There's something about weeping cellos and willows

that my student said today and something about red taffetta and how September is a fragile month, palming a blown-glass carousel. Or it's not. Fragile. Blown-glass. What it is clear, intricate, wonderous and so on. Last month I started another blog, a secret place for trying on ideas, essay bits, a place to explore what it means not to perform or to perform anonymously like whoever left that painting against the telephone pole last month and what in me wanted to drive back for it--floral-beauty of a thing and what in me said "leave some pretty for someone else" so I did.

M makes me think about identity, how much people hang themselves out of windows and say, in essence, "look at me" but with no real art to it. Just talk and show. Just desparation so loud that it is hard to really look at. Facebook does that. The status updates that I too, indulge. How many bits of what I might be able to call literature lost themselves to the wasted moments of gossip, trivia and time-wasting and now, here, how I linger when I was just preparing manuscripts and which I will again soon. With luck, the little fragments I am shoring up will soon be stories, poems, essays, novel and will make of my time a worthwhile sacrifice. For now, back to it. But not before I share a pretty.

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The throaty jangle of pennies against
pennies against the porcelain belly
of a dressertop pig, or a train ticket
slipped into the space between book pages.
A sweater stretched across an empty seat
in a concert hall lit with pinball chatter
before the house lights dim. Pickling jars
on a pantry shelf, gold-lidded terrariums
to preserve the seasons: crooknecked
cucumbers, drifty layers of lemon wheels,
round red beets. It's time to reset
all the clocks, create a new architecture
of daylight and dark. It's time to stand
in the sun and stain our shoes with
cemetery dirt. Now we're parceling
the contents of the house, what's left
in this shingled shell. There are colors:
the plump yellow sofa, the empty gray
coatsleeves brushing against each other
in the hall closet, the fleshy deep green leaves
of the jade plant, stout stacks of white
dinner plates. There is a full set of sterling,
a pair of Eames chairs. There are old letters
softening in shoeboxes, there is everything
suspended in ink, and everything that is not.


Copyright © 2010 Alison Doernberg All rights reserved