twisted knickers

poem in process

2012-03-07T08:10:00.009-05:00

I have been working on a poem for a specific occasion: another evening at my local library, sponsored by the local writers group, at which the poet laureate of Maine (Wesley McNair) will be the guest. If you'd like to give feedback...or comments, it would be helpful and appreciated. Melissa Green has already been beyond generous with her eagle eye and thoughtful suggestions, in private.

I have remained obsessed with the news about the discovery of a fresh-water lake beneath the ice at Vostok station, in Antarctica.

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS BORE INTO ANCIENT

ANTARCTIC LAKE

(Dr. Luckin, director of the expedition, said, ‘For me, the discovery of this lake is comparable with the first flight into space.’ There have been much–disputed hints that life might still exist there. New York Times 2/08/12)

We live in a pale globe, haloed in the light of underwater moons. Like the blood of a medusa, we are diaphanous; woven of silken threads, spun from microbial skeins, soft as smoke. The skin of our world glows overhead, a membrane holding in fluid and song. We have words; not to say out loud, just to look at. We press them into shapes or memories and release them. The word called blue can be sky or long afternoons. Brown can be sand pebbles or an empty heart. Like birds, blue and brown can soar and glide. They can spin like star motes or flatten, like feathers in a storm.

We dance. The space between us is sacred. The space around us is eternity. We never ask questions. We do not begin or end.

We are crying. There is too much noise, a dark thrum, like music that is wrong, like music with sharp edges.

We are afraid to look: the words break like black ice; splinters of red pierce the grey green sky. Our eyes hurt; we want to shut them, lock them tight as fossils. Our ears are curling up, like seashells. Words like drill or science or discovery pulse through the water like words for pain. We are dying.

briefly, other wives

2012-03-03T11:27:00.014-05:00

With my interest reinvigorated by news of the death of Eleanor Callahan, I've been thinking about men who photographed their wives and lovers...and trying to articulate why the pictures of Eleanor seem so special, so different, to me. I did find an out-of-print book that I have ordered, but until that comes, I wanted to throw out a few thoughts. (The book, The Model Wife--the title alone is interesting--documents a show curated in 2000, by Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, in San Diego.)

Here are a few others, some of which I anticipate were included in the Ollman exhibit. Above is Juliet, photographed by Man Ray. As Angella mentioned in the comments in the Callahan post, she was the subject of many photos by Man Ray, including some of his ground-breaking experimental work, which ensured him a place in the history of surrealism. I worked in photographic publishing for most of the 1980s, and as such, met Juliet--who went by the name "Juliet Man Ray"--which always made me giggle. She was a feisty, aging beauty, who reminded me of the stereotypical Parisian shopkeeper, an eagle-eyed business woman, careful with every centime that crossed her gloved palms. Although I found her faintly amusing, I greatly admired her spirit. I don't think she was an exploited model--but I also don't think Man Ray considered the end result a collaboration. But, that's just a guess.

Emmet Gowin also famously worked with his wife, Edith. And Weston photographed the women who passed through his life, notably Tina Modotti, a wonderful photographer in her own right, and the luminous Charis Wilson. And of course, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe.

Still, I return to the photographs of Eleanor. And it seems to me, just from this glimpse into a complicated topic: no other woman appears so palpably naked, so vulnerable as does Eleanor. And--is this a contradiction?--so loved and cherished.

[Top to bottom: photographs by Man Ray; Emmet Gowin; Edward Weston (Modotti); Weston (Wilson); Alfred Stieglitz; Harry Calllahan]

eleanor

2012-02-29T16:33:00.005-05:00

"I wanted to photograph the person for whom I had feeling. It wasn’t enough just to photograph a nude."

Harry Callahan's wife and photographic muse, Eleanor, died yesterday, at age 95.

my week as editor brings you Tuesday Poem: Holly Iglesias

2012-02-27T09:37:00.005-05:00

Please do check out the Tueday Poem. Click on the quill, in the right-hand column. I am the editor this week, and even though for me in Maine it's still Monday, as we all know by now, New Zealand is so ridiculously advanced, they are already having Tuesday.

xo susan

And make it real: buy Holly's books.

Here, pictured above, are two of them. They are gorgeous inside and out, pleasing in size and lovely to even the casual admirer. Warning: if you are so foolish as to start reading the words on the pages of Boxing Inside the Box: women's prose poetry, you may somehow forget that you have work to do, a deadline to meet, and a grocery store to get to.

secret writing

2012-02-26T13:18:00.004-05:00

We just got back from a walk on our favorite beach. The sky is a thin and brilliant blue; cold and windy.
The message in the bottle, or engraved on this piece of driftwood, or written in the sky with soft white wisps of clouds:

pay attention. everything matters.

Friday: signifying

2012-02-24T09:21:00.000-05:00

getting away

2012-02-20T18:17:00.003-05:00

We went about 3 hours north, or as they call it here, Down East, this weekend; hiked up a few ice-slick trails; ate the requisite tunafish-sandwich-and-dark-chocolate-with-hazelnuts lunch, and left all the day-to-day crap behind.

Why is it I can't lie on my own couch for hours at a time reading in the middle of the afternoon, but if I am in someone else's borrowed house, I can? In between hikes, I zoomed right through Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter, and started Bernd Heinrich's Racing the Antelope.

And the whole time I was reading, I never once thought I really should be doing a load of laundry or cleaning out the back closet.

2012-02-17T10:13:00.007-05:00

Even with insects—
some can sing,
some can’t.

—Issa

I have been thinking about, struggling with, acceptance. How difficult it is to open one's door, receive guests, and accept each one as they come. On their terms. In their own skins.

This one, with unruly hair and the unwashed shirt and the shoes, thick with melting ice and mud.
That one, with the blinders on, who flounders in the doorway, wondering where she can put her purse so it will be safe.
This one, who, like all my guests, is new to my home, just inside from a blustery, wintery day, but somehow she, alone, finds the coat hook, the kitchen, the tea kettle, and the cupboard where I keep the tea, and has made everyone a cup before some have even removed their mittens.

And, me, the shy, eager, reluctant, loving, tongue-tied, blithering, selfish, good-hearted, foolish hostess...
wants them all to be happy, wants them all to come in and stay forever ... and at the same time, hopes they will not stay too long.

In a related thought (and I do hope you understand that the above soliloquy is mostly metaphorical): Someone once told me that we all enter relationships in a state of infatuation, deliberately overlooking any difficulties and opting instead for the uncomplicated absolutes of bliss and perfection. Once reality sets in, the infatuation takes on a few wrinkles, a few shadows--then we decide what we can live with. Sometimes, this person said, the distance between fantasy and reality is too great to bridge, and you have to walk away. If we're lucky, the reality is just fine, as long as we are prepared to move forward with a few adjustments, compromises, and a great deal of empathy.

tuesday poem: happy valentine's day

2012-02-14T14:29:00.009-05:00

02/14/2012

if it is possible to
discover,
beneath
two miles of solid ice,
a vast lake
that flows with
fresh water,
is it not likely
that within each of us
there is a silent pool,
sweet and
clear,
waiting?

at this site, there are several feeds of the sound of ice:

http://www.awi.de/en/news/background/palaoa_what_does_the_southern_ocean_sound_like/sound_of_the_ice/

[photograph from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914]

the insanity closet

2012-02-12T15:24:00.007-05:00

Like Groucho says: there is no sanity clause....

I am cleaning out my clothes closet and bureau today.

This may be a real breach of trust, but I have a feeling that there are at least 3 and possibly more of you who stop by my blog for whom NO explanation is necessary why I am not throwing out these pieces of clothing. (Salient elements photographed...) Even though I never wear them.

The value of the last one, below, may be less evident than the others. This blouse has 8 of these beautiful apricot-colored enamel buttons. It is a handmade blouse, that I bought in Amsterdam in 1989. The buttons are lined up in a purposeful, very cool nonlinear fashion. However, they do not quite match the nonlinear arrangement of the buttonholes. I have taken the damn buttons off 3 times over the years, resewn them, and I still can't get them to match up so that the blouse hangs right. I love the buttons; I love the avant-garde look of the random alignment. But I can't make it work. (In writing this, for the first time, it occurred to me that I could take it to a professional seamstress. There IS a sanity clause!)

perfect puttering weather

2012-02-11T11:51:00.004-05:00

It snowed this morning; now it's raining. The slush is a few inches deep on the porch, and we're just ignoring it. Going nowhere, fast.

James has been writing.

I did my homework assignment for the class I am taking with Melissa Shook.

Chances are, James will convince me to play cribbage with him, so he can beat me.

A good Saturday.

art/book. book art. artist(s) book(s).

2012-02-07T13:38:00.009-05:00

I wanted to show a few examples of the work that Melissa Shook and I saw when we had our pre-poetry-reading afternoon
of art and books, at The Boston Athenaeum.

Insecta, by Linda L. Broadfoot.
Although it is a bit tidy and fastidious for me--I tend to like things that are visually more exciting, or that call forth messy emotions--I admire the way it references the Victorian approach to collecting. (More info: www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/b/broadfoot.html)

The book I most would like to emulate, in terms of technique and visual/visceral impact, is called Axe Me Biggie, by Stephen Dupont.
Melissa and I looked at it carefully, to try and figure out how he glued it and manipulated the texture and binding. I have since found out it is a type of handmade book called "concertina". Axe Me Biggie is a pidgin translation of the Dari, meaning Mr. Take My Picture. The photographs are street portraits, in Afghanistan. (see video)

Axe Me Biggie, or Mr Take My Picture from Stephen Dupont on Vimeo.

Finally, here is a tiny and lovely offering, by Laura Davidson, called Fort Point Illuminated. It is 3 inches high, and more pictures of the interior can be seen on her Web site: http://www.lauradavidson.com/w-fp_illum1.html

There were many others, of course, but these three are good illustrations of the scope and variety. And, each of these stimulated me in a different way, I think. I left the exhibit full of creative energy and a desire to make my own book.

[There is a fabulously interactive Web site, via the Boston Athenaeum, where in you can examine all of the books in the show closely: http://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/cdm/search/collection/p13110coll7/searchterm//field/all/mode/all/conn/and/order/title/ad/asc]

so many stories....

2012-02-03T14:27:00.012-05:00

Damn; I forgot to tell Melissa the story about Kahn & Selesnick, who made the photograph in the header.

And we got sidetracked in the middle of another great conversation -- midsentence -- distracted trying to find the seedy restaurant I'd seen earlier that looked perversely appealing. And she wanted to show me the one she liked, with the small tables and the lighting that was too bright. She said she was sure that the food there would be horrid, and I know her well enough to know that this enhanced its charm, for her. But It was emptied out now; a lone woman swept the floor behind the plate glass window. And... what were we talking about?

the coat room at the Boston Athenaeum

What a wonderful afternoon we had.

Our mutual friend, the 'other' Melissa -- M. Green as I've taken to calling her in my head and sometimes out loud, to distinguish her from M. Shook -- was having a reading at a university in the Boston neighborhood where M. Shook and I hoped to find a cheap meal. Our only real requirement was that the place be quiet, so we could spend the time before the reading spilling out our stories.

self-portrait, waiting for M. Shook, at the Athenaeum

Melissa Shook and I became friends about 12 years ago, after an encounter at a writers conference at University of Massachusetts-Boston. I had just been invited to be the editor of a literary journal devoted to memoir, and had gone to the conference to solicit writer submissions. But I also wanted the journal to have photography, and someone had told me I should look up Melissa Shook, who usually took pictures at the conference, and was also a writer. So I found Melissa.

I was immediately attracted to her no-nonsense style of talking, her intelligence, her complete lack of pretension. We became friends; and, we started a writers group together after the conference. Over time, we confided in each other the details of our oddly parallel lives, which had criss-crossed back and forth from New York City, where we had once lived in apartments less than a block apart, to our status as single mothers, and back to Massachusetts, where we were now both mired in complicated mid-life relationships.

M. Shook, listening, at dinner

Before dinner, we went to an exhibit of artists' books at the Boston Athenaeum. (I will talk about the artists' books in a follow-up posting, so stay tuned.) It was a terrific show, and the Athenaeum itself is quite remarkable, a quirky institution of refinement that easily escapes notice by the casual observer -- exuding what we used to call old, cold money. The lovely building has an old-fashioned style of hospitality, with large, well-lit rooms, comfortable chairs (leather, in a surprising Marilyn Monroe red), and a bathroom bigger than a NYC apartment. Only one room, with newspapers and periodicals, is off-limits, for "members only." Melissa was quite taken with the young woman who collected our entrance fee; her name was Mrs. Mountain.

the hallowed burial ground, behind the Athenaeum

After dinner, which we had in the perfect, practically empty spot -- the below-street level cafeteria of the university where M. Green was reading--we headed up to the library and settled into the front row.
Our poet Melissa was charming, surrounded by poets and poetry lovers, her own kind. It was wonderful to see her like that: happy, glowing, a master of her craft. She read some poems that were new to me, and some that have just been published in the latest issue of Little Star (http://littlestarjournal.com). I especially liked listening to Melissa read First Snow, which she posted recently on her blog (http://tuesdaypoemmelissagreen.blogspot.com); hearing her say the words opened windows to meanings that had alluded me before.

[except for the header which is by Kahn & Selesnick, all photos are by me with my iPad]

tara donovan

2012-02-01T11:06:00.007-05:00

I want to take a day off tomorrow to head south to visit some beans in Beantown. Which means I have to work like a maniac today.

Your assignment while I'm gone:

google IMAGES, Tara Donovan.

I am in awe of her work; in person, the installations knock your socks off.

Gorgeous and mind-blowing and brilliant.

I love art and music because they take you to a whiter shade of pale.*

*the phrase came to mind looking at her work....

postal delicacies

2012-01-30T13:07:00.004-05:00

I have been working quite often lately with post-docs from Harvard School of Public Health. Many of the researchers are from Asia, and in the last few months I have edited papers for several Japanese women. There are reliable pleasures for me, associated with the work I do with these women. One is the extraordinary charm and politeness of our e-mail correspondence. Another is the lovely stamps that accompany their letters when they send me payment.

[The header photograph is of a paper-white narcissus, in full bloom now, more than a month after my son gave me some bulbs for Christmas. He is back in San Francisco; so far away. I think of him whenever I catch sight of this delicate flower on the window sill.]

3 things i liked

2012-01-26T12:55:00.004-05:00

tiny shells

grapefruit

the night sky

back where i belong

2012-01-24T14:51:00.005-05:00

Got things to catch up on, including work, e-mails, and blog readings, but just wanted to check in with you all from my desk, in Maine.
We survived.
But, I have returned with a newly respectful appreciation for the word "toxic" as used to describe a personality feature.

florider

2012-01-19T09:53:00.004-05:00

Where I grew up, in southeastern Massachusetts, that's how everyone pronounces that state where oranges grow and where old people move to. Usually, they settle in a specific place in Florider where their friends move, so, for instance, a great many people who are over 65 and used to live in South Weymouth or Quincy may now live outside Orlando. Or, if you are a few rungs up on the social class ladder, you have a condo in Naples.

We are flying down for a long weekend to visit James's children, who were hastily relocated there from Maine by their mother. We have not seen the kids in over a year. I am trying to look forward to this trip; I like these two teenagers very, very much. The mother, and ex-wife, is the person who stalked me and wrote libelous and obscene comments on my first blog (and my LinkedIn account), hence my move to Twisted Knickers, where most of you have come to know me.

I do not have warm feelings toward her.

But, I am focusing on the promise of long walks on the beach and the warmer weather. And I bought a very large dark chocolate bar at Trader Joe's, loaded with slightly salty nuts. We'll nibble on that as we soar through the clouds.

Back soon.

just sayin'

2012-01-18T08:58:00.004-05:00

may god strike me dead for conspiring to judge women by their appearance. but i can't help posting this...i just can't.

word/image

2012-01-17T09:38:00.004-05:00

The new header photograph is from my iPad, at night, through the windshield of the bus I was on. I always sit in the front seat when I take a bus trip. I like to get a sense of the driver, I like the visual space in front of me, less claustrophobic, and unless the bus is totally booked, people rarely sit next to me. My guess is that the aisle seat, right up front, feels too exposed; and I think perhaps people may take buses, in part, because they prefer to be anonymous, hidden.

When I was a young teenager, I took a long bus ride to western Massachusetts. It was winter; the bus was crowded with people laden with heavy coats and scarves. I sat in the back third of the bus in the window seat; a middle-aged man sat next to me. Some miles down the road, I was aware that the man was fidgeting and I glanced over at him. He looked me in the eye, and I saw in my peripheral vision that his penis was exposed, a flare of pale skin against his bulky dark coat. I froze, not knowing at all what to do, him staring at my face, willing me to remain frozen, his captive.

FInally I found the voice to ask him to let me pass, grabbed my things, and made my way to the front of the bus. I told the driver a somewhat censored version; I doubt I could have said the words aloud for what had happened, and a man in the front seat overheard, understood immediately what the scenario was, and gave me his seat. He made his way back through the crowded bus until he found my empty seat, where he stayed for the remainder of the trip.

The last few years I lived in New York, I co-taught a class called Word and Image at Cooper Union, in the department of continuing education. The other teacher was a photographer who also wrote, and with her input, I designed a course curriculum that focused on work that combined writing and photographic imagery. Stacy presented a slide show that gave a historical perspective on the use of language in conjunction with photography, but most of the course was devoted to hands-on projects combining the two forms of creative expression. Writing projects were done during class; photographic assignments were done in the week between meetings. I loved teaching this course, I loved seeing the personalities and skills of the students unfold, and I loved being part of the process. Almost all the projects were collaborative, with partners, and both Stacy and I participated.

I had started to write this post this morning, to sort out my thoughts about that course, since I have been considering revising the curriculum and putting together a proposal to teach it here in Maine, on my own. But I wanted to change my header image, so pulled the photograph I took last night on the bus. And then I told you the story that immediately came to mind when I looked at this snapshot. That's exactly what the course is about.

listening. or resting.

2012-01-09T11:12:00.004-05:00

If anyone is looking for me, I'm just being quiet, is all.

The Frisell music, and thinking about Disfarmer, reminded me of some tintypes I have:

for Jane, with love and squalor

2012-01-04T12:22:00.003-05:00

[the artist is Rebecca Doughty.]

a poem of mine (Tuesday Poem)

2012-01-02T09:18:00.007-05:00

There is one at:

www.rulrul.4mg.com

I posted it here before, I think. But, nice to see it online.
Even nicer, I must say, in that the editor solicited it, to my surprise.

Okay: that's enough. We Protestants get squirrelly when it comes to tooting our own horns.

learning to fly

2012-01-01T10:47:00.004-05:00

A fine New Year to all of you. May we be kind to each other, and attentive, and lend a hand or whatever is needed to keep us all aloft.

With friends you grow wings.
Alone,
you are a single feather in disgrace.
With them you master the wind,
but alone,
you’re blown in all directions.
—Rumi

from the (brilliantly named) website: Fuck Yeah, Rumi

the sheer force of creation

2011-12-29T10:38:00.005-05:00

This morning, I took my son to the bus. We talked a lot about what he will do now that he is done with the academic world and has his 'real' life spread out before him. I can see that he is happy on the one hand to be in the position he is, with great credentials and training and skills and talent...and I also see how immobilizing so much choice might be.

We watched a documentary on Maya Lin last night. Although the film was a rather narrow focus, covering only the decade that began with her debut--at age 21--with the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it was a stunning depiction of a young woman with singular self-possesion and vision. The image above is one of two projects she designed for Haley Farm, property owned by the Children's Defense Fund: This chapel that sails the rolling farmland like an ark, and the plain-spoken vernacular as depicted by the Langston Hughes library, crafted from an old barn (below), original to the land.

The film left each of us thinking about our own creative process, its value, what we do with it, or what we might do with it, in the time we have.

I have posted this website link before, but will do so again because I think her work is so crucial. If you have time, and if the subject matter interests you--the extinction of animals--here is a link to Maya Lin's multisite project called What is Missing? http://whatismissing.net/#/home
and further, her current project about the Columbia River Basin, Lewis & Clark, and the synchronous pathways of native tribes in the Pacific Northwest:http://www.confluenceproject.org/

achey

2011-12-27T17:28:00.005-05:00

backache eyeball ache heartache
I find the holidays to be a major pain in all the parts of my body, even
the inside parts that don't show. no matter what you do, there seems to be no way out of a
bit of bloodletting. the stepchildren. the almost stepchildren. the exwife. the exhusband. the all-grown boy who still has little boy feelings deep deep down.
oh christ.
I forgot to give some people presents. I'd rather just give when I feel like it.

don't worry, I'll be my mild-mannered self again tomorrow. or soon.

yesterday afternoon and today

2011-12-25T15:23:00.005-05:00

Benjamin is home. He made a beeline, not surprisingly, to the refrigerator, and stood there gazing in, as though by doing so he could glean important data about meals he had missed, meals that might happen very soon.

He was happy to find some pickles I made.

We picked up some driftwood on the beach yesterday, and turned it into a Christmas tree.

what Richard said

2011-12-24T09:44:00.007-05:00

I always think of my friend Richard this time of year.

Richard was Tommy's father, and Tommy and my son, Benjamin, were in school together until high school, starting at age 5.
The school they went to, a day school in Greenwich Village, was one in which most of the children had started a year earlier, in a preschool program. Benj and Tommy hadn't had that year to form alliances, so found comfort and then deep friendship in each other--the two new boys. And over the years Richard and Sheila, Tommy's parents, became good friends of mine and of Danny, Benjamin's father.

Richard and I shared a love of books, and of the four of us, he and I were the seekers, the introspective ones, the ones in therapy, the ones constantly questioning and evaluating the paths our lives took. Our spouses were actually remarkably alike, not given to emotional rumination, second-guessing--they were doers.

Every year I agonized over Christmas. Who to get gifts for, how much I hated it, how meaningless it was, and yet, conversely, how much i wanted it to be perfect.

Finally, one year after listening to my endless litanies, Richard turned to me, and said: Suze, here's the thing. When we were younger, our generation thought we could do anything, we were going to change the world, we were going to shake things up, foment a revolution. But look what happened. Things are no better. But this much I do know; this much can be true. We can have any kind of god-damn Christmas that we want. And even if that's all we ever have, if that's the only change we ever make, then we will have done something.

Richard is gone. He died 4 years ago, of a vicious cancer. But Sheila and I are still very close, and Benjamin, home for the holidays, said last night, apropos of nothing: I've got to give Tommy a call.
I want to share this with you: make your Christmas whatever you god-damn want. No, we couldn't change the world; but we can have our holiday any which way that makes sense to us.

hair

2011-12-21T12:36:00.009-05:00

people who think i'm deep, just better browse on over to another blog today.

i am so bored with my hair.

i am soaking my salt cod (don't ask) and cruising the net for hairdos.

fabric can be very cool...

i saw a woman who had tied children's socks of all different colors in her hair. it looked fabulous. kind of like this...

feel free to chime in.

the opposite of twilight, random thoughts

2011-12-20T05:57:00.008-05:00

I have been getting up well before sunrise for a few days now. The header photograph is from yesterday, I'd been writing, and looked up to realize that the exhilarating stolen hours of a pitch-dark morning had disappeared, leaving this stream of pinked light. I love the beauty of late afternoon, blued-out winter light; but there is something so impossibly optimistic about these mornings. It's a difficult emotional landscape, this march toward Christmas. Most all of you have been alluding to it, one way or another, in your own postings.

I have been sick, which has put me in an alternate orbit. It's been rather nice, actually, now that I am feeling better. The medicine I was taking wrought all kinds of havoc with my normal rhythms, and I like that. I like looking at the world through a new peephole. And I have been ruminating on some tamped-down family history. That's been good, too.

I also have been thinking about how extraordinarily lucky I am, these days, that nine mornings out of ten, I wake up and I want to jump out of bed and see what the day will bring. Even if I have far too much work, or a million worries nagging at the back of my head, there is something, I don't even know what to call it, that outweighs all the busy little voices of doubt and negativity.

If I had power and money, I would give Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and The Innocence Project anything they need. They are doing some of the most important work in this god-forsaken country, bar none.

I am reading Wade Davis's brilliant new book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, about the British adventurers who set their sights on Everest, the world they came from, and how the devastation of World War I affected their generation.

For my Tuesday Poem comrades, what is this, if not poetry? In alluding to an eyewitness account, From the Trenches, by the war correspondent Geoffrey Young, Davis says:

"This was not war, he wrote; it was the inversion of civilization. To call it war was to imply that something of the sun remained, when in fact all that existed was a bruised sky in a bitter night of cobalt rains."

In the Christmas spirit, here's one of those adorable old timey snapshots, my cousin Nancy and me, with our new dolls. My cartons of family photographs are full of these sweet captures of idealized moments. Within an hour of this particular Kodak memento, I had gone outside and given that doll to the girl next door. My mother gave me holy hell, marched over and got my doll back. I don't know; I haven't changed much. My impetuosity often outweighs my self-interest, and I am sometimes left with a handful of nothing. And, occasionally, a good story.

looking at christmas, peripheral vision only

2011-12-16T10:41:00.001-05:00

for T. Clear

2011-12-15T09:17:00.001-05:00

tips for single women:

the hollerdaze

2011-12-13T12:41:00.008-05:00

I just spent about 2 hours screwing around with the design of this ridiculous blog. Makes me craaazy.

And, I am sick and have been for over a week BUT I will be heading back to the doctor today to get the magic bullet that I know she meant to prescribe for me the first time around. Which is just to say that my normal level of patience, roughly a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Saint Francis, is today down in the subzero p factor = insignificance territory.

On top of not feeling well, I have been wallowing in faux nostalgia: wishing for Christmases that never were:

Honoring the two-year anniversary of meeting the man with whom I live. I count my lucky stars and hope that he continues to ignore what a wack job I am:

Plotting a fun project with some friends:

And sifting through boxes of old family photographs and papers, in the very early stages of getting some kind of grip on this entity, this mushroom cloud, this anything-but-placid gene pool, this rabbit hole I call family:

Greetings to all.

[the new header photo is from my Cornwall walk, in 2009. This was the inside of a small gallery. I was not interested in the artwork, insipid tourist stuff, but the building and the easily overlooked personal touches, like these shells at the window, were perfectly lovely.]

fragments

2011-12-06T15:03:00.006-05:00

why is it that there is such beauty in broken things? it must be the interplay of what we know of the whole, so that the aesthetics accrue as we apply memory. what we see is overlaid with what once was.

would we appreciate so much of what we have if we had not suffered so much loss?

the empty dress

2011-12-02T13:22:00.006-05:00

As most of you know, I love photography, and I am drawn to artwork by women. As I am often drawn to writing by women. This is not ideological, although I certainly identify myself as a feminist, but it does have to do with life experience and aesthetics. These photographs by Ishiuchi Miyako affect me on so many levels. Politically: they depict relics of Hiroshima. As beauty: the fragility of the objects and the delicacy with which the photographer composed her pictures is impeccable. As symbols: the remnants of fabric, especially in these that I have posted here, are from feminine garments, and speak to us of the women who did not escape with their lives.

These photographs affect me viscerally as do some of Louise Bourgeois's sculptures, in particular an installation she made of her mother's clothing. Ishiuchi Miyako has also published a book of photographs of her mother's objects and clothing, entitled Mother's.

As a reviewer writes: Mother’s isn’t so much a portrait of Ishiuchi’s mother, but that of Miyako herself, through her obsession, through her mourning process. As Carl Jung wrote:
"Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life."

the header photo and the top 3 photos of this post are by Ishiuchi Miyako, a chromogenic print of an A-bombed dress from Hiroshima: Strings of Time; the bottom 2 photos are from her book Mother's]

shedding light on the past

2011-11-30T10:39:00.009-05:00

The choices are:

transparency
translucency
opaqueness

[Ishiuchi Miyako, chromogenic print of an A-bombed dress from Hiroshima: Strings of Time]

the perfect guest

2011-11-27T09:01:00.012-05:00

We had a fine week with Andreas.

We hiked.
We ate.
We watched films.
We conversed.
We did not shop, except for one foray to our favorite used book store, and for replenishing provisions.
We did not go to restaurants.

The photographs illustrate our walking adventures: to the Camden Hills; over the bridge and all around the city streets of Portland; Crescent Beach at low tide; the Audubon preserve in Falmouth; along the rocky cliffs of Prout's Neck; circumambulation of Hermit island, in Phippsburg; and several short outings to see if there were any ships in the harbor, or to spot the great blue heron at low tide.

James and Andreas talked about rock climbing and moutaineering and all the wild risks they had taken when they were in their twenties; Andreas and I talked about food. And on the one walk we took without James, about romance and aging and the profound pleasure of a mature relationship.

And we all ate:
Squash soup and pear and feta salad and focaccia.
Roasted vegetable lasagna.
Fish poached in white wine and lemon juice, rice, sauteed peppers (the night Andreas cooked).
Brined turkey breast, garlicky potatoes, green beans with olive oil & lemon, corn relish, cranberry-ginger relish.
and...
cranberry cake; chocolate cake with chocolate ganache layers and raspberry sauce; apple pie; pumpkin custard with whipped cream; pears and Saga bleu; dark chocolate and almonds.

And after dinner, James and I on the couch and Andreas in what he came to call "his" rocking chair, we watched:
Touching the Void
several episodes of Fawlty Towers
Exit Through the Gift Shop
LA Confidential
Helvetica
The Secret of Roan Inish
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.

[the header and top photo are from Hermit Island; the fort is Fort Gorges, in Portland Harbor; Andreas and James, in the Camden Hills; me in my apron on cleaning & cooking day, before Andreas arrived]

flesh & blood & pie

2011-11-24T09:35:00.002-05:00

happy thanksgiving, friends!
enjoy!

shifting sands; patterns

2011-11-21T09:54:00.010-05:00

James and Andreas walk into the wind, reconciling the ghosted, imprinted memory of earlier days of the friendship with the present moment; back into focus, erasing 20 years of distance.

I am happy to let the gorgeous November sun warm me, carry me along the beach, captivated by patterns of motion, shadow, light and the infinite suggestion of sand, stone, wood, dune grass, and sky.

The rock that comes home with me has a wraith-like cuneiform sunken into the surface that refuses to disappear.

a stroll through magpie alley

2011-11-18T09:10:00.009-05:00

We have a house guest coming tomorrow, for a week. I have to clean my room. Actually, the whole house needs a fast-track tidying up, but James will happily help with that (the guest is an old friend of his). My room is not the bedroom, it's the room where I keep all my Very Important Stuff. I have the same sinking feeling I used to have when I was a kid, when I was not allowed to go out and play on Saturday mornings until I cleaned my room. I was a magpie even then, and my room was piled high with thrift shop clothes; magazines that I scavenged from the neighbors, 3-foot high stacks of them along the complete periphery (knock knock knock: "Hi, I'm Susan Landry from Canoe Tree Street, and I have an art project and I was wondering if you had any old magazines you didn't want?"); comic books; pictures of movie stars that I liberated from magazines in the library (my friend Julie would cough loudly to hide the sound, I'd rip along the binding...); shells and rocks from the beach.
You get the idea. Well, sadly, little has changed. There's still the pile of thrift-shop clothes; boxes of fabric; sewing supplies; art books; magazines; scraps of interesting paper; lots of different kinds of (dried-up) glue; broken jewelry; baskets; shells and rocks from the beach.

This portrait hangs in my room and it is a portrait of Kate, who was one of the older women artists who filled my need for a surrogate mother, when Benjamin was a baby. She lived in the building we lived in when Benjamin was born; had once been a model at the Art Students League (the photo is from that era); was married to a seriously depressed abstract expressionist; had a personality as joyous, as sunny, and as genuine as a field of wildflowers.

This is an old and rusted chocolate or candy mold of a rabbit.

A quote from St. Exupery that I have carried around with me for about 20 years:

A hand-made book in the binding that I believe is called Jacob's Ladder.

And, another great find from that amazing recyling store Benjamin took me to in Oakland: crying baby wrapping paper.

Okay, that's it for today: now I am going to go clean for real. Just wanted to have a little show and tell with you. I hope all of you are either enjoying getting ready for the feasting day, or ignoring it and practicing gratefulness on a quiet, daily basis.

Tuesday Poem: love pretzles

2011-11-15T10:44:00.007-05:00

Biographical note:

"My biography was born July 1933. Grew up with dirty feet & giggles. Cant stand dust so pick my nose. Trouble in school: always thinking dreaming sad mistry problems. Quit high school in middle of last term & got lost working in Mental hospital old man's bed slopy ward. Love pretzles & cant remember dreams anymore. Will somebody please buy me mountain with a cave up there. I dont speack any more. Wanted to be a farmer went to high school for that & worked hard, hard, I tell you, very hard, you'd be amazed. Did weight lifting with bus stops. Got to enjoy burnt bacon with mothers help. Stare at my feet to much & need to undue paroniac suden clowds. Enjoy mopping floors, cleaning up cat vommit. Enjoy swinning underwater. I want the moon for fun. Getting to enjoy blank mind state, especially in tub. This summer got to like flies tickleing nose & face. I demand piss be sold on the market, it would help people to get to know eachother. I.Q. 90 in school, now specialized I.Q. is thousands."

Peter Orlovsky
from:
The New American Poetry 1945-1960
copyright © 1960 by Donald M. Allen

Peter Orlovsky was such a physically beautiful man. Even crumbling into weary, tired-of-fighting pieces, he was close to the angels, almost beatific.

Undone myself, or more accurately in the process of trying to stitch up my own wounds, I had the sad task of comforting him on one of his periodic visits to a hospital clinic. His eyes were rheumy, his pallor was chalky. Shame sat heavily on Peter's shoulders; or maybe shame was just the half of it; for him, it may have been the far too high price of being vulnerable to life's "suden clowds."

[top photo, peter & allen by photographer, Larry Keenan; bottom, misc. hospital bed]

November 13

2011-11-13T09:02:00.009-05:00

Today is my father's birthday, and the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson, as well. This synchronicity pleased my father inordinately, and in that odd way of imagery introduced in childhood, before I could read myself, the connection between Stevenson and my father infiltrated my sense of comfort and well-being, even my aesthetics.

We had a beautiful copy of A Child's Garden of Verses in the house. I am guessing this came from the box of books from my father's childhood, which also included the L. Frank Baum series and editions of Jules Verne, and a full set of encyclopedias from the 1920s. All these books were old and included wondrous illustrations; some had gilt-edged pages that shined softly in bed-time lighting.

My father grew up in an era when people memorized long-form poems; he could recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart, and much of Longfellow. He knew the true version of The Village Blacksmith as well as a very funny parody. My father had a wonderful sense of humor, and a face that fell naturally into a smile.

Best still was that he read Stevenson's poems to me; in my memory, he read them over and over without complaining. Is this possible? Was my father the perfect, loving father I want to remember? My favorite was the poem called "The Land of Counterpane," and in the edition we had, the illustration showed a little boy tucked under the covers, with the hillocks and rumples of a patchwork quilt forming hills and valleys of an imaginary landscape, unfolding to the foot of the bed. I have looked online to see if I could find the illustration I remember; I cannot find the exact one. It was slightly Victorian in feeling and richly detailed.

This may be a resurrection of memory in service of an explanation that accounts, ultimately, for too much, but I equate my love of taking naps at my grandmother's house to the Stevenson poem, and to my adult collection of old fabrics. When I was small, and we went to visit my grandmother Wadleigh (my mother's mother), I would take my nap in Grammy's bedroom. She rented out the top floor of her house to Miss Daniels, a spinster, and so her own bedroom was off a hallway on the first floor of the house. Grammy would pull the window shades down, dimming the room for me, and I would curl up on her narrow bed, covered by a piecework quilt made by her mother (my greatgrandmother)--my 'counterpane.' The murmur of the grownups in the living room was a comfort; I traced the outlines of faded quilt sections with my finger as I drifted off to sleep.

My father died when he was 48 years old. His love of literature, of the sea, his passion for music, his pride in me sustain me...even after all these years.

[header photo is my father, Raymond Edward Landry, in a close-up from a snapshot taken with a bunch of college friends, at Revere Beach, MA. Top illustration is from Coleridge; 2nd illustration from Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, though not the version I recall; last, a quilt on my grown-up bed.]

on the inside looking out; or, is it the other way around?

2011-11-11T11:01:00.015-05:00

The Twins Would Like to Say, the dog & pony theatre co., Chicago:

I read Marjorie Wallace's The Silent Twins many years ago, and remain intrigued by these odd sisters, their strange world. The bond they had resonates with those of us who struggle to connect, and who struggle to walk away from connections that threaten to drain our soul.

June and Jennifer Gibbons were West Indian twins, born in Barbados in 1963, but grew up with their family in Wales.

"Clamped together like limpets" they were, said journalist Marjorie Wallace:

The Gibbons sisters have inspired several books, at least three plays that I know of, including a new one called Speechless, by Linda Brogan and Polly Teale, produced in Edinburgh, at the Traverse Theatre, this past summer. The image above is from that production.

I saw Fred Holland's perfomance/dance piece called What I Like About Us back in the late 1980s, in downtown NY; the twins were played by Robbie McCauley, a woman who now teaches performance art, and Jake Jones.

The decision to have a man play one of the parts was inspired. The Gibbons twins were deeply intertwined. They developed language together, and although later became capable of speaking to others, made a vow to only communicate with each other. They invented themselves away from the rest of the world; they were highly creative, wrote stories together, acted out elaborate plays, drew pictures of private fantasies, and wrote poetry.

As teenagers, their pathology became aggressive, and they were eventually remanded to a mental institution until they were 30 years old. In What I Like About Us, with Jake Jones as one of the twins, the implications of the young girls' dawning sexuality and the profound depth of their bond became obvious as a movement in their pas de deux.

What I Like About Us:

from "We Two Made One"
September Poems
1981
--June Gibbons

a life
our life
always together, forever
drawing strength from one another
two beds, two heads, one mind
locked in
locked up
creating stories
inventing life
you and me
you are me
I want to find a part of me
that doesn't belong to you
a poisoned mind
this is our game
virgins on the dole
tried a little witchcraft
trying to be invisible
someone is driving you insane
it's me
stares and signals
my perception, your perception, clashing
you are me
you and me
you are me
a passing breeze across the sky
dreaming
separated
burning inside
this is our war
this is our life
who will give in
you or me
a division within and between
separated
only one should lose
I was missing from the world
you gave my life back to me
this is our life
this is our game
we once were two
we two made one
we no more two
through life be one

Jennifer died the day they were released from institutional life, and June remained, alone in the world, still in Wales. Hilton Als wrote about visiting June for the New Yorker, in 2000.

[The top 2 photographs are from theater reviews; the 3rd photo is of a postcard from the performance I attended, which I've managed to hold onto for more than 20 years. The poem was quoted in the Hilton Als article.]

for jane/pam

2011-11-10T11:09:00.005-05:00

When I went to visit my son in Oakland, CA, this past May, before I could even sit down for a coffee, he dragged me out of his apartment, saying Mum, there's this place you'll love.

And indeed, it was an amazing storefront warehouse of recycled STUFF... neatly categorized: odd bits of broken jewelry, faded party favors, half empty containers of glue, mirrors of all sizes and shapes and vintages, buttons, rhinestones, envelopes, piles of fabric remnants, gorgeous old straw Mexican hats, half-colored coloring books--in other words, beyond fabulous. Magpie nirvana.

I bought a small piece of embroidered fabric for 25 cents because it reminded me of my friend Jane, whom I have never met, except in blogland. I thought of mailing it to her...but I don't have her address...and it seemed creepy/weird to ask for it. I could have posted this image on her blog, but I am not clever enough to figure out how to do that. So, Jane, this is for you, for Pam. For loss and grief... and for living.

[header, photo I took last night at moonrise, 4 pm; November 10, today, is the official date of the full moon.]

in the living of it

2011-11-09T14:51:00.009-05:00

food
shelter
companionship

I like these mornings, it's still dark outside when I get up. Pad downstairs in wool socks, unlock the front door, pick up the newspaper. Turn the thermostat up, plug in the kettle: boil water. coffee, filter. juice, vitamins. headlines. e-mail.
and another day begins. I used to fight the dark, the cold.
Now, I welcome it.
I like the moving inward, the slowing down, the quieting.

I like to daydream about travel.

Oh... and just so I don't get too complacent lounging around in my postcard-perfect nomadic digs, I one-click ordered Vivian Gornick's new bio of Emma Goldman. THERE. Now, I'm really all set for winter.

[top photo is the set of a performance piece by Eleanor Bauer,
A Dance for the Newest Age.
The colorful rugs/tents are from a website about nomads in Morocco.]

the goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick

2011-11-08T08:19:00.005-05:00

Apologies to Peter Handtke.

Thanks everyone for your attentiveness in the days leading up to my poetry event. It went very well. If I go on and on beforehand about how neurotically anxious I am to anyone who will listen or stop by to read my blog, chances are by the time of the actual penalty kick I have dispersed enough nervous energy to make a sporting gesture. I am also fortunate in that I have friends there--it is a kindly, if anarchic, group of poets--who actually cheered as I walked to the stage. Maybe the fear, after all, is about being unheard, unseen?

I am happy to be back by my quiet cove, in my own bed.

More soon: I have a lot to catch up on, reading your prolific postings, and of course the work monster has grown in size far disproportionate to missing only a Monday at the grindstone.

Addendum: for the fashionistas:

Here's the dress I wore--it's asymmetrical, made of taffeta & jersey, and my African jewelry.
(These pix were taken at home, before packing. I took my camera to NYC, and took no pictures. Just too much stimulation...)

going home; looking back....

2011-11-04T08:45:00.011-04:00

This photograph was taken across the street from the building where I lived for 13 years.
The caption of this photograph places it in the summer of 1978, which is when I moved there, with my two-year-old son. Thirteen years is the longest I have ever lived in one place.
We lived on the top floor of the building in the background; four walk-up flights above the hardware store. It was a very old building, a tenement building that housed generations of immigrants. When we moved in, the building was owned by an Italian man, Joe Chinizzi; his uncle Frank lived on the second floor. The building was half empty even then, and over the years, most of the few remaining people left. Joe did not rent out the vacated apartments, and the stairwell of the building had a hollow echo.

Crazy Jane moved out after her son was caught on the roof one night, with a gun. The stomping of the cops overhead woke me out of a sound sleep, and I dialed 911, scared out of my mind. The operator told me she'd call it in; then she said, "don't worry, Miss; the police are already there."
Crazy Jane was on thorazine, and she'd stand outside my apartment door, shuffling, tapping like a wounded bird until I opened it to give her a cigarette. The climb up to my apartment was daunting--the apartments had 10-foot-high ceilings; the stairs were made of white marble. Benjamin, who never walked but always ran up and down, fell once, smashing the back of his head on the stair.
I could see the blood splashed on that white marble until we left when he was in high school, although whether the actual stain remained, I couldn't tell you.

It's all gone now.
The neighborhood has changed radically, as Joe Chinizzi knew it would eventually. He finally paid me off to move out; there were only three of us tenants left by then, including his uncle Frank, who snarled at me on the staircase one day, calling me a traitor. The Bowery Poetry Club, where I am reading on Sunday, was established after I left, just a block south on the Bowery from my old building.

Here's a link to an article about the venue:
http://gvshp.org/blog/2011/06/13/words-art-in-the-east-village-2011-village-awardee/

[photo by Godlis: Various members of the No Wave mob (including Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps, artist/filmmaker Diego Cortez, Contortions' manager/scene-maker Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Jim Sclavunos of Teenage Jesus, Bradley Field of Teenage Jesus and filmmaker Liz Seidman) hanging out on Bowery at Bleecker Street, in front of CBGB in the summer of 1978; header photo, Benjamin, in the Bowery apartment.]

the life of the would-be poet/writer before the stallion with the silver mane disappeared into the forest

2011-11-03T13:27:00.010-04:00

This is what will be in the printed book, for the festival on Sunday; poems I wrote in 2011 for Brevitas. We were allowed to choose up to six to publish; the first four we are to read at the gathering. Some I like better than others; one I chose just because it would be easy to read, and I get nervous; one I chose because the poems will be projected, and I think it works well visually. Most of these I think I posted here previously, perhaps not in final form.

from
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Tangles of her hair hang like fruit over his flank.
Her hands are pale fish of the stream
And they ripple through his wool-thicket.

She is cold, pulls him down to her, surrenders.
Her arms work their way into him, like sleeves:
one to the left, one to the right.

The animal form confines her, reimagines her.
The bison takes the woman deep into the
night cave. He shapes her, keeps her warm.

Morning sun draws the woman from the
fur womb, releases her to the light, to the work
of living. She dips water, sifts seed. The bison waits.

In the outfield

She could learn to catch the ball
If only she could stop looking at the clouds,
And put her hands up, like small bowls or half moons,
Cup something besides wind or blue or hawk
She could learn to play the game

She could try to pay attention
And not yearn to pluck the sweet
inner spear of tall grass, position it
between pressed thumbs and whistle,
sun glinting, ball winging through space

Origami
(for the Japanese people, after the tsunami)

take one square of smooth paper,
mark the corners (a)nya, (b)asho, (c)armen, and (d)ex.

fold anya so that she aligns with carmen.
undo; press basho toward dex; match them exactly.
these fold lines are impermanent. others are not.
reverse the square, turn dex in on himself; basho
approaches anya but must not touch; dex lies aside carmen.
spread the narrow shape formed by the longest part of dex,
measured against the longest part of basho. Now there are two.
flip carmen; she opposes anya.
reverse;
dex traces the ghost line of anya.
do it one more time, with basho and carmen.

pull the tail through the V-shaped space.
attach a thread to the head of the crane so that it shivers in the breeze.

Summer Fruit

A peach is the moon
pulsing on the sea.
A plum is a poem.
A pear
is the Buddha.
Two plums are prose.
A cherry is
more than you expected,
after the whipped cream.
A raspberry is a stain
on a child’s foot.
The moon is a peach
beating in the sky.
The Buddha
is a persimmon.

This poem is for you

Stars scatter across the half-void like silver
crows, pearl-limned shells, or lost love.
You were always etched in black or white,
the rough stroke of crimson.

We have become our bright-metal selves,
tempered by fire, shot through with heat,
lighting up the sky in our last
sacred, heart-banging leap of faith.

Short bio:
SUSAN T. LANDRY lived for many years on the corner of Bleecker and the Bowery, but now lives in Maine where the nights are cooler, darker, and quieter. Sometimes she dreams of the city.

[header, title of photograph, which is mine]

Tuesday Poem: poetic this & thats

2011-11-01T08:32:00.010-04:00

I received a note this week from Bob Arnold, with whom I corresponded when I was seeking permission to post the poems of Lorine Niedecker, back when I was editor of the Tuesday Poem page in June.
(http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/2011/06/lorine-niedecker.html).
Bob is Niedecker's literary executor and is also a bookseller and publisher (www.longhousepoetry.com/). He wrote to let me know that a new biography of Niedecker has been published by University of Wisconsin Press, which he featured on his 10/29 entry on his blog: http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/.

His note sent me upstairs to rummage through the shelves to find the anthology that I have of her writing, and I realized again how immediately l can lose myself in her poetry. I like that. I like a poet who seduces you, takes you with her, and when she releases you, has somehow inserted a bit of her way of seeing beneath your eyelids, altering your customary way of taking in the world.

In other poetry news, I am one of approximately 4 million poets who will be reading this coming Sunday afternoon, at the annual BREVITAS festival, at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. I am being slightly hyperbolic--I think there may only be 40 of us, each reading 4 poems, in blessedly fleeting appearances. [I am speaking only for myself--I do enjoy the other poets hugely, but I get far too nervous for it to be fun for me until the limelight has shifted to the next in line.].

It is a rollicking event; many of the poets are old hands at performing, and the host is the wonderfully extroverted Bob Holman, proprietor of the Bowery club, a member of our group, and possibly the man most credited for creating the slam poetry movement. He's great--and functions as an exuberant Pied Piper of everything that you could imagine falling under the rubric of poetry. If you're in the city, please come by. (It's 2 pm - 5 pm, November 6th; just don't tell me you're there until my turn is over!)

Mostly, I am happy because I got a new, very funky black dress.

[book cover, Lorine Niedecker, A Poet's Life, by Margot Peters; header, yes, that's me in my nightie. Don't get too excited; just playing with light.]

all hallows

2011-10-31T09:34:00.004-04:00

As a child, I was enamored of the original Oz books; Jack Pumpkinhead was an especially endearing character...

[and please forgive me --for being a besotted mother--but I have to post my son's Halloween picture...]

Tuesday Poetics

2011-10-25T14:03:00.004-04:00

A photogenic and willing radish,
escaped from the two bunches I bought at the farmers market.
And, a ripe, freshly plucked book, delivered by the mailman.

That's about it, chez moi.

written on the land

2011-10-23T10:28:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, we walked the boundary of a state preserve, marked by the remnants of an old stone wall. It was a damp, grey day; the woods smelled of leaf rot. It's a smell I like; not decay, not an ending, but a settling down of the exuberance of summer. Time to do that at home, as well.

come the Revolution...

2011-10-18T17:23:00.006-04:00

On Sunday, we marched from South Portland to Portland, in our small-city version of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Down at the end of my street, two young guys have been demonstrating with signs for about a week, just a few hours each day, mostly to make their presence known to people returning home in the late afternoons. We have befriended them. James talks economics with them, and gave them his copy of The Predator State. I brought them some sandwiches and Brownies, to give them strength. One of them is awfully skinny. They came by our house one evening when it was windy and overcast, and asked if they could leave their heavy signs with us. We tucked a tarp around the painted plywood posters, and felt a warm glow of Solidarity. It's been a long time since I've actively protested anything. The last march I joined was in NYC, against the first Gulf War.

Sunday, we rallied down at the corner, the idea being that we comrades of South Portland would march across the Casco Bay Bridge, and meet up with our compatriots in Portland, who had been encamped for awhile in the main town square, and would no doubt welcome reinforcements. I recruited my friend Tori and the man she lives with, Will, to join us. Our boys--we've come to feel quite parental toward them--brought peer-group pals, too. It was fun when the teenagers recognized Will, who is retired but still does substitute teaching at the local high school. Yo, it's Mr. F., they said, as we got our band of about 8 lined up snappily and planned out our marching route. I brought apples for everyone, because really, every revolutionary needs food. We set off, under a sparkly blue sky. In no time at all, my younger, feisty radical self emerged, and I was shouting "Power to the People" and "Free Huey" at the top of my lungs.

Tuesday Poem: Charles Simic

2011-10-17T12:50:00.011-04:00

Charles Simic is a Yugoslavian emigre poet, living in the United States. He is well published, well regarded in the States, described by one online reviewer as "perhaps our most disquieting muse." Critical remarks like that may suggest the degree of disquiet, perhaps discomfiture, on the part of the writer...not the poet.
I'll leave you to explore his writing, if you are not familiar with it, and make up your own mind.

I actually discovered Simic because I misread the author's name in a quick spin through a book store, years ago. I thought it was a book about the artist, Charles Simonds, whose work I was familiar with in my neighborhood. I like to think of my odd mistake as fortuitous.

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

Charles Simonds

In the 1970s, Simonds built miniature dwellings on the ledges of abandoned buildings and in vacant lots on the Lower East Side of New York. He elaborated a fantasy of migration, appropriate to what was a decaying quarter of New York, home to successive waves of immigrants. He worked by spreading clay on a ledge or in a niche, then modeling tiny clay bricks, to build the shelters and ritual places of his little people.

[courtesy of Petr Kazil's blog on Urban and Adventurous Artists]

MORE INFO ON SIMONDS: I just found this online (http://purple.niagara.edu/cam/art_of_70s/Artists/simonds.html). I especially find this statement about the dwellings intriguing: "The imaginary "Little People" who never actually appear in their environments but are always implied, belong to three different types, a straight line people, a circular people, and the people of the spiral. The different races can be discerned by the way the environment is arranged."

inhabiting the lives of others

2011-10-16T10:27:00.004-04:00

I work from home, spend most of every day alone. This has not always been my circumstances, but I have been a loner by nature ever since I was a child. I was in fact an only child until I was almost 8 years old. I lived in several houses in several different small towns, but from the age of 6 until I was 14, I lived in a sea-side town, on a quiet street in the woods.

Much of what I consider my core character was formed in that place; at least, the memories that stand as snapshots of my childhood were fixed in that time and location. Earlier images exist in my mind as though they were nicely illustrated children's books. I was a visual child, even though I was known as a reader. But I taught myself to read at a young age because I could remember what the words looked like from watching the print go by as one of my parents read aloud. Growing up memories after the age 14 are richly colored and almost random, scattered on the canvas in great abstract blotches. Understanding the composition takes careful, rather painful, study.

Oddly, most people do not 'see' me as a loner, or believe that I am shy. That's not, apparently, how I 'present.' But I am a loner. I like having a companion, for many reasons, but the men I have been able to stay with the longest have been essentially loners, too.

My interest in blogging and in the blogger world feels like an extension of my usual tendencies. I have always been a 'watcher,' fascinated by how other people live their lives. I wouldn't call myself a voyeur, because I am not secretive about it. I am curious; my attraction to the lives of others is like archeology; the endless sifting for information, looking for patterns.

I am also interested in group dynamics. As a loner, I circulate in and out of groups. I want to be accepted, but ultimately I do not want to belong. I have strong affinities, but I do not want to be an acolyte. I have never been a joiner; I was even thrown out of Girl Scouts, for encouraging giggling among the back-row singers at the Christmas pageant. I hated the schoolyard games that called for choosing up teams; I wanted to be chosen, and yet early on had a wrenching empathy for those who were the last to be called.

This blog world has been so interesting, because of these well-entrenched personality preferences. I have formed deep friendships with people I have never met. I have met a few people in person that I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. There are people I can imagine spending endless hours with, walking and talking. There are others with whom, honestly, were we to meet I would find myself tongue-tied. Some people have terrific writing skills, and I read them solely to marvel at the way their voice plays out on the computer page. Others, I read because they provide a window into a life so different, so foreign to my own that I am driven simply by intrigue. And still others, I am awed by a profound connection; they are family, by choice.

I am not writing this as a specific message to anyone, mostly just wanted to extend an appreciation. For enriching my life, for giving a loner some playmates--we've had some good laughs!--, for stretching my mind. (Amazon has profited mightily from the book orders I have placed because of authors or topics mentioned by blog friends. ) Still, given that disclaimer, this week alone both Elisabeth and Jane have moved me beyond the moment; I find myself ruminating on their lives and mine, and the connections.

The photograph of the sea anemone, which I brought home from the beach yesterday, is for Elisabeth. The poem I am writing, struggling with, is for Jane; if I can wrestle the damn thing to the ground to the ground, I'll post it here.

fish bones

2011-10-13T10:03:00.005-04:00

more accurately, cartilage.
i found them in a small pile on the beach, and carried them home in a large clamshell. i like the shapes, so suggestive of meaning.
if anyone is inclined toward divination, you may do a reading.....

Tuesday (not a)Poem

2011-10-11T11:56:00.006-04:00

I am supposed to be doing my work, two pharma projects that are due tomorrow, and one densely scientific piece of editing, a technical energy report, that is due next week and I don't even want to do it, but I never say 'no' because who knows?
In any case: I should be working, or at the very least posting a Tuesday Poem (click link with quill for better followers of the rules than me). But, instead, I am thinking about gratitude.

We went to visit my friend this past weekend, an artist who spends several months of the year on an island in Maine, a 4-hour drive north from where I live. I've written about her before. She is one of several older women that I have become close to over the years, to replace, I suppose, the model of a mother I was given at birth. Most of these chosen mother/women have been artists; some of them have been the kind of mother/person who can put her arms around me and say I love you, Susan, without irony. or a martini. That's not really the point of this story, not the boo hoo, poor Susan narrative; it's about my friend, who's 86 now. And it's about her character, her goodness. It sounds naive, I suppose, to describe someone as deeply good. But she is, and one manifestation of this goodness is her expression of gratitude.

This is difficult to articulate, but I'll try:
When she says thank you for anything, say, for the kale soup that I brought her, she makes me feel as though I have given her not only a gift, a container with lunch, but a part of myself. Beyond that--she says, thank you, in simple words, from her heart; there is no gushing, no flowery language, it is in her eyes and in her hands, the way she extends every part of her self in return.

The giving and the receiving are one; and I am the richer for it, because I live within the glow of the incredible light she carries inside, her gratitude for being alive.

[Emily, on the island she loves.]

here/now/begin/again

2011-10-09T21:08:00.010-04:00

too much beauty ...

and for anyone in need, a small boat that floats.

before/after Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T17:06:00.005-04:00

Popular Mechanics in 1949 confidently declared: "Computers of the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"

Tuesday Poem: Memory motel; after thoughts?

2011-10-02T12:46:00.004-04:00

Feedback from someone in my poetry group, Brevitas: the second stanza alone is a stronger poem. i think he's right...do you?

damp sheets and the
blanket thread-bare pink or gray rose-
petal thin wool, hot light seeping through
the frayed fibers
cold light slatted in the window cut-
outs of the paper weight walls

i remember nothing, only the
tangle of sheets, the
too-warm spread slipping to
the floor. not your face, not your
lake-blue eyes

addiction

2011-09-30T10:59:00.003-04:00

Dear friends,

As some of you may have noticed I have been scarcely seen in these parts lately, altho I do drop in and read your blogs & amuse myself with facebook. I have lots of work--I keep telling myself this is a good thing, because god knows I never did anything practical like put money aside until I was in my late 40s. so, I have been grinding away at all the editing my loyal clients send me. My salvation, to refresh my brain, heh heh, has been trolling ETSY. So far, I haven't been spending money...but...addiction sneaks up on those who think they can "handle it."

Look at this little guy! Don't you want to bring him to a good home?

I do...

[he's from SOMETHINGCHARMING's vintage shop, on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/listing/75101162/tiny-bisque-boy?ref=sr_gallery_8&ga_search_submit=&ga_search_query=&ga_order=most_relevant&ga_ship_to=US&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_facet=vintage]

Tuesday Poem: Wallace Stevens

2011-09-24T09:59:00.006-04:00

I posted this over the weekend because I was thinking about rabbits, and I dimly remembered this poem by Wallace Stevens. Mostly, I like it because of the hyphenated word 'rabbit-light'.
Right there is a fat volume of poetry, if you ask me.
Still, it's a thoughtful poem, and although not originally intended for the Tuesday offering to the gods of poetry, I submit it.
I am (again, for those of you who patiently listen to me whine about this) overbooked with work, and sadly not free to post something:
more daring/passionate/
and/or
French.

Thus: have at it:

Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

[header photo, Terence Koh; rabbit on wheels, mine.]

Tuesday Poem: OCTOBER, louise glück

2011-09-20T11:40:00.004-04:00

1.

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden
harrowed and planted–

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,
didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when I was silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is–

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth
safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

.
2.

Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see; sun that could be
the August sun, returning
everything that was taken away –

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice;
you can’t touch my body now.
It has changed once, it has hardened,
don’t ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.
Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples
nearly mauve on the gravel paths.
And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;
bounty, balm after violence.
Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields
have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,
I won’t believe you.
Tell me I’m living,
I won’t believe you.

.
3.

Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact sentences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal –
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher –

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

.
4.

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. –

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says
I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How priviledged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestro, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

.
5.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

I am
at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world
bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking,
each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron
gates of the private houses,
the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s
duty to create
hope, but out of what? what?

the word itself
false, a device to refute
perception — At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against

the same world:

you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.

.
6.

The brightness of the day becomes
the brightness of the night;
the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I think
sunlight has failed her.
Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.

Between herself and the sun,
something has ended.
She wants, now, to be left alone;
I think we must give up
turning to her for affirmation.

Above the fields,
above the roofs of the village houses,
the brilliance that made all life possible
becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:
they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s
bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:
she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

[painting: I Saw Three Cities, by Kay Sage]

This poem is for you

2011-09-15T10:05:00.003-04:00

Stars scatter across the half-void like silver
crows, pearl-limned shells, or lost love.
You were always etched in black or white,
the rough stroke of crimson.

We have become our bright-metal selves,
tempered by fire, shot through with heat,
lighting up the sky in our last
sacred, heart-banging leap of faith.

[header and second image by Matthew Zappala, my ex-husband]

a tribute to Green

2011-09-14T11:29:00.009-04:00

music (John Coltrane: Greensleeves)

art (one of my favorite pieces of green space sculpture: the Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park, NYC)

food (healthy soup: in fact, I made this last night, a puree of 6 green vegetables)

politics (the 'Greens', poster by Joseph Beuys)

fashion footwear (nuf said; I must have them)

poets (from JULY 19, 2001, The New York Review of Books)

Daphne in Mourning

Melissa Green

Palm fronds have woven out the sky.
Fog has infiltrated every vein.
My hair has interlaced with vines.
Cobwebs lash their gauze across my eyes.

I’ve stood so since the world began,
and turned almost to stone some years ago.
Who passes by perceives a lichened post,
my girlish features, ghostly, nearly gone.

My bark is warmer than the dead’s.
Human blood still lulls the underside of leaves.
My fingers hold the very dress I loved
to dance in, when dancing mattered—and it did.

Copyright © 1963-2011 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

[header photo: mine, from bog-like terrain in the highlands of Cape Breton]

the peace pole

2011-09-12T09:42:00.008-04:00

I found out recently that spreading both the word and the thing itself, the peace pole, is a worldwide movement, and that these sculptural posts with May Peace Prevail on Earth written in many languages have been "planted" by the tens of thousands.
(http://www.peacepoleproject.org/)

I have noticed one on my walks around South Portland; "my" peace pole happens to be in an especially beautiful location, near a tiny, very old cemetery overlooking the ocean.

As illustration on one of her recent essays, Claire Beynon posted a photograph of a peace pole in New Zealand (http://icelines.blogspot.com/2011/08/temple-in-mist.html), so I promised her I would post a photograph of "mine." This seems a particularly apt time for us, as members of this far-flung network of friends, to extend our hands in community, draw in a bit closer for safe-keeping.

Peace. Compassion. Begin again.

righteously

2011-09-08T15:23:00.008-04:00

I love this. And it's not my *type* of music--but this tune just knocks my socks off.
I have been impressed with the way blogger friends post music, like it's nothing, like popping an LP on the hi-fi on a grey soggy afternoon, and dancing around the kitchen.

souvenir, to remember

2011-09-06T08:48:00.011-04:00

We escaped for two and a half days, into the woods, alongside a lake.

Signs of beavers everywhere; I brought home four sticks; the thinner pale stick has been completely stripped of bark by busy beaver teeth. The other two sticks show some serious wood-honing skills. Left to their own (dental) devices, beavers are relentless stewards of the land. The fourth stick is a walking stick, for balancing on the granite chunks that carve out the shore, while I search the crevices for lost worlds.

We have had so much rain recently, mushrooms are everywhere, creamy and white, grey and speckled, virulent inversions of scarlet, deepest orange, and pale moony yellows. I like this photograph of the round, plump mushrooms that are so aesthetically pleasing they might be the kind you make of meringue that will decorate your Yule-log cake; Martha Stewart would have her people carry home this log and its fungi to use as a centerpiece for an early autumnal dinner party.

I am drawn to feathers, rather than stones. why this change, why now?

I have claustrophobia in the tent, even though we have a new tent that is all netting, so you can lie there and see the stars, watch the tops of the trees sway.

James helped me choose a sleeping bag cocoon online that is suitable for sub-Arctic temperatures. I admire his wilderness geekiness, but I would prefer a flat, rectangular sleeping bag, with flannel lining that is printed with images of cowboys and Indians.

The cocooning suffocates me, makes me feel tangled in my dreams of the past. I want to be able to jump on my pinto horse and gallop away, my rawhide skirt ruffling in the wind.

and then there's these....

2011-09-01T15:52:00.006-04:00

I am loaded down with work, again. As a freelancer, I notice an uptick in the clamoring for my skills that coincides with periods when in-house editors take vacation...the week before Labor Day is, of course, a favorite. So, here I am, hunched over the keyboard.

In my (frequent) breaks, I have been exploring shadow-y art.

greetings to you all, at this bittersweet end of summer.

[leaf silhouettes, Jenny Lee Fowler]

words go round in circles

2011-08-30T11:25:00.004-04:00

lately:
and not in melodic form, but as prophesy or chanting or epitaph,

these words have been chasing each other's tails
around in my head.

And, in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love you make.

[new header photo, Masao Yamamoto; old-fashioned shadow puppet prints, Henry Bersill]

Tuesday Poem: Ginsberg's "Song"

2011-08-22T09:18:00.010-04:00

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—
looks out of the heart
burning with purity—
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

We watched the documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg last week. Allen reads this poem in the film, and I immediately wanted to post it for our Tuesday Poem community. It speaks directly to me: from the opening line, I am right there; and I do think, objectively, it's one of Ginsberg's best.

I was never a superfan of the Beats, although I read Kerouac, DiPrima, and Ferlinghetti and some Ginsberg back when I was in my twenties. (I was more interested, actually, in Burroughs.) To live downtown in NYC, however, as I did, was to live in Ginsberg's neighborhood. During my years in NYC, I had a few encounters with Ginsberg. One was in the mid-1980s, on New Year's Eve.

It was a particularly bleak evening as I remember it. I had gone out with a bunch of friends to the Mudd Club, a trendy, crowded, noisy dance club. Not my kind of scene—or music—especially that night, with the place wall to wall with drunk and drugged-out crazies. When one of my friends suggested we head to Harlem where she had been invited to a party, I trailed after her. I was not involved with anyone at the time; in retrospect, it was the end of an extended period in which I had been adrift and lonely, certainly exacerbated by wandering around the city on New Year's Eve. We took a cab up to Harlem, and as we walked up the steps of a brownstone toward the sounds of a raucous party, I knew that I had made another poor decision. I told my friend I wasn't feeling well, and that I thought I'd catch a bus and head home. As I walked toward the the bus stop, it began to snow lightly. The bus pulled up, and it was almost empty. This close to midnight, most everyone was where they wanted to be, not in transit. The warm interior of the bus, the fogged-up windows, the swish of the bus wipers as they swept aside the lovely snowflakes began to lift my mood. A few blocks along, the bus pulled over, the accordion doors folded back, and Allen Ginsberg climbed aboard. He sat with a book, I sat staring out the window, comfortable in my solitude now that I was a little less alone. The moment of transition to the new year came and went as we rumbled through the streets of the snowy city.

[Ginsberg & Orlovsky, unknown photographer; heart-shaped stone from Cornwall, my photograph]

saline woman

2011-08-19T14:53:00.005-04:00

be careful what you fish for.

[painting, magritte; film still, jean vigo]

40 whacks

2011-08-16T15:29:00.005-04:00

One of the things that you don't know about me is that I had a grandfather who was a photographer and a recluse, and who lived much of his adult life alone (he died there, too) in an apartment in Fall River, Mass. Although I had no relationship with him, saw him only twice that I remember, I'll write more about him sometime.

I have also had an abiding, unrelated interest in a more well-known, you might say infamous, denizen of Fall River, that monumentally difficult daughter, Lizzie Borden. As such, I am copying this recent posting (8/15/2011), an excerpt from one of my favorite literary sites, www.bookslut.com/blog/.

"You don't think of Lizzie Borden as this kindly woman who loved children and sent Christmas cards and little bunny stickers, and she did," he says.

A) People in her hometown still have strong, personal feelings about whether Lizzie Borden was an axe murderer.

B) There is apparently a quarterly journal about Lizzie Borden (deliciously called "The Hatchet") and I for whatever reason don't subscribe to it. (Must change this.)

C) There is a new book coming out about Lizzie Borden called Parallel Lives and its co-author swears it will blow people's minds. Possibly only the minds of the 91,000 people who live in Borden's town and are still caught up in the drama, but count me in, too. I will read the 1000 pages of axe-wielding goodness.

[photos (mine) from Cape Breton Island]

half-way there

2011-08-15T09:58:00.008-04:00

I have two manuscripts done out of four to edit by Wednesday, so a few more days of intense work, and I can come up for air.

Last night, instead of sleeping, I was compelled to ruminate on every fault line in the terrain of my life.
There they are, the representatives of my flaws, all queued up like lunatics off to the magistrate, waiting their turn to present their documentation: every slight, every worry, every word said, every word unsaid, leaving me exhausted, with the fire in me completely tamped out. The lunatics take extra pleasure in dousing me with buckets of icy water as they parade by, with their smug little grins.

The geological metaphor may not be accidental: I did take a break over the weekend. We took a walk on a rocky stretch of beach we don't remember to go to very often. I was able to unkink the tightness in my neck, breathe deeply, and study the ancient faces of these boulders. Strains of quartz run like brooks through the granite, the crystals sparkling in the whitened light from the sea.
And always, an errant clump of grass, as in the header photo, clings to life against all odds on this windy, soil-less terrace.

buried in work

2011-08-13T09:26:00.000-04:00

back soon.

Tuesday poem, on Wednesday

2011-08-10T07:50:00.004-04:00

Wee oors

In the heich oors o the nicht
stars strip aff
and douk in the rivers.

Hoolets grein for them,
the wee feathers on their heids
birse up.

Sorry for tardy entry; just ran across this poem and was so charmed I had to post it.
This poem is by a Guatamalan, the Mayan Indian poet Humberto Ak’abal, translated into Scots, and published in a trilingual edition of his poetry. Please follow link for the full back story...
http://www.drumofstone.co.uk/about-drum-of-stone/

here comes the bride

2011-08-05T10:26:00.006-04:00

I am making a quick trip to NYC tomorrow, for my stepdaughter's bridal shower.

I can't wait to see her. It's been two years.

I apologize for censoring, but a long time ago I vowed not to indulge in mean-spirited rhetoric about my marriage. I think this posting crosses the line, I regret writing much of it, and so I deleted most of it, as well as comments that had anyone's name in them. My apologies to those who followed my example and used names I had mentioned.

Tuesday Poem: The Strange Woman And Seven Diamond Miners

2011-08-02T13:52:00.008-04:00

The image above (you'lll have to click on it to read it) is a spread from a work in progress by a friend of mine, Debra Jenks, who is an artist who works with language as well as more traditional media associated with the world of fine art. It may be stretching the boundaries to call this poetry and sneak it in under the wire here, for the Tuesday Poem, but hey: i'm just back from vacation and I'm so stretched beyond my usual boundaries that I want to keep it going....

This link explains her process: http://thestrangewoman.wordpress.com/
and I will conclude with a link to the page on Debra's blog, where she is periodically posting the pages of her found story.

Just to totally wedge my foot in the door to her artwork even more firmly: Ben Ames Williams, who wrote the original novel from which Debra is working, also happens to be the author of a book called Leave her to Heaven, which I remember well from my own naive attempt at a conceptual piece at the age of 14, in which I embarked on reading every piece of fiction in the Clift Rodgers Memorial Library. Not such a big deal; it was a tiny private library and I started at "S" after reading Catcher in the Rye, unable to walk away from that shelf....

In any case: I am very excited about this work, and the Yves Klein blue makes me doubly happy.

[Debra's blog: http://thestrangewoman.wordpress.com/the-book/]

gone and back again

2011-07-31T18:36:00.005-04:00

I am trying to hang onto the sanity that miraculously appeared as we ran away from our real lives.

No thoughts yet, just a few pix.

How are you all?

here's where we're going

2011-07-20T08:17:00.003-04:00

Countdown: 3 days to vacation...
I am SO ready.
Well, I will be ready, when I get out from under the pile of work!

Tuesday Poem: the POEMobile

2011-07-18T11:08:00.007-04:00

Bob Holman and Steve Zeitlin of NYC, Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club, and Zeitlin of City Lore, are traveling around the city this summer in their POEMobile.

I love these photographs of light beams of poetry (with the Greek translation); word clouds hanging on the side of brick buildings in Astoria, Queens, a traditionally Greek neighborhood, and very close to where I lived in my last go-round of city living.

[Further research:
the performance aspect of projecting the poems on the built environment around the city is entitled "White Wing Brushing the Building," from these lines in a poem by Martin Espada:
“God must be an owl, electricity coursing through the hollow bones, a white wing brushing the building.”]

woman warrior

2011-07-14T10:46:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, a friend and I were talking about, lamenting, the odd state of affairs clothing and women have taken since the days of early feminism, or at least feminism of our generation. I find it hard to talk about this without appearing to be a cranky shell-shocked woman of a certain age who is no longer a marketable commodity. I never did conceive of myself as such, preferring to be thought of as bright or funny or artistic. I never imagined myself as pretty or beautiful. i had good taste, i was clever with clothes--that's about as far as I allowed myself to go into that realm. My friends have always been the most beautiful creatures on earth, and still are: but, me...I never could muster up the assurance to say that about myself.

Aging has added a whole new dimension that I seem to confront daily, in the popular media, in the crazed sexualized world that assaults us. These days, I usually say that I just want to stay healthy, stay strong. Still, I sometimes second-guess myself, wonder if I had been a stunning young thing, if I would have built up the political sensibility that I did. It served me well, I suppose, as a metallic shield around my body, keeping the pack at bay, luring only the lone wolves who navigate the world in their own prickly overcoats.

[top photo (mine), metallic dress from an exhibit at the US Botanic Garden museum, Wash DC; bottom two (mine), a dress made of sea shells, antique store window, Long Island, NY]

tuesday poem: sherman alexie

2011-07-12T08:43:00.003-04:00

I subscribe to only three periodicals these days: The New Yorker, because I have always subscribed to The New Yorker; The NY Review of Books, because it is like having a box of the most decadent dark chocolate bonbons delivered every 2 weeks, the kind of boxed chocolate that doesn't give the contents in a diagram on the inside cover; and Orion, a visually beautiful journal that publishes writing about nature, culture, and a sense of place. In the most recent issue of Orion there is a poem by Sherman Alexie, that he calls a sonnet, which made me curious about the license a poet can take with form. Below, I have copied 2 sonnets by Sherman Alexie, the first one from Orion; the second one I found online from a journal called the Summerset Review.

Sherman Alexie is a self-described Indian, and in tandem with Louise Erdrich, one of the most well-known contemporary Native American writers.

Sonnet, Without Salmon
1. The river is empty. 2. Empty of salmon, I mean. 3. But if you were talking to my grandmother, she would say the water doesn't matter if the salmon are gone. 4. She never said that. I just did. But I'm giving her those words as a gesture of love.
5. She's been gone for thirty-one years. 6. The water doesn't matter if my grandmother is gone. 7. She swam wearing all of her clothes, even her shoes. 8. I don't know if that was a tribal thing to do, or if she was just eccentric. 9. Has anybody ever said that dam building is an act of war against Indians? 10. And, yet, we need the electricity, too. 11. My mother said the reservation needs a new electrical grid because of all the brown- and blackouts. 12. "Why so many power outages?" I ask her. 13. "All the computers," she says. 14. Today, in Seattle, I watched a cute couple at the next table whispering to their cell phones instead of to each other. But, chivalrous, he walked to the self-service coffee bar to get her a cup. Lovely, I thought. She was busy on her phone while he was ten feet away. When he sat back down, she said, "Oh, I was just texting you to get me sugar and cream."

Sonnet, with Tainted Love
1. My teenage niece, after listening to my Motown's Greatest Hits CD during a six-hour road trip, asked, "Why do they keep calling every woman baby?" 2. Good question. 3. In this slightly more enlightened era, what are the acceptable terms of romantic endearment that men can say to women? 4. "Baby" is way down on the list. 5. And yet, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner," from Dirty Dancing is one of the more romantic movie lines of my generation. 6. But I saw Dirty Dancing soon after a female electrical worker disappeared from a rural power station near my reservation. 7. "Signs of a struggle," read the newspaper story. 8. Nearly twenty-five years later, it's a cold case. I search for the latest news. Nobody knows what happened. Her husband and co-workers are still mourning. 9. But the husband has also remarried and had children. His says his new wife has helped him grieve and recover. 10. Good for him. Good for her. 11. The world is equal parts magic and loss. 12. I have this recurring nightmare where huge men break into our house. While defending my wife and children, I tear the invaders into pieces and eat them. 13. Jungians would suggest that I am metaphorically eating myself. 14. Even though some of us believe otherwise, men love violently.

[header photo, by Danny Rosenblum; horses on the reservation]

living the moment

2011-07-11T09:42:00.008-04:00

Yesterday we climbed Baldface Mountain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a mountain whose granite face above the tree line is visible for many miles around. James and I had tried to reach the summit on a balmy day in October, only to reach the ledges and discover they were already completely iced over. We had to turn back, after I almost--literally--lost my grip and my life. A spring attempt can be risky for the same reason, lingering ice and snow, and early summer brings another difficulty, the notorious black flies in deep wooded areas.

So, finally, now almost mid-July, we were able to set out again. It was a beautiful, clear day, in the high 70s. The hike in to the actual ascent of the mountain is, to me, the worst part of this particular mountain. Here in the East, trails are a direct beeline up the mountain, as they are in the Alps and other ranges in the old country, but unlike those of the more gracious Western mountains, which are designed as gradual switchbacks, so that you ease your way up. It is a rough, rock-strewn, exhausting, and somewhat monotonous incline for about two miles, at which point a half mile or so of granite ledges and alpine vegetation begins. This is what I love, the scramble up the rock, figuring out the handholds and footholds, the absolute focus necessary to propel yourself upward. And coming down was even more fun, because you could see the landscape and the contours on the mountain face, which were not visible on the upward climb. Another mile or so beyond the ledges, we finally reached the true summit, 3500 feet, 4 hours of climbing.

This is not a true rock-climbing experience, it's only a difficult hike--but the technical components come into play, and for someone like me who never did anything like this before last year, the challenge and the mental working out is addictive and the accomplishment is thrilling. James spent his late teens and early 20s as a serious rock climber out west, where he's from, and spent many years as a young man living in the wilderness, learning survival skills, and consuming all the related literature. Even for him, no longer involved in that level of athleticism on a daily basis, yesterday's hike was demanding.

Last night, we sat out on the porch, eating a dinner of Saturday-night leftovers, looking out at the cove, listening to the night calls of the birds, and nursing our sore muscles and bug bites (the black flies didn't get the memo that their time in the woods was over). If you were riding by on your bike last evening and saw this aging couple, you might think, kindly, that they had spent the day poking about in the small garden, maybe walking on the beach, or playing Scrabble. Little would you know that this aging couple was quietly savoring their aches and pains, too tired to chat much, but each feverishly plotting the next adventure.

happy birthday!

2011-07-07T09:34:00.005-04:00

I suppose my son, as much as anyone's, served as the repository of my dreams, the focus of my creativity, from the moment of conception onward.

These days, I stay several paces back, intrigued to see how it all turns out. I see in him glimmers of me, a quirky aesthetic and sense of humor; glimmers of his father, that amazing ability to focus; but he is very much an artist unto himself, taking up his own space in the world.

I took this photograph in our apartment on the Bowery, where we moved shortly after his second birthday. We lived here for 13 years; his father lived 6 blocks away. It was an inexpensive, noisy, silt-stained railroad flat, but it had 10-foot high ceilings, incredible light, and wonderful old moldings outlining the living room walls.

destiny

2011-07-05T14:20:00.004-04:00

If the worst that happens is that I end up a bird woman wearing sensible shoes, I promise I won't complain.

[photograph by Elijah Gowin]

a walk down by the bridge before dinner

2011-07-01T19:41:00.004-04:00

faith ringgold: summers in the city

2011-06-30T12:21:00.008-04:00

Almost July, my son's birthday next week; he'll be 35 years old. and so it begins: going over those years in my mind.

"I will always remember
when the stars fell down around me
and lifted me up above
the George Washington Bridge."

[from Ringgold's wonderful children's book: TAR BEACH; photograph of benjamin & me by his father.]

jessie

2011-06-28T14:00:00.006-04:00

In my header photo slot above, that's a picture of Jessie. It's not so much a portrait of her, but a collage about her, with her colors and her texture. Jessie is a fictional character based on a real person I barely knew, someone I observed off and on when I was in my 20s and was recently graduated from college, but still living in the college town, not sure whether my grown-up life had started and if it had, what exactly it was going to be.

Jessie and her best friend, Brenda, were townies, those native sons and daughters who did not go to college, unless they were included in a demographic outreach and given scholarships to the very expensive university. I had come from a small town myself, on scholarship, and never felt like I really belonged at the academic enclave, high on a hill above the town. My parents struggled financially; we'd lost our home to foreclosure; my family life had been like a never-healing wound. I couldn't wait to get away from home, and yet when I did get away, I was drawn to the townie girls, knew that I was far more like kin to them than to the quick-witted, sophisticated city girls I went to classes with.

I have been trying to write a story about Brenda and Jessie and me for years...so many years that I can no longer tell for sure what is truth, what is memoir, what is deliberate artifice, and what has crept in under the guise of a better adjective, a stronger verb. I know exactly what the three young women look like, even though what they look like is based on pictures that I found in a magazine decades ago. I no longer can make images of the real young women appear before my eyes, although I once could. And their true names were not Jessie and Brenda; I don't remember what they were.

Twenty years ago, in New York, I worked with a young woman who looked and acted so much like Brenda--my invented Brenda--that I called her Brenda in my mind. When I connected recently on Facebook with another woman who had worked in the same company, I wrote her an e-mail and said, Do you remember Brenda, that wild girl from the Rockaways, who used to work with us? Whatever happened to her? She wrote back, oh, I lost track of her, but last I heard she's got a couple of kids. I know who you mean, but her name was Angela, not Brenda. So, not only had I forgotten the real name of the person I named Brenda in my story, I had also forgotten the real name of the person who looked like my fictional Brenda.

[point of information/embarrassment: I made the collage of Jessie, as a working visual reference for my story, long before the days of photoshop. it's just glued paper from magazines, then scanned.]

fairyland

2011-06-27T13:11:00.005-04:00

Yesterday we went for a walk in a swampy area, made even more lush by several long days of rain. The moss and ferns were extraordinary; look at the way they follow the curve of this small brook, straight from a storybook. These could be soft resting places for hobbits or the perfect spot for Mr. Toad's picnic.

One of the photographs I took yesterday I used as an illustration for my turn as editor at the Tuesday Poem blog. Please do stop by over there (it's already Tuesday, in New Zealand!), and meet the poet Lorine Niedecker; I hope you enjoy the two poems of hers that I posted.

http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

tidy little beds

2011-06-26T10:23:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, when the rain finally let up, we took a drive to visit the Shaker village located at Sabbathday Lake, here in Maine.
I have visited Shaker museums before; a few previously lived-in Shaker habitats and grounds have been turned into low-key attractions, with tours of the herb gardens, demonstrations of the traditional woodworking skills, displays of the distinctive form-follows-function tools, furniture, and household objects for which the Shakers are well known. I had assumed that this community would be similar, but in fact Sabbathday Lake is the only active Shaker residential community left in the world, and it houses the only living Shakers, two elderly women and a man in his 50s. The Shakers, who emigrated from England in the 1700s, have always practiced celibacy; the communities kept their membership fairly robust in the centuries since the founding of the religion (an offshoot of the Quakers) by adopting orphans, who could then choose to remain in the community as adults and become members. Recruits are welcome, but the celibacy stance is not so popular these days, and in truth, it's always been a sticking point: even at the height of Shakerism, there was a heavy turnover in membership.

Because the Sabbathday village (and by village, I mean a small cluster of farms and outbuildings, a cemetery, a gift shop) is an actual residence, guests are not allowed to wander about, exploring the gardens and the livestock areas, as I had hoped.
Instead, we could only visit the gift shop and part of a unused farm building, one room of which was a model of a young boys' dormitory-type room in earlier days. It seemed authentic: the lovely muted colors that I admire in the Shaker aesthetic, the hand-loomed blankets, the simple, beautifully turned maple bedsteads. Somehow, though, try as I might, I could not quite hear the muted giggles of the three little boys who slept under those practical, slightly scratchy woolen coverlets.

Outside, the worn dirt paths were completely empty of human activity; the houses and the cemetery are off -limits to visitors. Indeed, the only signs of life, with the exception of the subdued woman in the gift shop, were sheep far off in the field, and 5 or 6 very sweet cats who strolled about, posing against the weathered barn doors and lounging under the huge maple trees.

[top photo is of the floorboards in the women's bathroom. Cameras were strictly forbidden. I sneaked the shot of the boys' beds, and seized the photo op when I used the loo.]

6 am: water, water

2011-06-21T07:58:00.009-04:00

Illumination: clouds, light changing too quickly to capture; the cry of an osprey...

Too much work to write anything cogent here. I just run outside and take pictures, then go back inside to work.
June can be heartbreakingly beautiful in New England.

in the garden

2011-06-20T08:18:00.004-04:00

Dial-a-Poem

2011-06-16T16:31:00.016-04:00

I just read an essay about a NYC phenomenon, back in the late 1960s to the early 1970s: Dial-a-Poem. The essay is posted at the Poetry Foundation's website.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/242182

I moved to NYC in 1974, and according to this article, the Dial-a-Poem project started in 1968 and lasted for about 4 years, so I am trying to recall if I ever dialed the number and listened first-hand.
I did live in the East Village for just a summer, though, when I was still in college, the summer of 1969. That would have been the likely time period. I was even writing poetry then. Bad poetry; but, surely I would have loved the idea of Dial-a-Poem, and dialed it up.

It strikes me today as lost innocence, as so many things feel like recently. We use such dazzlingly sophisticated technology now for the crudest of ends. How lovely that once you could dial up a poem...just like that, with your index finger.

John Giorno, who started Dial-a-Poem, published a record album, which is available on a amazing resource, called UBUWEB at www.ubu.com. I don't think these were necessarily the actual poems of Dial-a-Poem, but the album features the poets who were involved in the project.

here's Anne Waldman:

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/giorno_waldman/Giorno-Waldman_02_waldman_fast.mp3

from:
The Dial-a-Poem Poets
Released: 1972
By: The Dial-a-Poem Poets
Label: Giorno Poetry Systems
Genre: Spoken word

Anne Waldman, 1970s.

Tuesday Poem: e.e. cummings

2011-06-14T11:23:00.008-04:00

i have found what you are like

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss

I used to think, after I was no longer a teenager and had moved along to appreciate poetry that was darker, more like being grown up, more like being in the real world, that e.e. cummings was the poet for one's teenaged years. But now that I have begun to climb, one slow-footed step at a time, out of the pit of mid-life to the other side...well, I think e.e. cummings is a poet to grow older with.

wild-type

2011-06-12T10:06:00.005-04:00

I am testing my new camera; these are wild flowers from a walk in the woods yesterday.

for marylinn: from the 50-family yard sale

2011-06-09T18:10:00.012-04:00

Here's some pix of the buttons I purchased at the yard sale. I wish I had my camera with me, though, when I was actually there.
I love the interactions that happen at gatherings such as this. It was fun, the sun was shining; and one can never have too many buttons, right?
Especially as I seem to be losing my marbles...

And, here's some button art...

The dragon flies: Sue McGettigan; Lorrie's Button, 1976 (sculpture park): Hy Zelkowitz; Abstract button art: Eva Kelly;
Raven: (anonymous) Northwest Coast Native

more birds: The Crow Catcher

2011-06-08T09:02:00.003-04:00

A painting by Leonora Carrington, who died last month at the age of 94. I was intrigued by the brief sketches of her life as presented in her obituary and ordered a book about her and her amazing art work. She was one of the few women artists to be counted among the surrealists, and was productive well into old age.
I wanted to post The Crow Catcher, because I think it augments our discussion of birds.

I also want to show you another favorite piece, an etching, entitled Dog, come here into the dark house. Come here black dog. Clearly, she was a poet, as well.

[In fact, she is described as writing poetry as well as making visual art, but I have yet to find an example of her poetry.]

territoriality

2011-06-05T14:52:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I was sitting on my porch, reading, and I heard a bird making a loud fuss, a harsh exasperated squawking. I looked up and saw that it was a sea gull, perched on the glass-domed top of the street light. He was clearly furious, making the same rasping cack cack sound, over and over. it was not the usual sound I associate with gulls, but a different noise and, it seemed to me, specific to the situation--whatever that was. At first, I couldn't figure out why he was so upset. Then a crow swooped out of the sky, and dive-bombed within inches of the gull, setting off a new and even more frantic series of the cack cack cursing.

I know this crow lives in the area; I see him often, and have been pleased that he is a local resident. I have been reading the books of Bernd Heinrich, the biologist whose primary domain is bird behavior, and who has studied ravens for decades. I am fascinated with his observations, and so had half-hoped the bird I'd seen was a raven--he's that big--but I am quite sure he is a crow; ravens are far more likely to live further north, deeper in the Maine woods. Still, this bird is quite large, and definitely considers himself the avian ruler of my neighborhood. I was puzzled as to why he bothered to make such a flashy show of declaring his turf to the sea gull. There are lots of sea gulls around here; I live within a few yards of a marshy salt-water cove and at low tide, the gulls swarm in for clams and sea worms. I may be wrong, but I don't even think that crows and gulls eat the same food, so it's not a competition based on potential food shortage. I think the crow is just compelled to make his presence known, even though he has little to gain, or lose. And the same with the gull; he parks himself on that light post just to irritate the hell out of the crow.

I suspect we all know people who behave like that. Sometimes, don't you just wish they'd put all that energy into a more constructive enterprise?

grief; writing about grief

2011-06-01T09:04:00.011-04:00

My father died when I was 17, and I have so few specific memories of his funeral service, burial, and anything else around that time period that it was especially important to me to memorialize the death of my brother. When my father died, I vowed never to attend church again, and I was filled with anger at the rituals enacted by my family: retiring to the home of my aunt and uncle, the pale white triangles of thin-bread sandwiches, crusts trimmed, cut-glass bowls of olives, celery, radishes; and the cocktails. Always the cocktails. Was there any other way to express anything, ever, except via alcohol in party clothes? I was dead set against alcohol in those days, a high school anomaly.

My vow to abandon the church was essentially hollow; I had stopped attending when I was 13 and permitted to make that choice. My father had completed his studies at theological school and was on his way to becoming a Protestant minister when WWII broke out. He left his incipient career, which he must have had doubts about, enlisted in the Coast Guard, and never formally returned to pursuing the ministry. I regret that we never talked about religion, although my father was a participant in the church we belonged to as a family when I was young, and even taught Sunday School for my age group. He threw me out of class because I giggled when he demonstrated the limited scale used in monotonal Hebrew singing. The fact he was teaching such an off-topic subject makes me even sadder that I never plumbed the depths of his interests; from reading his letters home during the war, I have a sense that he had expanded his interests beyond the narrow world of traditional New England protestant sects into a wider, philosophical inquiry. But...I don't know that for sure.

My father's death was devastating for me, and I learned later, even worse for my brother. He was 10 years old; I was half way out of the house, waiting for returns on college applications. I remember telling my father in the hospital that I had applied to Harvard (Radcliffe, in those days), and his immense pride. At least I gave him that much; he was gone by the time I got the letter saying I had only made the waiting list. After my mother died, 2 years after my brother, I was left to sort out everyone's papers, and found a letter from a school psychologist to my mother telling her that my brother was not doing well in school and that it appeared as though the death of his father had clocked him in loneliness and despair. She recommended therapy for him, but as far as I know, no one followed up.

When Mark died, I knew that I had to learn how to mourn, partially in some way to make up for my inability to approach my grief when my father died, and also because my messy, hard-fought struggles to stop using alcohol and drugs had helped me realize the value of feeling. Feeling anything. I was determined to be there for every scrap of pain. And, as I have shared with another blogger who also lost her sibling, I was even reluctant to let go of the symptoms of grief. I treasured the sleepless nights that whole first year because I knew the insomnia would eventually pass, and once it passed I would have only the hole.

A few years ago, when I left my husband, I had a very, very rough time of it. I couldn't face the loss; I didn't know what to make of the grief. I felt hypocritical mourning him because it had been my choice to end the relationship. It occurs to me, though, in thinking about this confusing reaction, the inchoate onslaught of emotion, and where to put it, what it means, that it is only as a result of all that has come before that I am able to sort through this most recent loss. It is only because in the intervening years I have learned how to take in love, that the emptied out feeling is not quite so final.

(Thank you to Melissa G.; your post about grief prompted me to try and write a bit more about all this.)