Category Archives: Stories

Not So Deadly Serious After All

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photoTerms of Interment

I’d like to twine my limbs among

great roots beneath an oak,

eternally embracing there

—but not before I croak.

I want my grave within a grove

of alders, at the least,

so plant me deeply in the trees

—but wait ‘til I’m deceased.photo

Cheer up; it could Happen to You

The shrinking shrubbery betrays the end-of-season, last of days,

that comes—enfin!—to suck and drub the lushness out from every shrub,

to make it sere and small and sharp, and leafless, stringy as a harp;

to drag the desiccation on until all fruitful life is gone,

and while it’s shrinking, to remind me salad days are left behind me;

so I, too, will shrink and shrivel: I’ll dry up, as all who live’ll.photo

Roland Stone Gathers Moss

Roland was a rascal

Roland was a scamp

Roland gave his children

A trip to summer camp

The neighbors thought it generous

But never did they guess

He moved away and left the kids

No forwarding address

The kids were smarter than he thought

And found him anyhow;

They gave him a nice funeral, though:

The joke’s on Roland now.

Lighting Candles in the Vastness of the Dark

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photoIt’s easy in this big, busy world to feel sometimes that one is alone in the magnitude of space, a tiny voice calling out and not knowing if there’s anyone who will answer. When times are grim, that is quite simply the pervasive sense. When my youngest nephew was very small and spending his first overnight at his grandparents’, my mother tiptoed down the darkened hall before turning in for sleep and heard his little voice coming out of the doorway with the plaintive little inquiry: “Is there anybody here who knows me?”

Like him, I have always eventually been answered in my timid forays into the fearful or unknown with rescuers coming to my aid, whether in a literal sense or in the sometimes equally powerful act of offering emotional and companionable solidarity. I’m here for you; I hear you. It doesn’t always have to be more than that, though I can’t imagine there are many who would find themselves able to be surfeited when it comes to genuine kindness and support; sometimes just knowing that there is somebody else somewhere in this overwhelming life who cares what happens to us is grace enough.

Entering the seemingly surreal world of the blogosphere is certainly sufficient intimidation and unfamiliarity for most of us, and a place where we well might feel we’re talking into empty nothingness. The discovery that there are not only fellow wanderers in the place, indeed, but kindred spirits–well, that is more than just a comfort. It’s a relief and a joy and the sighting of rescue breaking through the impenetrable dark with, however tiny, a candle flame. Amazing how that infinitesimal light pierces the gloom and begins to widen. How it begins to be passed from one to the other until a seeming infinity of tiny flames has suddenly coalesced into blazing daylight!

That is the kind of friendship that shifts from virtual to virtuous in a rather quick succession of conversations and shared thoughts and dreams, where we go swiftly from meeting-in-passing to knowing that it matters that each little flame be tended thoughtfully. True community, it turns out, can be cultivated in dimensions that know no boundaries of physical space. It grows in sharing commonalities and respecting and treasuring the uniqueness and differences of opinion and belief and history that give so much deeper meaning to what we do hold in common.

So I pay grateful tribute to those who have answered my voice in the darkness, who have shone light upon my blogging life and more importantly, shed light in every direction by the mere warmth and passion of their spirits through their own voices in blogging. There should be a much more beautiful and euphonious name for this dimension of community than Blog, Blogger, Blogged, Blogging–all of them sound, if not rude, then at the least terribly plebeian. But then, perhaps the true beauty of the construct is its very ability to carry our unvarnished, unembellished humanity if not on golden wings then on plainly mortal feet, all of us walking along, however trepidatiously, speaking softly to others we only trust are there, carrying our little candles ahead of us with quavering hope.

Lately I have been reminded of this sharing of light and warmth yet again by the gifts of three further Versatile Blogger Award recognitions by that Beautiful Spirit, Alpha, at Aspire.Motivate.Succeed., the warm and wonderful master of his well-tended garden, Bishop, at Bishop 9396’s Blog, and the Bardess, DM Denton, who shows magnificent visual and verbal ambidexterity. From three people who demonstrate great versatility indeed I take it as a high compliment.

And I have now been granted the Candle Lighter Award by dear ‘Nessa at Stronghold. She is a bright light indeed for such a young torch-bearer, bringing her insights and opening discussions on many a topic that could fall into the dark but for the repeated loving applications of the light of inquiry and passion that she offers in her forum. All are free to ponder there the complexities of life, love and the human psyche that cross all boundaries of age and experience. Precisely the kind of place that welcomes shared illumination just as I’ve been describing here.

Candle Lighter Award logoThe Candle Lighter Award has been variously described in terms of its requirements, so I thought I’d see if I could trace it back, and behold, this award’s creator actually maintains an open link so that we can bask in her generous and thoughtful gift. So raise your lamps high with me, won’t you, and we’ll thank her for this kind and inspiring offering. Thank you, then, both to Kate, the nurturing mother of this Award, at Believe Anyway, and to ‘Nessa, who believes strongly enough to shine her own light in the darkness.

Kate is especially generous and ingenious, I think, in opting to simply let the award she conceived stand on its own, requiring no response or action other than that one should, appropriately, shine light upon its meaning as a representation of positivity and hope and illumination in and of itself and the thoughtful sharing of it ought to recognize those whom the giver sees as showing those qualities in blog work. To further those beliefs and ideals, I will of course share the names of a small few bloggers who represent the vigor of meaningful optimism, teaching and leading and sharing the light through their munificent and loving work. And as ‘Nessa has reminded me, many of the brightest lights are those that persist to shine in the darkest places.photo

Thus I gladly pass the torch to my friends at PsycheVida, The Invisible Shadow, Aspire.Motivate.Succeed., The Human Picture, G (of G Caffe), and Year-Struck, who all know the light well, if partially by virtue of having known or passed through various dark places, and choose to shine their better selves abroad like rays of sunlight.

I have handed the Versatile Blogger Award along (as well as a few others with similar requirements) enough times that I fear I shall put your lights out, all of you, if I should share another laundry-list of factoids about my shining self, and know that you’ll find more than enough of my self-revelatory chatter just by wandering around my blog any day of the week. But I hope that you will also attend to the following fellow off-road-thinkers who certainly deserve a badge of Versatility for their wide-ranging skills and interests, again without requiring anything of them in return other than that they should rejoice in being in company that deeply appreciates the surprising and wonderful collection of wits that each of them represents.VBA logo

To Marie, tending home, garden, and a next-gen toddler in her Little Corner of Rhode Island; to Ellen, who writes and paints and draws and sets the cultural coordinates of her region at Nine Lives Studio; to Bella of winsomebella, a magical land where passionate soul-searching merges with poetry and photography, travel and storytelling; to John, cooking up history and food and familial love in the Bartolini Kitchens; and to Nia, who intertwines photography with food, the tails of cats with tales of travel, and wonderful daily expressions of local culture to charm and amaze us.

Some of you, I know, have been laureates of these specific and many other blogging awards, and deservedly so, so I neither demand of you that you accept (though it’s pretty much an impossibility to make me un-like you once I’ve decided I like you, as far as that goes!) nor that you ‘keep passing the dessert around the table’. Your blogs and excellence speak for themselves, and if you wish to share the joy further then I am delighted to have put it in your hands for the sharing. Because that is the whole beauty of this place we call the blogging community. There’s dessert and light and warmth enough here for everyone.photo

Thoughtless Thursday

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Since a number of Web Wanderers post wonderful Wordless Wednesday items, and I’m always behind the times in oh-so-many ways, I’m posting my own version a day late (and undoubtedly a dollar short), giving you here a highly abbreviated visual history of my life as an artist. Since I’m only middle-aged, I let it end at the Middle Ages for now, though you’ll notice from some of the costumes in the last frame that I’m looking for a Renaissance to appear fairly soon. Can’t hurt to hope, can it?

P&I

I was no prodigy, and I certainly took an early interest in shortcuts and easy techniques when it came to making images, but I did always have an eye for a good juicy and dramatic storyline . . . P&IAs I grew more seriously interested in art, I was also reaching an age where one wants to Fit In, so I did my part of stylizing my imagery and making it seem, I thought, more palatable to the critics (teachers, relatives) . . .P&IThen, of course, there was that awkward age when I started to think for myself, to develop my own philosophy of what my art should or could be, and what I wanted it to be. Presumably, the reason I lost my reason entirely. You just can’t make your own art without giving up at least a little of your already tenuous hold on reality . . .P&I. . . and here you find me, wandering from village to village in the vast land of Internet, telling my tales and making my pictures without much regard for the safety and comfort of those around me, but perhaps in that most of all being at last quite true to myself, the mildly crazed artist in your midst . . .

Arithmetic, Thou art No Friend of Mine

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photoAnd lo, how my thoughts go round and round upon the subject.

It must come as no surprise whatsoever that I am among the multitudinous math-phobes peopling (pimpling?) the world of the creative soul. Why do you think we really all took those arty, wondrous, supposedly “Easy-A” classes, eh? Escape Route, we thought, freedom from the horrors that lie between the covers of every arithmetic text known to humankind. Only to find out we’d been hoodwinked and were expected to know how to disassemble and reassemble an ellipsoidal reflector in under ten minutes and with fewer than two “nonessential” parts left over after completion (what is this word “two”?), or whether one could type 200 words of dazzling script per minute while trying not to be hopelessly hypnotized by Mr. Young’s* blindingly mustard-colored toupee. I was able to accomplish the former task, by the way, but the latter, not quite so fully. However, I only lost consciousness for a split second and did not actually fall off of my chair.

*Name has been changed to protect someone vain’s glabrous secret.

In fact, by taking uni-approved ‘alternative’ courses (“I’ll take the class behind Door Number, uhhh, B, Dave!”) I managed to go all the way from 9th grade algebra, passed mainly by babysitting for the teacher’s kids on the weekends, to grad school without having taken a single other mathematics class. Then I got stuck: first those lousy entrance exams, which are now a blissful blank in my memory bank, followed by Graduate Statistics for Pedagogy, or whatever they called it. Hell, I tells ya! The only thing that saved me was that my older sister had survived the same course with the same prof a year earlier and coached me every cotton picking minute of the way through it. While I wept copious and bitter tears. I squeeeeeeeaked by with the B grade needed to pass the course and ran screaming all the way to graduation. Which commencement ceremony I skipped to go to Mt. Rainier with friends from Australia, because once you’ve paraded down the catwalk in those hot mortarboard and gown get-ups, never mind adding a hotter yet academic hood, on a sweltering summer day, in an auditorium full of people you don’t care to know, to grip that rolled-up piece of parchment that says “Redeem for Actual Diploma at Registrar‘s Office on Tuesday after 4 pm or for a Free Pizza at Gianni’s on Main after 5 pm”–well, once you’ve gone that route there’s really no need for a repeat, is there.

Although come to think of it, skipping The Forced March may mean that I didn’t in fact officially graduate and so taught college for two decades under false pretenses, and what’s not to like about that! In any event, I did finally, truly knock down that last class on the looming list, if without particular distinction or panache.photoMath, though, remained a bane. It was hideously disappointing to realize that a grasp of basic functional math was the only thing that stood between me and, say, a growling, slavering pack of credit card representatives or perhaps the growling stomach of starvation after having demolished the pantry stores by reversing the quantities of salt and sugar in yet another foolproof recipe. On the other hand, it was something of a relief when I finally realized that I was worrying needlessly about something I could never, ever fix. Between my dyslexia (or more accurately in this instance, dysnumerica) and my utter disinterest in getting better at math for the sheer unfathomable pleasure of it, I could see that this was something I should learn to put aside and compartmentalize safely to keep it away from unnecessarily pestering me in my everyday Happy Place.

Not to say that I didn’t have to find some truly inventive ways to do a (cough!) number of things. Balance my bank accounts. Figure out the current time/date in another time zone. Calculate the distance and ETA to work locations. Without GPS and Google Maps, because I do predate plenty of Modern Miracles by a significant margin. Teach drawing students how to draw in two-point perspective. Memorize ridiculous chains of randomly generated numbers to have even the remote hope of regaining access to umpteen kinds of personal accounts, not least of all ones containing personal information or money.

That is where you find me today, where numbers serve only the most rudimentary decorative purposes in my quotidian existence, for the most part (some of them being visually pleasing as abstract shapes, at least), but still occasionally rising up to help me remember my home telephone number so that I can call my more numerically astute husband to solve all of my more knotty mathematical problems. Because no matter how crummy my skills and how limited my knowledge when it comes to things numerical, I have what is for me a far more useful piece of wisdom, which is: one should always have great resource persons to call upon when one lacks the required smarts, information and/or tool handling artistry to accomplish the task of the moment. Stand ready, y’all.photoThe only sort of geometry at which I am expert, apparently, is circular thinking. But look where it’s gotten me thus far!

We are Feline Fine, Thank You

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graphite drawingTransubstantiation

Fish-eyes ogles us, just to say

in that slippery longing way of his,

that sidelong gaping staring way,

‘I envy the cat that milady is.’

We ponder his liquid love, his fins,

and the way each turn makes him squirm and sink

in the tank (predicament for his sins?),

and we sit and groom ourself and think . . .

Can’t help but pity and love the poor

fish-eyes in turn; think biology,

its cycles, return of what’s been before,

carbon reclamation, and all that we,

with wizard knowledge, learned to admire

and along the way, to recognize

as an opportunity to acquire

matter remade thus if one only tries . . .

what we think is this: that a little fish

could become a cat, graceful, sleek and slim,

by means of becoming a dinner dish–

and on thinking that, we devour him.

Tools and Techniques, Ingredients and Inspirations

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ink drawingSometimes the best way to get started with something new is to jump into something old and rethink it. Writing letters–really, reeeeeeally long and extravagantly detailed letters–to my friends and loved ones was a favored pastime for me in my youth, and only transmuted (rather than muted) over time. It’s not necessarily that I had so much to say, nor that it was terribly original, it was simply a pleasant way to keep my sense of the connection between us open and flowing freely. It was Relationship Anticoagulant for me, in its way. Most particularly because I happened to have friends and loved ones who indulged me by writing letters back in my direction.

Yes, the telephone had already been invented when I was young. (I heard that!) My letters weren’t even delivered by Pony Express, let alone chiseled on stone tablets, though those would’ve made nice doorstops, once read. But as I have never liked telephone chitchat overmuch and have always had a slight tendency toward commentary that could perhaps stand a little more editorial restraint, and most of all because I am so defined by my visual experiences, a written, tangible and yes, correctable medium like a letter suited my personality more.

I think it was at least partly that that led to my downhill slide into essays, poems, short stories and the various other Dark Magicks of creative writing. Maybe I thought that developing my fictional skills would make my long letters more entertaining and excuse their verbosity. But of course, when the mystical world of the internet appeared before me, it was inevitable that I should embrace its friendliness towards the mass production of verbiage and the speedy transport thereof unto all and sundry. “All” being my actual known connexions and “sundry” being anybody else who was incidentally caught in the overspray. The latter being people who, if they foolishly responded to my wildly flung words, were likely to get sucked right into the vast vacuum of joining my poor captive audience if I could manage it at all.

ink drawingWhen I figured out how to put visual images along with all of the wordy wonders, then Boy Howdy, I was off on a new tangent. And you’ve all seen just how tangential I can become. Why, just the other day . . . oh, see, there I go again. The additional enhancement of putting pictures with stories need not be examined here. You and I know that the telling of a tale not only frequently requires images for completeness and clarity but sometimes is enhanced and enriched by the presence of visual cues that lead the reader to start thinking about the stories tangentially as well.

I was of course drawn* in immediately by artists’, photographers’, designers’ and other visually rich websites and blogs (*this pun’s for you, yearstricken). Then I felt the magnetic, hypnotic pull of foodie blogs, with their perniciously gorgeous food photography. Glorious gardens and magnificent architectural edifices reached out of the ether to grasp at my ankles as I passed. Tripping, I dropped into the well of travelogues and vehicle- and furniture-restoration sites and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! It was the beginning of the end for this visually obsessed fool. Pretty soon I was swapping recipes and anecdotes, recitations and antidotes with all of my new Old Friends. I almost made a Freudian typo there and wrote Fiends, because of course I have been enchanted and enslaved by you all and am now helplessly in thrall, thirsting after the goodies you dangle in front of me on your every post until I succumb and retaliate with posts of my own.

ink drawing

So here we all are, the relatively new digital tools in hand, cooking up marvelous messes of every sort and, far from being penitent, diving ever deeper into the strange and cheerfully dangerous tangles of what we are collectively wreaking upon the unsuspecting of the world. What began as relatively innocent missives to sisters and schoolmates, great aunts and great mentors has evolved into a different sort of Post that explodes with the weird and whimsical, the frightening or florid or sometimes just plain fishy, and whether factual or fictional, wanders the globe and the magnificent bubble of nonsense surrounding it, and the old urge to write a letter is made new again.

Now, I’ll readily admit that it’s every bit as possible to create fodder for the dustbin as it was all those centuries ago when I began writing my small-world tall tales and detailing them with quaint and creaky little scratches of “art”, and I’m quite certain that there’s no more sense and treasure sneaking in the hidden corners of my productions than there ever was. But I do find that the wider range of correspondents who really do have something to say in return, and the pleasures of the process of learning and using new and different tools for the conversation, immensely entertaining, energizing and inspiring. And I’d say that’s a paint pot of a different color.

ink drawing

Mrs. Sparkly’s Ten Commandments, I Mean Ten Questions. And More.

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photoI am “It”. No, really, that’s not just my Godzilla-sized ego talking: I’ve been tagged, and I didn’t even know there was a game going on. So very like me to be caught unawares. Least I was wearing more than just my “underwears”!

Among the activities in which the denizens of Bloggervania indulge are those through which we unmask various bits and bobs of our selves for mutual edification or at least amusement. This can be dangerous or great fun, depending upon whom you ask what, but then that’s the way it always goes, isn’t it. The promise of a nice sunny afternoon swapping gossip over a cuppa suddenly turns into a sword-fighting bloodbath. Oh, no, that was the murder mystery I was reading last night. Never mind!photo

Here’s what I got asked, followed by my to-the-best-of-my-knowledge-true answers.

1.  Describe yourself in seven words.

I can do it in 1: Rich. Okay, here are six others, but they’re all extrapolations of the first: loved, happy, curious, privileged, encouraged, playful.

2.  What keeps you up at night?

Brain-spin. I’m a very good sleeper generally speaking, but if I don’t quiet my mind by bedtime and shut down the wacky-factory, there’s no telling how long it’ll keep me too busy to sleep.

3.  Whom would you like to be?

The best version of me I can manage. Too much work to figure out how to be anyone else!

4.  What are you wearing now?

Jeans and a comfy shirt suitable for doing chores between bouts of typing.

5.  What scares you?

Other people’s drama.

6.  What are the best and worst things about blogging?

In my circle, we all seem to experience the same basic risks and rewards: the risk of losing ourselves completely in the effort and time of dedicated blogging, and the reward of working amid and coming to respect and love such stellar folk as populate the blogging community. Come to think of it, that pretty much encapsulates what I think is good or bad about any activity for which one has a passion.

7.  What was the last website you looked at?

Retire Early Lifestyle, a travel, food, culture and off-the-beaten-path-living journal produced by the only friends I’ve acquired through online conversation before I began blogging, and a site that is simply a joy to visit.

8.  If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?

Let go of fear.

9.  Slankets, yes or no?

I have three perfectly excellent reasons to Just Say No to Slankets: 1-The skill a perpetually freezing person develops for dressing in layers more numerous and impressive than those boasted by the best millefoglie, 2-A really cuddly husband, and 3-What, I need to make a bonfire out of my money because I don’t know how to wrap up in a plain blanket to get warm?

10. Tell us something about the person who tagged you.

John comes from good stock. By that I mean that he has great familial roots, and that they are such natural foodies that he learned early to appreciate and make excellent soups, among many other classic Italian dream-foods. He documents all of this, and much more, on the wonderfully warm, witty, artful and delicious pages of From the Bartolini Kitchens, all while being himself ever the debonair gentleman-about-town and as sweet as fragole.

Whom are you going to tag to join the quiz?

I hope I’ve not “double-tagged” anyone. I’ll just go alphabetically here, for fun:

  1. Antoinette at cooking-spree
  2. Bella at winsomebella
  3. Cyndi at cfbookchick
  4. Dennis at thebardonthehill
  5. Eden at litrato-ngayon

photoMy blogging friend Antoinette, she of the wonderful aforementioned site where you can learn from her expertise how to put “Love on the Table” but more importantly, the myriad ways she expands that love into a multitude of life’s little nooks and crannies, all with a measure of mindfulness and gentle good humor–this lady asked me yesterday the perfectly innocent question “how . . . do you do this?” Since the bellissima Bella (also tagged above) soon thereafter made a comment that begged the same question, and I have fielded a few inquiries in a similar vein over the last six months of blogging, I am going to take the self-indulgent opportunity to spout off a bit on the topic today.

Many folk simply wonder how it’s possible for me to post a new and (mostly) different essay, poem, story or combination of them, illustrated with my own art and photography, every single day. They politely edge up to the corollary question of whether I don’t have a big closet full of old stuff that I’m just pinning up in public as I go. If it’s any consolation, yes, I have been producing things like this for a rather long time. Yesterday’s post (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/what-were-you-born-in-a-barn/) is a perfect example: the cow sketch is from some doodling in a notebook nearly 30 years ago (and digitally doctored yesterday); the rooster and hens scratched their way into my sketchbook last year; the birds were among many sketched multi-panel proposals for a set of organ pipeshade carvings around 7 or 8 years ago; and the pastel of the Cheviot ewe and the Highland cow is from about two years ago.

Some of the illustrations I use (photographic or drawn/painted) are completely, hot-off-the-pencil new, a few are practically archeological finds from my vast trove, and some are oldies that have been digitally “remastered” (dolled up or changed) to fit the occasion. Almost every visual image requires some tweaking or re-formatting for the blog medium or to better reflect and expand upon the text in some way. Regular readers will have noticed that I am not averse to using the images’ captions to try to intensify the relationship and relevance, ‘specially if the connection was a little tenuous or artificially-imposed at the start.

In addition, I do have a (digital) reserve of hundreds and hundreds of picture + text images like the ones I used on Tuesday (https://kiwsparks.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/its-foodie-tuesday-and-i-havent-eaten-yet/), set up like book pages, where I guess without knowing it I was practicing a variant of the sort of combined word and image that I’m now putting in this blog. I try not to dip into that storage much, if nothing else to prevent my getting lazy or stale or not producing anything strictly new. There is a remote possibility that they will someday in fact be used to produce actual books, but realistically, publishers are inundated with stuff they find much more relevant and exciting, and like most artist-types I hate the drudgery of trying to sort out the whole business end of book production. Hence my standing on this soapbox handing out free samples daily. And I thank you all for coming by Speakers’ Corner (though since I live in Texas I suppose I should pretend it’s in Rawhide Park) here for visits so I don’t die of neglect and boredom.

digital compositionThe prose of my posts is never older than a few days (and that, only if I happen to have gotten a day or two ahead in writing), but nearly always written on the same day the posts go online. The poems are a mix of old and new. I started wading in poetic and essayist waters as a mere stripling, and as long as twenty years ago spent a twelvemonth writing five poems a day for discipline. Yes, mostly short forms! A couple of years ago, I did a one-drawing-a-day year, and I’m gearing up to get back to somewhat more regular drawing and art-making, so hopefully I’ll be posting more ‘fresh produce’ soon, but having unused images in storage takes an nth of the pressure off of the blog production. As it is, the process takes me several hours of the day to get through both creating the post itself and the related correspondence.

graphite drawing + textAnd it does take time. I wouldn’t be able to do this other than extremely sporadically if I had a “real” job, that’s for sure. Working from home, I can keep up with laundry and cooking and housekeeping and that sort of thing without losing the flexible hours it takes to do this. That’s the big issue for me: I have a husband who values my art and writing enough to have supported my leaving my previous employment and kept us in financial safety with his own work, and that is a rare and fabulous gift indeed. Or a cruelty to you, if you happen to think I should have kept it to myself. But then, I like to think you’re all smart enough to not show up here if I weary you with my nattering.

Having noted that, I suppose it’s time to address the Why of it all. But that’s embedded in the whole Who-What-When-Where-How of it all, isn’t it. I do this because it gives me joy to play with words and pictures, and because I’m not necessarily cut out to do something else, and most especially because by sharing stories I find new marvelous and inspiring friendships and loves, and renew the best of those I already have, all of which serve to infinitely reinforce my knowledge that I am Rich.

mixed media collage

Gold, Mine (detail from a mixed media collage)

Creature Feature

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photo

Little ray of sunshine, how sweet your flitting ways!

Orange Butterfly

Isn’t it charming, cute and quaint

That a butterfly made up in bright orange paint

Can masquerade thus as a garden saint

And be seen as a ray of the dancing sun

And a light, fleeting dash of enticing fun,

When its finely-veined system in truth is run

On a fuel of venom cold with spite—

It would far rather sink a great poisonous bite

In your pulsing carotid some murderous night—

How pretty, how dainty, how full of cheer

The butterfly’s presence makes it here,

At least behind all that orange veneer

photo

The Lady was a Tiger!

Delicious Deviation

A scurrilous, scandalous sinner

Invited him one night for dinner;

He learned that her wish

Was, he’d be the main dish,

Though before he knew that,

He was in her.

photo

They were drawn to his charisma like, well, moths to a flame . . .

The Ballad of Professor Montague

Professor Montague, a moth (specifically, Cecropia),

was glamorously smooth and frothy, ruling that Utopia,

his professorship at Flares, where tender butterflies and moths,

with innocent and awestruck stares, had visions wild as Visigoths,

fixed on him, rapt, their compound eyes, absorbing, drinking deeply

(through curled probosces and their brains) this wisdom daily, weekly–

they soaked it up–he’d flit about, and with his brilliance all were thrilled,

until one day he was attracted to the classroom lamp . . . and killed.

Dream a Little Dream . . . But How to Choose?

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photo-collage + textI never tire of fantasizing and imagining my ideal. But some days it’s really hard to decide what would be better. To be slung sidelong over a rocking chair in the wash of yellow afternoon, watching the lift and ruffle of wisteria where it is teased by currents chasing around me on the old screen porch, drinking Blackberry Acid and reading Evelyn Waugh while the sound of Gershwin laughs its way out the door to shake the sleepy cat into a semblance of watchfulness? Or perhaps I should the rather be curled in a high-backed leather wing chair with Zola, maybe Garcia Marquez, a faint dark stain of Verdi’s Requiem insinuating its way slowly through my brain, the lamp turned barely high enough to read so that it doesn’t fade the firelight or those lights fourteen stories down where the city shimmers below, and with the scent of Boeuf Bourguignon drifting into the paneled room from where it’s simmering down the hall?photo-collage

Yes, I say, sometimes it’s hard, so hard to choose which I should prefer. Would it be finer to be wandering up a quiet path in checkered green light, perfumed with the heady incense of cedar and douglas fir, emerging from their shadows into meadows lapping with avalanche lilies and paintbrush and gentians at my feet as I climb up higher, drowsy with the sun and hypnotized by the river crashing away, just out of sight, to my right, and stopping at last to rest on the stony shore of a glassy lake and slake my thirst, assuage my hunger, with a crisp sweet apple and some salty well-aged cheese? Or should I better like to stride out through wildly waving waist-high grass onto the dunes just as the lowering sky with its mass of high black clouds starts spitting a sand-fine mist of icy rain, but bundled so warmly to the eyes that only my cheekbones feel the chill, and watching the storm blow up a wave so high it seems to engulf the top of the sky before it shatters to smithereens on the bouldered bulkhead there–and just as that cloudbank starts to split to disgorge its mighty gout of rain, tearing up the beach to the safety of the white-painted cottage, where I peel off the layers of storm-proofing down to my jeans, drag the little table to the window to watch the show, cracking the Dungeness crab that I bought at the shop today, to drown it in butter while watching the shoreline also drown, and eat crab sweetness messily to the tune of pelting rain and smashing sea?photo

I suppose if all else fails I could simply ask my butler to make the selection, you see. No, this one I know: I’d rather ask my love, since whichever it is, it’ll be that much better a dream if he will only share it with me.

Pretty Bird!

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It was a simple little painting, nice if nothing especially original or fantastically crafted or anything startling like that, but I liked what I saw. It was of a slightly stylized, funny little semi-abstract bird, one of those paintings that always run the risk of being too cute and cuddly and charming for its own good, with a few little bitty splashes of the leftover paint sprinkled about the canvas almost as an afterthought, maybe meant to evoke flowers or stars. Not much to move me or even catch my attention . . . except . . .

mixed media on campus

No, this is not the painting. Not even part of it. I couldn't photograph someone else's artwork (this is mine, as always) and stick it in my blog even if I wanted to do so, because that would be (a) copyright infringement and (b) as ill-mannered as flying over someone and . . . well, you'll see . . .

I liked what I saw because that last little splash, those sprinkly spots–why, they landed smack in the empty space right beneath the birdie’s tail. All of a sudden a foofy little bird that seemed to have been meant to act all pert and prim . . . had pooped. In an eyeblink it went straight from being a prissy little pretty-bird vacant of all meaning to become a faintly twerpish chirper, a vaguely immature and irresponsible and a much, oh ever so much, more real and kindred-spirit creature. “I strafe upon you all!” it cheeped, but all the while with the same blandly friendly expression, almost as if it were a passive-aggressive scalawag of a bird just barely behind that pastel-feathered façade.

So much more understandable and filled with story-time potential, this impertinent little fellow. It’s not that I want to be that bronze-cast personage of the park whereon the pigeons land to ‘take their ease’–life offers plenty of opportunities for humans to feel they’re treated like inanimate objects or public restrooms as it is–it’s just that part of me is pleased that a little cutesy-bird was allowed to go his own way just for the element of surprise, that some painter I might’ve dismissed as boringly sugared-up with too-sweet birds decided, literally, to ‘let this one go’.

Even better to my mind, I’m afraid, is if that same artist never even noticed the obvious implication of that splotch’s placement and so sent out, for show and sale, a scamp of a bird that flicked its tail with devious disdain and dropped its pretty pastel bombs upon the painter’s cozy dainty reputation right along with all the passing world. I couldn’t help myself: I liked what I saw.mixed media on canvasNo, obviously this is not the painting in question either. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I will tell you that my original mixed media painting shown digitally here was titled ‘Ruach‘, a nice juicy Hebrew name meant to evoke the eponymous Holy Spirit. Which, being represented in the narratives generally by a much nicer (if not necessarily politer) sort of bird, would presumably drop kindlier sorts of things upon one in passing. I would hope. And hey, that just makes the earthly, earthy mischievousness of the bird in the other painting that much more amusingly charming by contrast. If you share my childish kind of humor, anyway.