Through the window
…I went to visit mom…she was lonely…we had tea and read the newspapers…I did the crossword puzzle my father used to do…I drove home…alone,not lonely…transported elsewhere by public radio’s Echoes…cutting through the hills on 254 to Litchfield, imagining the horizon line like former tribes of Connecticut…the day was a confusion of weather…cloud-cover one minute, a peek of sun the next…wind…calm…drizzle…I felt taken back behind the scenes to nature’s weather board…cue: cloud blanket above horizon…now spotlight trees in hills, cue: sunlight…wait…cue: raindrops…just a few…no, cue ominous dusk…ah yes, I am home…behind the scenes.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
FIELD NOTES: It's all the same to me...
A walk in the park
…I drive out of my neighborhood…notice a dog with his nose to the ground on his front lawn…a young man sits on his front stoop playing his guitar…at Harrybrooke I notice the reflection on the water looks just like the photograph I took one April ago. Wasn’t I just raking? Wasn’t I just bracing for a long hibernation? And here it is…the closed bridge that used to be the way to town…the horizontal branch I admire like grandma’s arm guiding the river water below…watching her adorn herself…and un-adorn herself…for seventeen years…someday she will collapse…and the bridge…and me…but not today… today, spring’s white-noise water falls from the rocks in twenty-thousand tones to make it all the same…back in the neighborhood, I notice the dog…in the exact same place…as is the young man and his guitar…my heart hasn’t missed a beat…like a wheel, I have been nowhere…and everywhere…because it’s all the same to me…
…I drive out of my neighborhood…notice a dog with his nose to the ground on his front lawn…a young man sits on his front stoop playing his guitar…at Harrybrooke I notice the reflection on the water looks just like the photograph I took one April ago. Wasn’t I just raking? Wasn’t I just bracing for a long hibernation? And here it is…the closed bridge that used to be the way to town…the horizontal branch I admire like grandma’s arm guiding the river water below…watching her adorn herself…and un-adorn herself…for seventeen years…someday she will collapse…and the bridge…and me…but not today… today, spring’s white-noise water falls from the rocks in twenty-thousand tones to make it all the same…back in the neighborhood, I notice the dog…in the exact same place…as is the young man and his guitar…my heart hasn’t missed a beat…like a wheel, I have been nowhere…and everywhere…because it’s all the same to me…
Sunday, March 21, 2010
FIELD NOTES: First Rake Haiku
Saturday, the First Day of Spring 2010
Piquant green on tines,
Extension of my fingers,
The scratch ‘n sniff of spring.
Piquant green on tines,
Extension of my fingers,
The scratch ‘n sniff of spring.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
FIELD NOTES: I hear one bird…
Through the (weekday) window
...its song muffled through the closed up winter window sashes. The heat clicks through the hot water baseboards in my bathroom, the morning news speaks so thinly from its cave in the other room that I can barely hear what’s new in the world today…but this one bird is what alerts me that I have been in a stupor of sorts, buried in snow and government paperwork. But that is the character of February. It is a good month for Lent. It is the month in which I write the least…move the least…eat the most and sleep the most. The attic overhead feels pregnant and overdue. The household file box needs its yearly purging. I take stock in my inventory, both in what I have collected and in what has somehow slid in around me like a storage facility. In February, its closeness turns claustrophobic and fills my nostrils like so much dust. I mull over things, incubate ideas about what’s next, brood and hibernate and absorb and fidget. What relief the one bird is, nature’s town crier, chirping that what is not here now, is preparing to return. Bulbs are energizing underground; they simply cannot be flowers all year round. So, back to the drawing board...
...its song muffled through the closed up winter window sashes. The heat clicks through the hot water baseboards in my bathroom, the morning news speaks so thinly from its cave in the other room that I can barely hear what’s new in the world today…but this one bird is what alerts me that I have been in a stupor of sorts, buried in snow and government paperwork. But that is the character of February. It is a good month for Lent. It is the month in which I write the least…move the least…eat the most and sleep the most. The attic overhead feels pregnant and overdue. The household file box needs its yearly purging. I take stock in my inventory, both in what I have collected and in what has somehow slid in around me like a storage facility. In February, its closeness turns claustrophobic and fills my nostrils like so much dust. I mull over things, incubate ideas about what’s next, brood and hibernate and absorb and fidget. What relief the one bird is, nature’s town crier, chirping that what is not here now, is preparing to return. Bulbs are energizing underground; they simply cannot be flowers all year round. So, back to the drawing board...
Sunday, January 24, 2010
FIELD NOTES: So what exactly happened under that blue moon on New Year’s Eve?
Catching up on a Sunday morning
...to answer a question with more questions…what looks like busywork, but isn’t? A spider spinning? A bee buzzing? A bird building? A woman cleaning?...I went to my studio in the basement. It had become coated with dust not from neglect but from a certain unfortunate condition of busyness. Relatives were preoccupied with other things, but apart from that, it just happened that I was feeling more reflective than social and, moreover, was willing to embrace it even though that eve is intended for partying. The word ‘evening’ may mean the closing part of the day and the early part of the night, but the word ‘eve’ is not merely its shortened form; it brings with it other connotations. A second definition - its commonly acknowledged sense - is “the period just before some important event” or “a period of decline”. Imaginings of last light, owl-light, twilight, dusk, nightfall, soiree, sunset and the poetic gloaming are conjured. Who has not experienced how differently things look when you are in the dark?...I grabbed a bottle of Bellini, piped in some dusky jazz and pulled out an onerous bin filled with fabric scraps…probably some thirty years worth because I used to sew everything: shirts, skirts, gowns, pants, jackets, purses, pajamas, curtains, cushions, even dolls. The bin turned into a magician’s hat with endless strips from the striated layers of my life that I could color-date. A heap lay before me like a new map or fitted sheet impossible to return to its container once sprung. Midnight was on the march. Should I: Discard it and not look back until I discover I have nothing to show my grandchildren and no memory of my handiwork? Give in to burden and hang onto it like someone hiding in their obesity?...Neither...Though the blue moon ended up being hidden by cloudiness, it illuminated my night. I gathered the expensive or exotic specimens into a sequestered group, then folded the useful pieces that were big enough to actually be made into something and placed them strategically back into the bin. I took a sample swatch from everything that remained, editing this economically industrious period of my life into a small box. Before the ball dropped, I turned out the light, went upstairs and opened a bottle of champagne. The box of swatches will be reincarnated into a collage…perhaps…under the next blue moon…
...to answer a question with more questions…what looks like busywork, but isn’t? A spider spinning? A bee buzzing? A bird building? A woman cleaning?...I went to my studio in the basement. It had become coated with dust not from neglect but from a certain unfortunate condition of busyness. Relatives were preoccupied with other things, but apart from that, it just happened that I was feeling more reflective than social and, moreover, was willing to embrace it even though that eve is intended for partying. The word ‘evening’ may mean the closing part of the day and the early part of the night, but the word ‘eve’ is not merely its shortened form; it brings with it other connotations. A second definition - its commonly acknowledged sense - is “the period just before some important event” or “a period of decline”. Imaginings of last light, owl-light, twilight, dusk, nightfall, soiree, sunset and the poetic gloaming are conjured. Who has not experienced how differently things look when you are in the dark?...I grabbed a bottle of Bellini, piped in some dusky jazz and pulled out an onerous bin filled with fabric scraps…probably some thirty years worth because I used to sew everything: shirts, skirts, gowns, pants, jackets, purses, pajamas, curtains, cushions, even dolls. The bin turned into a magician’s hat with endless strips from the striated layers of my life that I could color-date. A heap lay before me like a new map or fitted sheet impossible to return to its container once sprung. Midnight was on the march. Should I: Discard it and not look back until I discover I have nothing to show my grandchildren and no memory of my handiwork? Give in to burden and hang onto it like someone hiding in their obesity?...Neither...Though the blue moon ended up being hidden by cloudiness, it illuminated my night. I gathered the expensive or exotic specimens into a sequestered group, then folded the useful pieces that were big enough to actually be made into something and placed them strategically back into the bin. I took a sample swatch from everything that remained, editing this economically industrious period of my life into a small box. Before the ball dropped, I turned out the light, went upstairs and opened a bottle of champagne. The box of swatches will be reincarnated into a collage…perhaps…under the next blue moon…
Sunday, January 17, 2010
FIELD NOTES: A Happy Blue Pot
A Happy Blue Pot
(For Haitians & Others, January 2010)
I bought a pot;
(enameled cast iron,
cobalt blue on the outside, milk white on the in)
not because I needed it
at the time
but because it caught my eye
like love at first sight.
I first cooked in it
the bean casserole
for Wigilia*
and when I found myself smiling
unconsciously as a babe
I called it “my happy pot”.
I have since made soup
and rice,
and smile each time
for not much reason
other than delight in gathered senses
from a sometimes senseless world.
I do not wash the pot;
I bathe it
like a child of mine
when s/he was a baby
and wrap it gently in a towel.
Out from this Aladdin’s lamp
wafts wishes, memory and dreams,
and I would want it with me
if my earth should shake.
I clang my spoon,
call out,
how can I
give it
to you?
*(pronounced: /vi.ˈɡi.ʎa/ or vee-GHEE-lee-uh, the traditional Christmas Eve vigil supper in Poland)
(For Haitians & Others, January 2010)
I bought a pot;
(enameled cast iron,
cobalt blue on the outside, milk white on the in)
not because I needed it
at the time
but because it caught my eye
like love at first sight.
I first cooked in it
the bean casserole
for Wigilia*
and when I found myself smiling
unconsciously as a babe
I called it “my happy pot”.
I have since made soup
and rice,
and smile each time
for not much reason
other than delight in gathered senses
from a sometimes senseless world.
I do not wash the pot;
I bathe it
like a child of mine
when s/he was a baby
and wrap it gently in a towel.
Out from this Aladdin’s lamp
wafts wishes, memory and dreams,
and I would want it with me
if my earth should shake.
I clang my spoon,
call out,
how can I
give it
to you?
*(pronounced: /vi.ˈɡi.ʎa/ or vee-GHEE-lee-uh, the traditional Christmas Eve vigil supper in Poland)
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