and a plastic stemless on the floor with red wine in it, the rocks on ground, sky, vines extending up into blue.  My whole life, according to this camera, is wine.  In the vineyards… the symmetrical and tireless expression of expressions, expressing to me to not move, not move at all. Stay right where I am.  In wine’s throw, and go… go with more sternly strict say in my pages.  The wine all around me, in the Zin bottle on the counter and whatever bottles I have in my “cellar” if you could even call it that.  Can a closet be a cellar.  

Nothing in wine’s story for me is happenstance or some stretched theory or hypothetical. But a certainty that I’ve always and ever needed.  Note I wrote the other day on receipt paper, after some people left, not buying a thing, not a single bottle, only asking questions about what shirt sizes we have and… anyway, “Wine teaches me to not sell.  Communicate, genuinely and creatively.  Course as a poet in wine’s time, timing.  I’m already such mode, begging and making possible a consolidation of all my laboring identities materializes and places itself in Now’s, Wine’s, stage.” Wine ever pulls me closer and nearer to travels of everywhere, seeing everything that my traveling wine friends, somms and other, now see.  Like my family in France, tasting in Burgundy and headed to Paris to tomorrow fly back to US.  I should go somewhere now, taste, pretend I’m a tourist, take notes, buy a couple bottles and bring them back to my hotel room.  These photos, from this year and years ago when I was gifted the cam’ from Mom and Dad, pictures of Jack when he was only a couple months old…. I’m in the vineyard, and needing to explore wine with more fervent direction and momentum… wine isn’t wine, it isn’t a business or industry, it’s time.  She’s a reminder that we have to envelope ourselves in the moment and the moment in our dreams, our aims, what will make us happy.

Time with family all day today except for now, kids showing me I need play more in wine’s business and any venture or project associated with her.  Play more.  Don’t stop, pause or halt.  You don’t have time.  Just play, take more pictures, of everything, everyone.  Every glass I fill and bottle I open.  That’s what wine is.  Travel and play with form and pattern, establishing my own creative pattern away from society’s expected professional and vocational patterns.  Clock in never again, only to be on terroir, taking pictures like these, writing to them, responding to each image with new imagist prose and verse.

I tell my students during in-class writing to not think, just write.  That’s what I do now, more than mere whimsy or freewrites, Mike Madigan’s fanciful form.  Entertaining going to sister’s winery.  I should.  I’ll leave the house in a bit, do some writing there, take pictures, walk the Wild Oak Vineyard, see more in what I see at a winery I’ve been to more than a thousand times, I’m sure.

6/24/18