Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Let the moment be where Annie finds herself, not because she's lost but because she's been looking and when Aram calls because she was meeting with her boss and he remembers not one but both meetings and worries that she's weary and she is, Annie tells herself that it isn't only love that looks like this but some days when there's not a cupcake on the horizon, no good song, no time to read the body of books that she sleeps beside each night, she thinks it really is. Let the moment be Liza on the line talking about lost boys as dead horses, the kind heavy when they live, heavier when they die, their bodies the stuff of breaking the barn down around them, just to hire the back-hoe and dig a grave, larger than most of the places where she has lived. There is no quiet way for a lost boy to leave you, Liza says as she laments her own, the one who forgets to brush his teeth and won't floss for anything, the one who drinks himself to sleep most nights and dreams through the alarm because he didn't protect his ears against the years of truck-tinkerings so loud they blew out whole octaves and now it's hard to call him indoors when night is falling and dinner is still warm. They are tired, Liza and Anastasia, though Liza has made a home with her man and Annie some nights feels like a single dandelion seed pirouetting ever-away from the pod, and so portable it's as if the flight was what she was made for.
Advance Requiem for a Lovely Couple

So Beauty's gone under the knife again,
For a chin lift and an alabaster brow;
And Truth, who can't stop confessing
Everything to everyone, has taken another
Name in the witness protection program.

Who would recognize them now, Anonymous
And his soulmate? Maybe, with her new look,
She'd like a new name, too, something tan enough
For a swimsuit, like Melanie, or as pale as
Blanche, all parasols and moonlit lace.

Cramped in their dim suburban home, afraid
To stroll around the neighborhood, Alias goes only
Deeper into himself, where his thoughts line up
Like retired folk at a buffet diner, as if it's
All You Need to Know Night in the brain.

It's a cold and lonely life, quiet to the end,
When the organ pipes will play low hymns
No one but churchmice and poets can hear,
As soft as two palmfuls of ash poured inside
A small urn, old and Greek and overwrought.

Elton Glaser

May the Moment Be

better than the memory" my wise new friend tells me. I like it and like that I am just now, precisely where I need to be.

The new schedule of less phone time more discipline is working well so far. Today is a lovely color and I'm about to dive into it. More soon

Saturday, February 21, 2009

BRAT
I am all about heavenly cavorting
Here on silly earth.
And I misbehave around death.
And I tug on trouble's braids.
But tonight I am going to pretend
I know the people who love me.
Jeni Olen

Tonight I am going to pretend to know that the new love is respect and that what isn't mine won't be and that there is a bunch of gift wrap around things like that.
I had good Vietnamese food tonight. I walked on old streets in the new cold which is less-so than the old. I went for a drive last night and someone's presence was so present in the car with me I thought he must be thinking me too. But I'm rarely right about who pines and how much and I am again, okay with that.

A friend said yesterday that I was without strategy and that made me glad. I have made a list of goals that have little to do with anyone but me. They are good things and I need more energy. There have been many funerals in the lives of people I love lately and what they all seem to spit back from their bed-shaped holes in the dirt is something about knowing what matters, random beauty and the open eyes to get it, the infinite, unrepeating sky, spices, black cats, good music and the kind of hands that hold on and well.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Starry Starry Night

Tonight we study more Van Gogh letters and the work that he inspires. I recall seeing his paintings live and being unable to believe that they were what they were ie: real Van Goghs and not dorm posters or boxer shorts of starry night.

His colors, the shagginess of the paint, sigh... I am so tired still. I can't wait to go home and make some great veggies, eat spring mix salad and sleep. I am reading a borrowed book and oddly-distracted by far-away persons and the way they cast long shadows that are not unwelcome, unrefreshing.

Today's offering is from my new find:

Patrick Lawler

Freud with a Picture of Teiresias Finds Dora with a Picture of Cassandra

When I wake, glass is all around me.
Millefiori glass. Venetian glass. Glass
with thin vein-like cracks. Glass like
the breath of an anorexic.
Glass like the brains
of deep-sea fish. Glass like language.
Glass like belief. Glass filling the room.


Glass like echoes. Glass like the language
of aboriginal people. Glass from the mothering
caves of memory. Glass like swollen objects
that have been misplaced in dreams:
Birthmarks and terrariums.

Glass like the uterus of a saint. Glass


like the sewn language of memory. Glass ready
to break into a mosaic. Glass like a body of someone
touched. Glass like an indelible language.


Glass like the memory the body has
of places that have been touched.


Glass filled with twisted light. Glass so fragile
it breaks when I think. Glass that cuts into flesh.
Glass that grows more dangerous
with every step. Glass that sees everything
with its shattered eyes. Glass like a fantastic
plant with fruit that will make us transparent.

Monday, February 02, 2009

I was always one of those women that hung out too long at the counter with the other women in vintage clothing shops like the one in Baltimore where we gathered around Lucinda Williams as if she were a patron saint. And then Sam happened. Sam, who fit into that world and made larger it and brought his own globe over and we made a life of it all. A messy, tangle of life with plastic beads in his thirties, my late-fifties greens. His restrained deco decor and silk ties in colors that claimed the spice rack. Everything richer after Sam and that sense, that Peter Pan girl-feeling I had of being ever-single and moving in some circle of people that were, too, it evaporated so organically, so gently with Sam that I find myself stunned that there was a time I lived with...cufflinks and his big floppy clown-foot gym shoes and that there was a time after that, when I boxed his things reverently, breathed in his scent as if my lungs could keep him that way, and put our life away in storage. I didn't explicitly tell myself that he would be back and we would go to the desolate always-same rows of storage units and we would turn the key and our objects and his things wedded together behind some door with numbers on it would be waiting and we might then, right here, pull up a chair and resume. But I didn't and I know this, really tell myself that it would be impossible to store him and therefore us, for a better, later time. I lived with cufflinks, I thought, the way someone else might mutter the winning numbers of the lottery ticket that took them from destitute to beachfront property. Once upon a time, there were cufflinks on my dressing table.

Periwinkle Blue & Silver Shoes

A clean bedroom with my beautiful comforter (thank you, The Good Bird,) and my lovely duvet. A bit of blue sky and Florida up ahead, beyond that, Chicago and a big dose of people that I love. I have this real hold on things right now and I am loving that feeling.

I read a poem today that reminded me what it is about marriage that I will someday want in my life again.

Cleaning Out Zaide's Apartment
by Yehoshua November
— for my grandparents

His scent still lingered in the black heat
of his darkroom, where he spent decades
developing his meticulous world
of insects and flowers.
Boxes of slides
lay piled on top of one another.
Holding one to the lamplight,
I entered a different universe,
where moths silently cling to the stems
of roses.

In the bedroom
we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes
and then the slender, fragile model planes
he had built from scratch and hand-painted
bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings.

And in every drawer,
countless notes she had written to him.
He must have saved them all,
each one wedding the mundane to a private world
only the lovers themselves could know:
Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.