Each glass a spell, a set of steps, reminders and images…
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Tag: Mike Madigan
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with
…living more wildly than I have in days… days.. The point of this book, is, well to find something. In wine. In me. In my wine story. And what is Mike Madigan’s wine story.. something here. In this room. The bottle tasting better than the last time I swam in her borders, about a month or two ago. More structure and symmetry… lovingly and musically cogent. But I’m going to stop describing wine the way I do, the way people tell my to keep talking and writing about wine, ‘cause it might do something. But…. This light, from bottle’s neck and the cork looking back at me, strangely singing to my inhibitions and aims, my sentences and words, how I view this room. How I see everything… with appreciation of and estimation, embrace of living chords… how wine starts out there, on vines, from breaking bud to clusters, to harvest. On the couch now watching some show about a writer, whose attitude I admire a bit but the work ethic I don’t at all. Why is it so hard to finish a fucking book? Each vintage, wine is made, each sitting should be something toward a book. See my meaning? See my sight?
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Categories
Wine, making —
What’s happening in each barrel, each universe inside that wood containment, or steel, what’s being developed, what character takes shape. I stand and stare and take a couple pics, then wonder where I go with wine in my story, from here.
From formative stages and obvious metaphor for everything around you, remind you that Now is the Now to leap upon with eagerness, near-anger, certitude that you are the only YOU to pursue. Grapes after crush promising story, of the year and the crush pad, and of you observing it, all of it.
Grapes with their color and hue, voice and texture. I reach in and grab one, chew, spit out only seeds. The juice wraps itself around me, for my story and sight… a poetry re-written and thought. I entrance in the grapes and juice, want to touch but don’t. Don’t want the color to change even slightly so I take a step back and hear her notes.
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
Categories
The Kids
On my day off want
more of my time,
I of theirs.
There’s not enough.
Days off try.
6/24/18
On lawn, sidewalk,
a jeep’s tire.
Down to drain, sewer
that leads somewhere.
Ocean different, in glass.
What’s that.
6/24/18
Changing, from time to–
Wondering what front next in arrives
and changes my scene and setting and
what I have planned. Drops, dry. Sun,
then none.
Rocks waiting for the change. Dreading or
not. Sold one approach and life after another,
me listening to a couple from Texas have a conversation
about the heat, here. What heat they said.
Laughing, walking, think I heard thunder.
No sound before pour. Always the way.
Trees move, telling me it’s here. New approach and landing.
Kind first notes, benches gently drenched.
Songs in the steps, clouds convincing me.
6/24/18
Done. With he regularity of blandness and expected shows, do’s, tasks and tallies. This morning I woke with a slight ache in head from I’m sure that one and only glass of Alexander Valley Vineyards Zin. I never drink Zin, and I had it too late. So this morning leaving pillows and sheets I rolled my eyes and thought about the day ahead in the tasting room, told myself not to take any attitude, especially THAT one. So I’m here committed…. People around me, with the day off. Me, not. Needing my own office… where is it? My mood… writing way out of it, approaching that age. Stop writing about it, I know. I’m legitimizing it. Need to do something drastic, today… creatively radical. Eight hours I could be writing, spent pouring behind a bar. There’s that attitude, I know I know.
At least I acknowledge where I need repair. Book technically due tomorrow. What can I do. What will I do. I sip the mocha and say ‘fuck it’, frankly. I’m a shameless me manuscript and modality. I say to myself, “We all are, from time to time, right?” I have no idea. But this idea, this finding self through more exploration of self and what I want, what I want to be doing for the rest of my life— what YOU should be doing right now instead of being safe and contributing to pattern and the expected formation of everything out there…. Go. And move quick. The clock is a cannibal.
Stories in head, from the tasting room and other realities… my character, Kelly, and her novel, some novels snd short story collection. Will be with family all day, come morrow, so I need five sittings I this morning vindicated, between now and when we leave the house for our drive (taking kids to see race cars, or something, at the raceway in whatever city that is). Five. And I’m doing it. This isn’t passion you read, but refusal, refusing to keep with anything. I’m done with templates, being on a foreign schedule.
So I did it. The same thing I always do on Saturday. Get up, ready self for labor, care for babies while Mama suits up for workout class and leaves, wait for neighbor to come over and watch Jack and Emma, then I leave… come here, write a bit, get to place, and then stress finds me. I decided, on change. That this will be how I make my life more worth living, make a living, more wildly live. There is more in the present than I before noticed… people around me, looking at their phones or talking in small groups on their day off. Me, the writer in corner gathering himself…. Short stories, screenplay, novel. Starting over isn’t starting over. It’s starting. I’m deciding to start, I’ve found. This morning. And why not. Why not decide right now that, more of what you want, what you aim do for the rest of your days, and stop what stops you, or slows you. Decide.