I am starting to learn how to use my new camera. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to find the built in flash. It was really built in! Carolyn Forche’ is coming to Minneapolis for my birthday. Well, she is coming to teach this but I can say she is coming for me. I am in the class. The U is picking up the bill though I had to throw my teaching schedule to the wind. Now I am in a panic b/c she has already read my current manuscript of poems and maybe I should be working on another. Here is a goal, maybe I should just write ONE fricken, mothertucking poem. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should stick with the flash.

Another thing I have applied for. I want to go to a ghost ranch in New Mexico and write. I want horses and dust and no way for my children to find me.

Vividly, I remember being 13 and knowing I was forgetting how to be a child. Lately I am feeling that way about poetry. I am forgetting…and maybe that is good. Maybe I will emerge something else I haven’t even considered and that would be okay. Wouldn’t it?

Why do I feel like I am trying to convince myself that growing old is pretty?

our snow day

my morning girl

Yes, they closed down the highway; yes there is more than three feet of snow on the ground; where to go in all this white--to the hills of course, the fast wonderful hills.

This morning while I was trying to dig out a small path to civilization, I looked up and right over my head was a hawk, she had a chickadee in her beak and she did not move. I did not move. Ever so slowly she began showering me with chickadee’s feathers and then we both did our jobs, I made my path and she devoured everything except the small beak which now rests by the climbing rose bush.

I sometimes wonder why we need to make things beautiful—because this wasn’t beautiful, yet I wanted to wake everyone up and make them see that she had chosen me somehow, she had chosen me this morning to see her and I wanted to choose them. But I didn’t. Okay, so I made the children look and Em but I didn’t wake the whole block which was my initial reaction. The hawk was there for three hours or more without flying away until I called my best friend and asked her if she thought it was a sign.

It was.

It is truly the size that matters

We are suppose to get 16 inches of snow today and I got to call my first “snow day” at work and all the children had to stay home, which made me feel a bit like a king you shall not venture out into the weather.

On my way to have breakfast with my love, I passed a house that had a ten foot snow sculpture penis in the front yard. I know it’s a frat house but I still wanted to pull over and sculpt a dog taking a leak on their snow balls... yet I had to get to breakfast. I have the talent but I just don’t have the time. I think THAT should be printed on a T-Shirt for me to wear everyday.

At breakfast the man behind me said, “My first wife was named Joy and when she left I didn’t have any” which almost threw me into a fit of giggles, causing me to blow french toast out my nose. True Ballard fact: I'm always listening to conversations around me and not to any I am actually HAVING which makes me a horrible love most of the time but I am trying to make up for it other ways.

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sculpture out on the front lawn!

O Happy Birthday You Beautiful Maine Girl

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

Edna St. Vincent Millay 

 

“The truth in life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe he has found his place. But only the madman is truly calm.” – Antonin Artaud


Reasons I might be CrAzY……

I woke up this morning and it was twenty degrees below zero and I still went OUTDOORS.
I have not fixed the crack in my windshield.
I did not go to work.
I did not go to work and yet I answered the phone when my boss called and spent all morning discussing work.
I drank moon tea for health and one giant ass chocolate bar for breakfast.
I ONCE AGAIN prepared a packet for submitting and then missed the posting date.
I believe you are actually listening harder b/c I am using CAPITIALS!!!!
I invited 12 nine years old girls to sleep over next weekend for Bella's Birthday.
I let her pick an American Idol theme.
I ordered the playstation game.
I bought a disco ball.
I peed today on a toilet with no seat.
I replaced a hundred year old pull chain toilet (that I loved) with a brand new, fancy-ass (pun) with no seat.
I paid $680.00 for this.
I tried to hit a squrriel with a broom.
I think the toilet actually looks better in Sepia.

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)