#robin chapman

[readmydesire]

time by robin chapman

[fattomatoz]

• Lost hearts (1973) Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark

[missedstations]

“The Door-to-Door Saleswoman” - Robin Chapman

Look, I’m knocking on your door, satchel full of flyers for the best subscription I can offer you—deals for a scholarship to the school of the world, jars of honey, honeysuckle’s perfume, the sky swept cirrus by big bluestem, the zigzag work of bees, the four directions of the compass signaled by the compass plant, sunflowers’ fix on east, a wind to make a chime of leaf stir and branch when ice shackles the prairie grass—look at its brilliance flashing as it drips!                                   And maybe this is a return to my girlhood work, knocking on neighbors’ doors with deals for Time and Life subscriptions, scholarship to the college of my choice, in a town where Uranium-235 was carefully sorted from U-238 to make the bombs that could blow up our world— this wish to spend life tending what grows.

[rockymountainbeeplant]

The Door-to-Door Saleswoman

The Door-to-Door Saleswoman

Robin Chapman

Look, I’m knocking on your door, satchel full of flyers for the best subscription I can offer you—deals for a scholarship to the school of the world, jars of honey, honeysuckle’s perfume, the sky swept cirrus by big bluestem, the zigzag work of bees, the four directions of the compass signaled by the compass plant, sunflowers’ fix on east, a wind to make a chime of leaf stir and branch when ice shackles the prairie grass—look at its brilliance flashing as it drips!                                   And maybe this is a return to my girlhood work, knocking on neighbors’ doors with deals for Time and Life subscriptions, scholarship to the college of my choice, in a town where Uranium-235 was carefully sorted from U-238 to make the bombs that could blow up our world— this wish to spend life tending what grows.

Copyright © 2021 by Robin Chapman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 22, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

[mythologyofblue]

My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask if I might have seen her clipping shears that went missing a decade ago, with a little red paint on their shaft, or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain coffee cup that disappeared a while back when her friend, now dead, called the police to break in to see if she were ill, and have we had trouble with our phone line, hers is dead and her car and driver’s license are missing though she can drive perfectly well, just memory problems, and her son is coming this morning to take her up to Sheboygan, where she was born and where the family has its burial lots, to wait on assisted living space, and she just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors all these how many? years, and how lucky I am to have found such a nice man and could she borrow a screwdriver, the door lock to her house is jammed.

-Robin Chapman, copyright © 2012 +

[mariocki]

Villains: Move In, Move On (1.8, LWT, 1972)

"You're a studious fellow, aren't you?"

"D'you know, my old man wanted me to go into accountancy. Either that, or civil engineering."

"So why didn't you?"

"Well I have. I've sort of combined both, haven't I."

[mariocki]

A Ghost Story For Christmas: Lost Hearts (BBC, 1973)

"Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects. Especially in those cases where they can command the allegiance of... what we are pleased to call material objects."

[harpersplay]

Life in This Body by Robin Chapman

And those other images of the brain lit up— faces here, hand tools there, words heard, words said, maps of the body, feet next to sex, happiness glowing in the left frontal cortex, grief with no words in the right, fear bright in the amygdala, self here, consciousness of self there, and mirrors of your mouth, hands, movements everywhere, intention a latecomer— what is it to live in this body, these bones, the world entering in a river of light and sound, smell of cut grass, gravity’s tug?

Now the indigo buntings are singing insistently in the walnut tree, their flashes of metallic blue a color that was never sky, and wild phlox the shade of rainy cloud are releasing a perfume that makes the bumblebees wild. Wind gusts the daisy patch and green rises up on a great scaffold of branches into the building thunderheads.

All that pours in, first spatter of rain, sound of your voice, this inner life that is a singing underground— who can point to bone or brain and say— there’s the river running through?