where the warm is
hear it slip and unfurl
sail into summer and strip the gauze
from nighttime’s cover and mirage

Sing me spring 
skip February this year
lay me across a desert mound
I’ll not breathe until you wrap with web the storm
then glove and pen erect
whisper midnight into warm 

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Meet Faye Rapoport DesPres

I am happy to be part of the welcoming committee


Buddhapuss Ink LLC Announces Cover Reveal—Message From a Blue Jay

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2013

Buddhapuss Ink LLC, a NJ based book publisher, revealed the cover today for debut author, Faye Rapoport DesPres', Spring 2014 title: Message From a Blue Jay: Love, Loss, and One Writer's Search for Home. The book, a memoir, is beautifully constructed from essays DesPres wrote about her "middle decade," from forty to fifty.




Faye Rapoport DesPres was born in New York City, and grew up in rural upstate New York. Her maternal grandparents emigrated to the US from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s and settled in the South Bronx. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in New York as a teenager after World War II.
She has spent much of her writing career as a journalist and business/non-profit writer. She earned her MFA from Pine Manor College, where she focused on creative nonfiction. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Animal Life, Trail and Timberline, and other publications. Her personal essays, fiction, and poetry, have been published in Ascent, Superstition Review, and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, among other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Currently, DesPres is an adjunct first-year writing instructor at Lasell College. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and their rescued cats.


BUDDHAPUSS INK LLC is based in Edison, NJ. Founded in 2009, it is led by Publisher, MaryChris Bradley, a 29 year veteran in the book industry. “Our company mission is to ‘Put readers first’ and we are committed to finding and growing new authors at a time when the major houses seem to have turned their backs on writers who don't already have a well-established track record or movie credits to their name.”
Bradley can be contacted at 732-887-2519 or Publisher@BuddhapussInk.com.
www.BuddhapussInk.com Website
 http://buddhapussink.blogspot.com Company blog
@Buddhapuss on twitter     Buddhapuss Ink LLC on Facebook




From an astonishing blue jay to an encounter with a lone humpback whale, travel with debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres, as she examines a modern life marked by her passion for the natural world, unexpected love, shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully-crafted memoir-in-essays.


Three weeks before DesPres' fortieth birthday, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, and fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that soon won’t exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and find the real reasons she never “settled down.” The choices she makes from that moment on lead her to re-trace her steps—in the States and abroad—as she attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself moving forward to new love, shocking loss, and finally, in a way that she never expects, to a place that she can almost call home.
Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of such rising contemporary writers as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will appreciate Faye’s observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.





A Message From the Author


Imagine arriving at a train station in the middle of nowhere. On your lap lies a suitcase, and in that suitcase you carry your past. Metal brakes screech, the train slows and stops, and you struggle as you carry the suitcase toward the door and down the stairs to the platform. The whistle sounds and the train pulls away as steam rises from the tracks. You survey the landscape beyond the station and think: Where am I? What now? What happens next?
This is how I arrived at what I call my “middle decade,” the decade between forty and fifty. The suitcase I carried was heavy with memories—not just recollections of my youth and adulthood in America, but also inherited memories from an immigrant family splintered by the events of World War II. Born against a backdrop of displacement, loss, and ultimately hope, I was raised in upstate New York. Over the years I moved from New York to Boston, to England,  Israel, Colorado, and eventually back to Boston. I gathered life experiences as if they were pieces of a puzzle and hoped, without realizing it, that those pieces would eventually form some kind of whole. In retrospect I can see that my desire was to find what many of us seek: love, a sense of peace, and a home.
The essays in my book emerged from the pieces of that puzzle that inspired—or haunted—me most. They were crafted in an effort to fashion a big picture from the fragments of a restless life. I examined events in both the present and the past, the history of my family, the start of a second marriage the same year my mother-in-law’s life was drawing to a close, body image, aging, and the passage of time, and the connection I have always felt to animals. I explored these things while at a stage of my life where I had seen a lot of things but still had—as I have now—a great deal more left to see.
You will meet colorful characters (some human, some not), visit places from Canada to Bermuda and the Middle East, and witness the conflict between the desire to examine one’s life and the ultimate need to let go of it all in order to live in the moment. Perhaps you will find, as I did, that the natural world and the creatures who inhabit it—from a humpback whale to an astonishing blue jay—can provide insight in unexpected ways.
As I prepare for the journey toward the next stage of my life, it is time to pack up my suitcase. But because I examined its contents so thoroughly during this phase I feel ready to leave some of the weightier things behind and to move forward with a lighter load.
We’ll see how it goes. The train is pulling in and the whistle is sounding. The future is waiting. Care to join me?
— Faye


I'm looking forward to joining you Faye!!!




Official Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/MessageFromaBlueJay
Publisher's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Buddhapuss
Author's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/faye.rapoport.despres
Publisher's blog: http://buddhapussink.blogspot.com/2013/10/cover-reveal-message-from-blue-jay.html
Publisher's website announcement: http://www.BuddhapussInk.com
Author's website:  http://fayerapoportdespres.com/




Saturday, October 5, 2013

Something of Substance





Something of Substance

I’ve looked long at my fingers
how they touch the air
dispel the dust in light of stair
I’ve seen them catch my fall to ground
and pick up leaves and things around

The mirror is a play along
a friend that makes no sound at all
nor grumbles when I take her toys
I watch with much interest and see
the way it does things just like me

The yard is fabric light and dark
and warm or cool the grass like park
depending on which way I turn
in dip of driveway’s down I see
another laying down piece of me

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Take me Down










Take me down to curled leaf,
autumn falls,
it falls along the edge
and leans from the fence with the warped tomato.

Pull out the weeping end of summer,
its fragrance bites,
though sweet the taste.

Take me down into this cool morning,
oh, sun,  so layered in rising mist,
and touch me sweatered.
The bare shoulder has danced summer brown
into folly’s open fire with a sing along
and I can still hear it echo in the ripple.

I see grace moving now in the rake,
a piece of last October still stuck in its teeth,
leaning against the turn of time
watching the sky for the first dance
of the Liquid Amber.

Take me down with flannel sheets and the window open to cool
the warmth of autumn nights with you.