November Sun

leaves, fire colours
reds and oranges
the fallen sun

a street carpet
of fragmented light

sodden endless rain

paper garden bags,
of collected leaves,
raked and packed

my heart, enfolded
withdrawn

an economy of words

no fixing it, either - if it's
not there in the first sweep
it'll never be

I was on a pathway
that disappeared
before I arrived

the large wood-wet oak
a shiny canopy of leaves
held by powerful branches
bright yellow lanterns
slivers of sun

scattering¹


______
On November 8th, browsing radio stations I came across Don Jackson in his nightly spot, "Lovers and Other Strangers," and found him presenting a marvelous Autumn show composed of November-inspired poetry and music, that, hmnn, has obviously been inspiring...

¹While I couldn't work it into the poem, I was also playing with an origin of the universe metaphor with a reference to the point of the "last scattering" when, in the diffuse plasma of ionized atoms, particles and anti-particles annihilated each other for the last time, leaving about a billion photons for every particle of matter, thus making the universe transparent. I wanted this reference to echo the emotional underlayer of the poem where fragmented light leads to a naked transparency of the heart, a clarity.

Setting up a small studio...

On the weekend my son and brother moved about half my storage space out. A solid pine queen-sized bedframe in pieces, a dismantled swinging couch for a backyard, an old stereo system with speakers that still works, a workout bench in its box, a functional old laser printer with an unwrapped toner, things no longer needed or there isn't room for. They cleared enough space for me to set up a small painting area so that I can work right away if I have the gumption. Once the remaining dozen or so boxes are unpacked, there will be no excuse anymore: it's heated; there's a tiny window for ventilation; next door is the laundry room with a big sink for washing brushes (I use water-based oils, so clean-up is easy); the lighting's nothing, but there are clamp lamps and full spectrum bulbs...

I paint on the floor, whenever I can summon the courage to let it go, or when I manage a zen-like state. It's always a risk. It's the most nerve-wracking thing I do.

Once the canvas is dry, I can move it upstairs where there is light in excess and work on an easel.

Some of my best paintings have been done when it's almost dark and I can barely see what I'm doing. It's not about the amount of light but the state of mind.

I'll try to take a photo later and add it to this post.

Later: Ok, so 4. And so what if they're a bit silly. You get the picture.





My doggy wondering.



Fun wall shot. Oh, whateva, then.



What's still to do. Sort of Arrgghhhh....

And, anyway, what part of the brain is remembering...

Why am I trying to remember Plato? It was a dark green hardcover book. I took to reading outside of my course lists, rising every morning at 5am and reading for about 2 hours before getting ready to make the long trek to the university for my courses or teaching assignment. When I finished the Oxford Annotated Bible, I began Plato, naturally (and after him, well, Aristotle, who I found tedious, with his categorizations and namings). In the Fall of that year I read Plato cover to cover, and hardly remember it except of the wonder of worlds opening out. Though subsequently I felt I had the "Plato layer" somewhere in my psyche and would have some dim general idea whenever I came across a reference, or when reading Neo-Platonists.

The cave, and the chained, and the muted light, this I remember. Or the city of perfect people all with their perfect roles. The split of the soul into two halves each forever seeking each other. Transmigration of souls. Pure forms. And Socrates and the hemlock, oh yes. Plato really is two men anyhow, not one. He never was one man. Any philosopher would laugh at me.

This morning carrying a large chocolate-dipped apple that I was given for answering three silly Insurance Company questions (what might insurance be good for? is there a difference between an agent and a broker? oh ho ho my) and getting my picture taken I saw it, I'd never noticed before, down by the vault. Whoever uses it? The way the morning light rested on each of the horizontal lines. It looked like an industrial strength plastic flooring until closer and realizing it was marble. Light shone ethereally down those stairs, surely a representation of pure forms. Why do we have to find representations of what we're thinking about? Is that called pathetic fallacy? Walking by walls of marble tile and on floors of marble, it could almost be a cave. Not quite, but if you thought of the tremendous industry, hauling it all from the earth, cutting and polishing it, cementing it in...

___________
Writers read everything, and readers of writers read everything, and I was doing a graduate degree in English Literature and was tired of references to basic works I hadn't read and so embarked on a wide-ranging and varied reading project... that went on for 10 years at almost a book a day - totally different to Fine Arts, which I also did a degree in, where mostly what you had to know was Art History, at least back then. I'm sure it didn't begin with Plato... so why is He popping up? And on marble staircases of all places.

Neon Blue Calligraphy / of Love

Neon Blue Calligraphy
of Love

The concern of the French genre of récit is retrospective - it does not follow the unfolding of events like the novel, but looks back musingly upon them, allowing what has occurred to return in various ways, to the extent they can never be said to be completed at all. It names, thereby, a genre characterised by reflection rather than action, bearing on a single episode, or group of episodes as they present themselves as an occasion for meditation.¹ Lars Iyer

from where writing issues
enfolded in the heart
lines beating like blood vessels
this book of words

I

Do I resist the pull into the past? The way it swirls in me. How much of my heart remains in that vortex of love?

Decades pass silently.
I didn't know where,
or even if
you were alive.

Looking but not searching,
for an essence of what we shared.

How
I,
but words, like billions of capillaries,
this body.
Flow of the aorta.
Systolic.
Writing renews itself for you.

Prodigal.
Like Lazarus.
From beyond, risen, returned.
Kaddish to The Rite of Spring,
a funerary dirge becomes a blossoming landscape of love.
Which I barely recognize, our aged selves.

Where did you go?

And where are you now?

The neon blue calligraphy of the skies, where the plane was swallowed, where you went.

II

When he came out of the past, I wasn't sure it was him. The elegance of his language, that lexicon, I knew it had to be. Always I had difficulty putting him to his words, the latter an outflow of the former but the clarity of his intelligence, how it definitively appeared, neatly without difficulty, on the page.

The elegant calligraphy of a mind borne through the heart.

III

Only from where it is deep, searing,
vulnerability of the self.

Only if my writing pours out,
the blue blood of veins.

IV

I am your lover;
I write as a woman who loves you.

Who speaks to you in writing.

I surrender to you in the flow of the text.

Arias in the Wind

A woman singing arias on a high platform on a truck parked on a cold and windy November day. Her voice flowing with the gusts keeps becoming obscure, becoming wind. Will she fly turning through the air like a Chagall angel, lift and float in the lightness of being?

You haunt me. Is it that we fly together where it mingles, rebounding off each other, an undulating pattern of togetherness that's different to the separateness that's ongoing?

Who are you as the hours unfold across the tableau of time? When do you come bounding from that sky of vivid pastel colours?

This coalesquing of ours in various patterns and never stopping and always moving and reconfiguring, our agile dance across the expanse.

Daylight Shifting

I woke, and found the hour returned for revision. End of daylight savings, an hour that repeats itself: from 2am to 3am, and then back to 2am again.

That re-lived hour changed everything.

Take both forks in the road. Try alternatives, side by side. I lived the first hour trapped, obsessed; then went a different way when the hour started again. In the dark hours, a resolution to the dilemma, and I became free in a new way.

Or explore it multiply round-the-clock & superimpose the hours until time is like Comet Holmes expanding.

All day I re-live each of the hours when I pass clocks, the large blue-rimmed one that ticks loudly on the kitchen wall, the yellow-lit numbers on the stove, the travel clock on the bathroom shelf amidst coloured stones strewn around a conch shell, my electric bedside clock with its red LCD numbers, and my tiny silver watch, some are changed, and some aren't, absurdly I like it like that, playing with time, repeating each hour.

I envision changing my watch on the subway platform in the morning, stale underground air, crowded, turning the dial and watching the hands unweave the forever spiralling forward of time.

Today, the 25 hour day, when time repeats itself in the shift towards the light.

Models and Muses

Probably I will take this down and integrate it into a prosepoem, but I am intrigued by this insight, or perhaps it is only a reflection.

I hadn't realized before, anytime through all the years of exploration that began, perhaps, during my Jungian phase and obsession with the animus, the divine masculine.

When I am obsessed with a man, I write for him. Or is this too simple? Over 30 years of writing, I'm not talking about very many men. Those I've fallen in love with. Those few jewels sparkling in the light.

What I clearly understood today is that a woman writer has models, the man on whom the poem is dressed, but that the model is not the muse. The muse is the man to whom the poem is addressed.

The one, the figure; the other, the inspiration. The one, the man one might have become involved with because it worked for one's art, and was rather fun; the other, a man one rarely was involved with because he's, oh, how to describe, brilliant, knowledgeable, talented, huge in his capacities and achievements, and thus fearful. One is vulnerable before one's muse.

Yet one feels understood by the muse, for whom one pushes oneself to produce the best one is capable of; the model barely understands what one's working on, and only sees it in terms of themselves. The muse is hidden, the glory underneath, and for whom everything is propelled, created, while the model perhaps gathers an arrogance from the attention. It's an odd thing, this model/muse.

Perhaps the one is like Helios, who drives the sun across the sky each day; the other like magnificent Apollo, the ancient Greek God of Light. Rarely have the model and the muse been the same man. Though sometimes I mix up images of both: hopefully, it's cleverly done and goes undetected. I write about one as a model for the other's imagination, and pleasure.

I would never consider a serious relationship with a man who's a model, though I might with a muse. But I stay away from my muses. It's easier.

Or so I surmise: I haven't landed anywhere in the last 10 years, since my marriage ended. But there've been some wonderful men who've inspired me greatly; and I've had perhaps one or two wild rides with fascinating models.