Before I love, I fear the dark
with its gradual strangeness, familiar burden.
How sly the light with her shadow.
How quick the eye to forget.

Yet in my own night I’m forgiven.
If I close my eyes, follow the map
on the underside of my lids, my body
will remember which way to walk.

Until a chair bites me in the hip. 

Robert Creamer 

I’m still ill. I work, I come home, I do laundry and I run the three flights of stairs but I still feel like crap.

When we were D.C. we went to this great exhibit where the artist, Robert Creamer had built a box with this huge flat bed scanner, he then hung flowers as if they were in space and created amazing images. He also collected petals for years, meticulously arranged them for months and then set them on fire for a single photograph.

He talked about how he adapted as an artist. How he changed because of the digital world, how his art became something totally different then what he believed it would be when he first started taking photos. He was not born in the digital age but it was what he was given.

So these are my questions for myself today and thus for you in some way:

How are you willing to adapt as an artist, how willing are you to let your art change from what you once believed it to be?

And what are going to set on fire?

t. ballard 

I’ve been running a fever for the last two days.

I woke up several times last night believing I could speak every language in the world. I have an intense memory of being 17 in a little boat in Germany crossing a river. I was trying to concentrate hard enough to understand. I don’t speak German but I believed I could, if I taught my self to truly listen before the boat landed on the other side.

Just listen. These are words I tell myself all the time.

Other words I tell myself: Stop. Breathe. It’s a wave, only a wave. If you get up right now you can have _______ for supper. Five more minutes, I can sleep five more minutes. I will be a better mother, writer, teacher, lover in my next life. In my next life I will be more organized, creative, attentive, BETTER, able to leap small buildings…..

I understand slowly and then it seems I don’t understand at all. Listen.

Noises in the last five minutes: phone, car, a bus. A very loud garbage truck with one tire flater than the other. A chain saw. Barb next door yelling at the dog. A tree falling. Phone. "Keta come here, please come here" The door opening. Footsteps and one red beep.

Note to Carole Maso: If you write like a god, could you at least be kind?

 

I did it again!!!! I spent all my time last weekend (okay maybe four hours) working on a submission, finished it and then left it in my box to be mailed further in the week on my way to work. Now of course I’ve missed the deadline even though it seems I went to work a zillion times.

I don’t know how I keep doing this. Why is it impossible to raise two children, work a full time job and write a book----this is actually a question in my head.

On a happy note that involves no stamps. I finished a great first novel today called “Caucasia” by Senna Denzy about two children born in the sixties, in an interracial home, who were split up b/c one looked like one parent and one looked like the other. Read the book. It's written well and talks about things people never talk about in a way that’s incredibly interesting.

Another note: I am in love. His name is Robert and I met him on Tuesday while he was hiding under the art table from one of his teachers, who was trying to lure him out by asking him what the word “luminaries” meant. I then had him the next day in my mosaic class breaking dishes with hammers. “This is cool shit” he said and hugged my knee cap.

I agree.

photo- Les Krimns

Salt on the roads melts
the ice. Salt on the heart
hardens it.
That's not
How the Book
Preserves the body.

The bitten tongue
Tastes blood. The tongue
Uttering, utters love.

gregory orr

Calm down, calm down.
But why calm down?
When I'm dead and only
A poem in the Book
Read by someone
Not yet born,
Then I will be calm.
Then I will tell them
In a quiet voice
What a miracle it is
To be alive. I won't
Shout and jump around.
I'll whisper it in her ear.

gregory orr 

Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because the wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives live there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.

If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?

-gregory orr

(photo by jerry uelsmann)

 

I am the rat's star today

My friend, my friend, I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.


-anne sexton

I have been reading “Autobiography of a Face” by Lucy Grealy for the last few days. I found it in a used bookstore on Sunday along with the collected works of H.D which I had been looking for, for years. I scared the crap out of the person down the stacks when I saw her collected (made physical noises) and strapped it to my breast like a small child then like a BAD mother brought it to my house and lost it in my own stacks.

Read Grealy’s book if you have not already. She was a poet and then wrote a memoir before it was cool to do such things. She had cancer as a child which left her face disfigured and there’s no happy ending. No Oprah saying it made her better or stronger, nothing more than a brilliant book.

After I finished the book Em came in and said, “did you know she is dead?” Which really sucked b/c I didn’t KNOW and I wrote my own happy ending even if Grealy could not. I didn’t give her a drug overdose at 39. I gave her hair and better surgeries and maybe a few more lovers.

I don’t think I’m a poet. I might be a fairy tale writer.

Now I’m sad and want to go have tea.