Looking back aways...

Not a trip down memory lane, but sort of. I discovered my daughter had taken these photos out of the albums we recently excavated to show her friends, and I was touched. In the process of scanning...

In 1977, at 25 years of age. Ah, the world ahead! My first relationship of 5 years that had become a marriage was ending. A late bloomer, I didn't go to university till 21; I was working on my second B.A. and getting straight A's. When I look at these photos, I think I knew more then than now.

Did we all start from a position of surity that has gradually crumbled away? Leaving an essential glimmer in the unknowingness?

light like colourless smoke

Freshly edited for Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.



larger version here

Marigold Moon

For Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.

Muse Calling

One of those days, where I've meditated almost without choice, pulled easily in, and where I keep trying to enter the external day. I am tired. Is it because I've only eaten fruit, cheese, antipasto, and toasted multi-grain walnut bread for the past few days, and my body needs meat even if I don't get around to cooking it more than once or twice a week; or is it financial, I expected to be working more this month than I have; or is it emotional, with some strange responses from women to my output that leaves a discomfort that requires rest to heal; or, as I reach down deeper, is it creative? Is my muse pulling me into somnambulance, the place from where I write, even though today is not a 'writing day.' As I wander about, intermittently laugh or argue about writing with my daughter, I have an odd sense of writing emerging. Why can't my life go on when this happens? I have so many things to do...

An image of a great frozen polar cap shifting, the voluminous depth of the mind working things out in its billions of neural connections, and when it's ready, a piece of writing breaking off like an ice flow, and floating into the ocean where it melts eventually into all the other words.

Is this a Zen of writing?

Do all of our words flow together when we've shut off our computers and closed our books? Into a great linguistic ocean sweeping the globe?

Ecdysis Recording (1:41min)

A recording of my poem, Ecdysis, which may be found at qarrtsiluni.

Take a listen; comment over there.

Does it work? This little poem was difficult to record, not sure why. The short length? How many times did I try, each time finding a different intonation, which led to a different set of referential meanings in the cadence of voice.

In the cacophony of recordings on my screen, I just chose one. For better or worse.

This one: DSL/Cable, or Dial-up.
_

African Angel

A re-posting to join Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.


tags: angels, crafts, African angel, memories, photopoem, Illustrated Poetry Marathon.

Miss Muffet

It clung to the inside of the jar not understanding liberation. It was content above my bed, awaiting flies. I banged the Mason jar again on the door frame under the moth-flicked light, not out of kindness, I just didn't want squished spider in a tissue. Holding an empty jar, I called my dog back in, and shut the door.



I could say, not after Woody Allen's Scoop, after all that laughter and the 71 year old icon that he is despite the magic tricks, or the Life Salad at Fresh with organic carrots, beets, sprouts, spinach, lettuce, basil and a tahini dressing, or the mango, coconut milk and banana shake, or the fine Summer evening spent with a friend. I could say that the last time I tried to squish a spider it dropped fast onto my daughter's bed and disappeared. I could say it's because, well, that's just the chance a spider takes, and it lucked out tonight. But then it might have suffered a concussion being rudely knocked out of the Mason jar on the way down to the ground; I'll never know.