Green Eyed Muse

a seaside cliche.....

2009-09-21T10:35:00.001-07:00

a seaside cliche.....
Originally uploaded by fitzhughfella

one day soon, i'll load 35mm film into my Holga.

bla

2009-09-21T10:32:00.001-07:00

bla
Originally uploaded by Angélica Vis

i love this girl's work. and her (various) haircut(s).

{near.to.you}

2009-09-21T10:29:00.001-07:00

{near.to.you}
Originally uploaded by miliana.

dreamy.

losing focus

2009-09-21T10:28:00.001-07:00

losing focus
Originally uploaded by Katherine Elizabeth

i want the space to craft such photos. . . one day.

this is the kind of loveliness i chase every day. . .

2009-09-21T10:10:00.001-07:00

.
Originally uploaded by whateveryou...

i rarely capture it this beautifully inside of a studio.
natural light is so wonderful.

the tones in this are so lovely.

2009-09-21T10:09:00.001-07:00

Originally uploaded by i.Anton

i desperately want to master producing colors like these. . .

My Love Goes Free

2008-05-25T08:33:00.001-07:00

My Love Goes Free
Originally uploaded by amanda pulley

rapture is this photo. i just adore it.

2007-12-16T19:24:00.000-08:00

attention: readers!!

This blog has moved to a new address:

greeneyedmuse.wordpress.com

ENJOY!

My Flickr Account: Artsy Photos to Your Heart's Content!

2007-12-10T13:55:00.000-08:00

To see most of my work with the old Canon AE-1, follow this link.

(I'm working on incorporating it into this blog-space more seemlessly...)

seeing.

2007-12-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

"Seeing."

Here, the frost-lined furs

break out over the wet, orange

papier-mâché leaf-lined sidewalk.

The white crystals settle along

the Vena Cava of magnolia leaves,

like tobacco in a rolling paper.

These things, i had never seen

until my young adulthood:

like the soot-black of wet bark.

"Orange Blossoms"

2007-11-26T17:53:00.000-08:00

Orange Blossoms

“A typical orange tree carries about 100,000 pollinated blossoms, each of which is a potential orange, complete with the seeds that are potential trees. But in the course of a season, only about 500 oranges are actually produced. The tree determines which ones make the cut…” -Dan Cray, Time Magazine, Oct.2007

They rest, like gleaming starfish, mouthing light-
bulbs, fringed in gold-faced sticky fillae,
expectant. Clustered like stars on the forked
trunk, among the ovate, bottom-heavy
leaves, dark green, with crenulated margins:
scalloped like a cloud, or doily. Petals
joined, nested like ivory measuring
spoons: tablespoon, teaspoon, one-half, one-quarter.
One-hundred thousand of you, pollinated,
palming life. The decision has come: wet,
smooth, black bark sheds the “not viable”—the ones
with insufficient light, or hosts to moths’
homes. Luminescent petals slide to the ground:
the ill-begotten, eleven-week blood
pulp of a pitiless mother tree.

Arachne's Child

2007-11-26T17:41:00.000-08:00

This poem was inspired by the story of Lakshmi Tatma.

Arachne’s Child

Arache’s child, a god-head
in her own village—the more arms
and legs the more wealth,
what is it they cultivate, anyway?

Eight teeth show in her splitting laughter,
Ember-curls around her gold-pierced ears.
Her strong hands clapping, grasping air,
dancing, with her polished black eyes.
She is a beauty, by any standard. The hairs
whisp between temple and white-collared
dress. She is happy, in the way children are happy.

The BBC news-anchor is sober-voiced,
camera panning from her joy-face
downward, the “parasitic twin” they call it—
four additional atrophied limbs dangle
from a truncated, headless body.
The eight-legged one, the girl-spider.
She carries a joined spinal chord,
perhaps spare lungs between all
those legs. Arachne’s child,
with a womb-wrought parasite.
The question is whether beauty will live.

For My Brother

2007-11-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

For My Brother
(a ghost villanelle)

What we are is not so different, you
and I. Your russet hair, deep doe-eyes glide
gently across the world, the trees, the sky.

Yours track, mine quivering across the lines
of pen to paper, or stitches fingers slide.
What we are is not so different, you

and I. Steady-handed tracers: moved, high
by the intricacies of our art, slid
gently across the world, the trees, the sky

by palpable passion. The names fly
from my lips, yours: Latinate conifers spied.
What we are is not so different, you

remind me, platinum fletching putty
poised on the arrow’s shaft, then the vein laid
gently across the world, the trees, the sky.

Fletching is not unlike sewing, shooting
not unlike writing: pinning down to look:
what we are is not so different, you and I,
beings born to the world, the trees, the sky.

The Kitten

2007-11-26T17:30:00.000-08:00

The Kitten

She coos like a bird to you
and your answer is a cocked head
and golden eyes

trained on her warm and climbing body.
Again and again
she sings without opening her mouth.

You are not her father.
Neither of you have met a bird,
not really,

just seen them, suspended among leaves
in the hornbeam, through the wrinkled
old glass of our window.

But she calls their call to you
and you listen.
All children must make the same song.

"You Are"

2007-11-26T17:26:00.000-08:00

"You Are" (an unfinished poem,dating from May)

You are of sacred fluids.
The only landscape with which
I could replace her cool, damp one
is yours—balmy. The shade seems
rarer here, without the rails
of skyscrapers or brush of willows
to hide your face
so I crawl where I am known,
beneath your warm belly to lie
pressed and oddly free. I know
its smell, contours, and the inexplicable
kindness of your eyes, the blue they take on
in semi-darkness,
the blessed lashes.
And I find no need to declare
our love to a wider world.
I only scale your shifting body,
while you do the same,
then grow quiet and still again.
Look directly and speak to me.
I left her broad walkways
only for the tightness of your arms.

In case you're not tuned in, you should be!

2007-11-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

NPR presents whole concerts as mp3 files on their website: http://media.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15681603.

Most of the tapings occur at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. and are definitely worth listening too!

The Trees

2007-11-15T20:24:00.000-08:00

"The Trees"

The rain stains their gathered thighs
charcoal-black, like any number of
dryads lying back on one another,
grown as one, to wear fire-hair.

November and the trees look
more like balding men with
silvered orange mutton-chops.
Someone pasted yellowed leaves

and lamplight to the sidewalks.
Such joy to find my childhood--
browned grass and conifers--
replaced with Virginian opulence.

making the news...

2007-11-11T22:07:00.001-08:00

(University of Mary Washington senior Whitney Roberts holds a sign at a unity march held after a racially insensitive poster and comments created a stir on campus.)

featured in The Free Lance-Star, on Nov.10, 2007.
Here is the article: http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/112007/11102007/332323

more autumn...

2007-11-05T20:13:00.001-08:00

Autumn, through the lens.

2007-11-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

"The Name" by Robert Wrigley

2007-11-04T15:00:00.001-08:00

The last poem in his 1999 volume, "Reign of Snakes."

I'm in the midst of writing a lyric sequence...

2007-11-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

and I wanted to post rough drafts of what (I think) will be the first two poems of the sequence...

"The First Miscarriage"

Where were you, when it happened?
I imagine it as it could not have been:
clean, cool, white tiled floor in "the apartment."
A chest-high mirror, dim light.
Daddy was at school-- third period,
a pickle-jar's dented gold top, lidding formaldehyde
and squid.
black-haired, thin daddy.

Your body erupting in a smear:
a thing no longer than the distance
from knuckle to joint, on your first finger
breaking off, pouring out, jellied ear-knobs,
eye-spots, doughy hands, a curled tail.

not unlike Daddy's squid-jar. Swimming,
grief pasted to your brow in streaks of blonde,
twisting mouth, rolling eyes.
Will we? Can I?

I don't know
who came to get you. (Does it matter?)
I can't see the glassy hospital's landscaped islands:
a parking lot without mirages, too late for daffodils,
dogwoods, streaked and open-faced pansies.

Too soon for black-naveled sunflowers,
too soon for me, your June baby.

____________________________________________________________

"Asthma"

the metal canister and mouthpiece--
one green, one yellow, crooked like the periscope
of a submarine:
one to keep you from having an attack.
one to make it stop.
you always pushed your breath out,
wheezed it in, held, and shook
the air from your lungs, the hair from your neck.

epinephrine, albuterol, caffeine,
prednisone,
hydrocortisone:

the purse to carry your glass inhaler through college.
tiny sod-squares of rash on a five year-old's back.

Don't lay in the grass, baby.
You'll get sick.

"Dune Flower" (a ghost sonnet)

2007-10-29T17:47:00.001-07:00

"dune flower"

I was enticed: your dark and stylish eyes
amongst all that white, those brambles,
dollar weeds. Like the brazen sister of
the Black-Eyed Susans in my Grandmother's
front garden, you rage, even in the frame
of ocean blue and salty mother-air. Splinters,
prickers, sea-oats. To all these Southern Belles
you dance flamenco, a one-act filler play,
a jewel hushed-up. Your skirts spread around
the gaping black fuzz, truncated and fringed,
sinful pink-orange, and yellow. Each petal
seems a slice of fabric, a cut of fruit,
to be stitched up, to cover you, like so
much lace piled up over brown legs.

quatrains in trimeter.

2007-10-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

These are also fresh, and strange:

"The Abbey"

Sweet white Elizabeth:
laid flat, bone-bare, regal,
in Westminster Abbey,
(on my street.) I'm tight-lipped,

swaying in the draft below
dizzy rose windows, scared,
feeling round as they, but
colorless. The sun shone

on me for the first time
in months. Flaring nostrils
and wet eyes, silent chanting:
let the bastard child

swing free from my unchaste,
unbloodied hips. give me
a box of shame, a chance.
i'll tell myself i carry

the christ child. And you'll tell
me, in no uncertain
terms, that i have sinned.
Oh, how I suffer for it.

"Afternoon at the Chemist"

Half drunk with fear, the scarf
comes sliding down my throat.
Burst in, scour, feel sick
in line. Ten pounds, I race

to my flat, around a
corner. You can't say, "I
gotta piss." here, I think.
Piss is drunk. I'm dying.

Five floors in the lift. Slow,
then ding, then running, teal
walls give way to pale yellow.
Five minutes, two lines. We're

safe, it tells me. I call,
you wake. It's eight a.m.
in The States. Hysterical,
I tell you all. Strangely,

you thank me for wanting
to know. You are too small,
child, to have one. You can't
live in the ebb and flow.

Even that has left you,
your own body saying
it's final "no." Lovie
eat your mash, and more.

The Body Sequence

2007-10-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

These are a bit controversial. And I have literally written them in the last half-hour. So, here they are, rough and (not) ready:

"To my ribcage"

Ribs resting like fallow fields,
furrowed, dusty roads, silt-colored.
I know, you think I choose this,
but I don't. Eve stole the fruit
that I cannot eat. I do not know
why she turned from me
and said, starve this one,
so she doesn't bleed.
Make her body blind to the changing
moon, her mind deaf to the tide.
If she lives, it will be because
she wills it, in the end, (instead
of allowing the fields to fallow.)

"to my breasts"

not so round, peaked, tired
hungry for nothing and no one
hungers them. the kitten only
kneading at the sound of a tiny
motor, presses up close,
chooses you, milk white, pink
planets of slow growth.
a source of shame, a loss,
unknown, above the fields,
the plane, the crater, and on.

"to my pelvis"

french weeds lie low and tangled
with the ground, burnt, offered
as crumbling ash in wiry columns.
i want to know, why don't you
bloom like lovely wisteria?
why don't you tumble up a trellis,
or sigh, carrying your petaled heads
toward the sunshine?
lay low, you french weeds, under
a broken tree. indecent.

"to my thighs"

symbols of the eroding planet,
turning the color of dunes in mid-winter,
shrinking, rolling back, sucked under
a crumbling fence and nothing
of your once-high luster.
the houses will go under in tiny tides.
you don't notice the gentle wane,
the lack of breadth, the emptying
pant leg. the dunes don't choose
to shrink away. the dunes aren't angry.
only me, wishing they were more powerful,
wishing they looked "enough" to bear children.

more photos from the olden camera.

2007-10-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

Photos from the Canon A-1: my first roll, room to grow.

2007-10-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

"Stay Purdy"

2007-10-23T13:16:00.001-07:00

an original, fresh from my mouth...

Audre Lorde!

2007-09-30T15:46:00.001-07:00

A visit to Busboys and Poets yielded a new book and some inspiration...

adrienne rich

2007-09-28T13:40:00.001-07:00

the first three of adrienne rich's 21 Love Poems

London Street Fashion.

2007-09-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest things I miss about London, is the street fashion...
view photos by area of the city here.

"Dionysian Body"

2007-09-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

spontaneously written a half-hour ago, if that...

"Dionysian Body"

Milk-pale round balls of dough
in the half-light from the kitchen,
kneading and rolling them, the kitten
follows my fingers and necklace

swaying. The milk slides out into flushed
imprisoned sand, two dunes paired,
patched with dollar-weeds curled black,
as if by fire. Your calves bowing in

like the vase's neck, in the streetlight,
filtered through a white sheet
we hung as a curtain, and our cemented
hornbeam tree protecting us from bar-drifters.

communal creative energy!

2007-09-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, I had the privilege to see two of my favorite bands (The Rosebuds, and The National) in concert together at The 9.30 Club in Washington, DC. A unique thing happened to me at this show, I fed off of the energy of the musicians so much so, that I began to spontaneously write poetry during their performance. And I was down front, literally, leaning against the stage with my notebook and pen, scribbling in the stage lights. This is a video of part of their performance below, and also a picture of what I wrote down (mirror-image encrypted)... The experience of a band's performance, I have often felt, is akin to a religious experience, or creative orgy in some way. Everyone is eerily shouting the same words, which they have practiced in their cars, bathrooms, or other intimate domestic spaces--pumping their fists, tapping their toes, nodding their heads in rhythm. And the band is leading the procession. And everyone is usually getting drunk, as well... So, I also had the thought bubble that the experience of a really profound live music performance must have been what a medieval Mead Hall felt like, plus armor and the imminent threat of death. But I will blog more about that on my (strictly!) academic blogsite: Intertextuality (http://thenameofthegameisintertextuality.umwblogs.org/).

...and here is a direct transcription of some of the poetry i began seeding at the concert...

"the cancer"

is spun fruit, tendrils spinning
a fine overflow of borders,
the aggressive webbing of seedlings,
misshapen and hungry
multiply and harden, metastasize,
grow up and give birth
in the time it takes to bat an eye
for you.

and i don't know the boy,
sweater vest, greek name, love
of answers and archeology,
but i nearly see
his fearful eyes, encircling center
like that of ink black
flowers, universe of ache,
the death-touch
assaulting his mother.

<>

walk off the stage
to let the thing play itself,
a tuning fork,
heart bursting.

<>

"Body"

i learned to count the bridges
down the Thames
like my own ribs:
spread fingers, running
out to sea.

a hand across my stomach
produces goose-flesh
like the pebbles
on Brighton beach.

wiry grass on white
chalk cliffs,
London my navel.

<>

In My Craft or Sullen Art

2007-09-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

A bit of how I feel tonight is best expressed by the poet Dylan Thomas:

"In My Craft or Sullen Art"

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

- Dylan Thomas, 1946

"A Swim in Co. Wicklow" by Derek Mahon

2007-08-30T19:21:00.001-07:00

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/42

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Mahon

cheers to having a notebook around all the time.

2007-08-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO SCHOOL! Which means that my life consists of having pen and paper in my holster nearly 100% of my waking hours. So, some inspiration struck between classes yesterday). So, here are the unvarnished results. I know that I always preface these with DRAFT! DRAFT! NOT THE FINAL PRODUCT! But truly, the crafting of poems takes time, energy, countless revisiting...but the energy, what I want to record, is in this first AHA!

Adrienne Rich says it beautifully:
"poetry can occur as a fierce, precarious charge in the imagination,
or an almost physical wave of desire[...]as something written down,
that remains, so regardless of circumstance
you can turn back to that fierce charge, that desire."

"White Whiskers"

I lift your rumpled, cast off
skin from the bamboo-inspired
rug, to put it on-- V-neck
with a hanging hem, hot-sauce stain
and fading smell of smoke and soap.

You're asleep already, so I feed
the cat and watch her lick
her pink-and-black nose, stroke paws,
and rub the tufts behind her ears.

We crack open a book of poems
I need to have read tomorrow,
and she curls, sighs
against the place where an ovary
hides inside my abdomen.

I can't fault you for sleeping.
It's not insensitive, or avoidant;
it's just the tremendous pause between breath,
the kind of quiet when you listen too close,
that maddens me, until I see
your rising chest, a beacon.

I think of him, knowing it tears
at you. Even in sleep, you turn
and grunt, stirring the pages
of a book, your bedfellow.

I see in white whiskers
sighing on your t-shirt sleeve,
white hair on the operating table.

"Growth"

Is it me, or this place
that has lost a bit of sanctity,
of joy? Crushed underfoot
in the teeming streets of faces
unfamiliar and younger than mine:
whatever it is that the sapling holds
in the moment of breaking forth,
can continue even on this uprooted tree.

The message has not found its way
to the top.

heritage. (my father's family)

2007-08-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

metaphors springing up everywhere!

2007-08-29T13:14:00.001-07:00

A FEW DAYS INTO CLASS, AND MY READINGS are already sending off streamers of ideas in every direction! This is what I love about school. A few interesting potential metaphors have popped up, which I will mention here. Also, expect some new original poem fragments, a reading or two, and a book review in the near future...

FIRST: The picture above is from the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, which I have visited. I have even seen this tomb. But, what brought me to this image was a the love-story of Heloïse and Pierre Abélard, a Medieval philosopher, which my Classics professor glided over today. It has tragedy, scholarship, violence...the works. I am thinking of writing a voice-poem in the persona of Heloïse, or perhaps their son...stay tuned! The picture is of their tomb, or rather "memorial"...all comes full circle!

SECONDLY: I was reintroduced to the idea of a "palimpsest" manuscript...and am finding it more fascinating than ever. The OED has this to say:

Palimpsest:
A. n.
1. Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. Obs.
2. a. A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing. Cf. sense B. 1.
b. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.
3. A monumental brass plate turned and re-engraved on the reverse side. Cf. A. 2. Obs.
4. Physical Geogr. and Geol. A structure characterized by superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods.

THIRDLY:
check this phrase, from an introduction to Beowulf:
hapax legomena-- what linguists call words recorded only once in a language. Beowulf = wordsmith.

<><><><>
Okay! Enough for now!

freed verse?

2007-08-26T21:14:00.000-07:00

SO, SORRY, I KNOW...I haven't been here lately. Actually, in quite some time. I have photos to share, and poem(s)...I just got busy, and got down, and let worry knock me off my creative game. But, I'm back! My senior year of college starts TOMORROW...and I feel, well, incredibly out-of-place/ elated/ nervous/ giddy/ worried about it. It is much harder to adjust back to school, after a semester abroad, than I ever imagined (perhaps it is that my city of 12 million has shrunk back to a campus of 5,000?). Anyway, I will blog-o-generate a poem. Now. In real time. Just to bare my chest and tell my demons, ha! So here it goes: whatever I am thinking of now:

I bought a new notebook
of recycled paper
and left it
out, in the rain,
and thought about how the old
me would never do
that sort of thing.

I spent all night
writng my name on twenty-some-odd inside flaps,
and trying to recall the name
of the High Street that she was probably on
in the 1970's, leggy blonde,
in a new pair of Feragammo boots(!)

What a tiny tragedy
are the blurring blue lines,
and the untraceable thing
that goes with Oxford Circus,
like we were going to The Social
for a drink.

I never once shopped on High Street.

pictographic.

2007-08-18T20:01:00.001-07:00

"Aftermath" by Claudia Emerson

2007-08-18T19:34:00.001-07:00

"Aftermath" by Claudia Emerson

"Eurydice" by H.D.

2007-08-16T17:45:00.001-07:00

Because one can never hear too much of H.D....one of her poems. Also, I apologize for (already) falling behind on my poem-a-day posts. Perhaps late summer was not the proper time to start this? Alas, I'm trying!

"Landscape with Self-portrait" by Howard Nemerov

2007-08-16T17:43:00.001-07:00

"Landscape with Self-portrait" by Howard Nemerov

archives(!)

2007-08-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Dowser

I tore three pages
from the middle of March’s
Our State.
He was there: grey newsboy cap, down over
a fat, pink worm of a pouting
lower lip.
Born in 1920,
the dowser—water witch—
carried the sir name Scarlett
to Orange County.

He holds the hard kernel stick
loosely between his talk of God
and sparrows.
Before “Arthur Wrightus” he could
say how far down
the water is.
Now, he can only say where
to dig the well,
with a dogwood, hickory, maple,
peach or wild cherry switch,
a black leather hand and pink palm.
I can hear him when he says
he’s tar heel people.

The Corner of Cherry Street and Main in Marion

He says they are purple martins
dipping in and out of gourds
on the lawn edge, where we
found a rat snake at the cellar-mouth,
rotting pecans in greenest grass,
the wind chimes, and two
strawberry shortcake tricycles in the shed.

There is the flat-topped tin
carport, the out-of-place gym bar,
the out-of-use clothesline,
the well-kept hedge backing up
to a grass alley, two dirt
tracks beaten in by years
of yellow cars.

There are my grandmother’s pickling
jars, and the bird bath near the gourds,
and the foam always at the edge,
and the sweet gum balls
we pretended were spiny cherries
or small planets, suspended
around the stump that is always home plate.

There are the blue glass bottles
aligned at the kitchen window,
and the woman who adopted this house
and all of us, stands elbow-deep
in soap and water, by the thin-crusted
pie on the cooling rack.

Bathroom in the Isle of Palms Beach House

The place
where Moma stands,
naked back and ashen hair,
to Aunt Izzy.

And speaks of her children’s births
as personality indicators:
how he
didn’t breathe
and how, instead, she screamed:
swinging, red, and angry.

Talk of who has died,
while she’s slipping green straps up,
one petite hand to shoulder
at a time.

And from the doorway,
the mirror revealed to me only
the blue spackled sky.

Introducing: Delilah, the mannequin, and the late-summer Crafted Collection!!

2007-08-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

a segment of "Hilda's Book" by Ezra Pound

2007-08-13T17:05:00.001-07:00

a segment of "Hilda's Book" by Ezra Pound

A Poem, A Day! Starting with "Matins" by Louise Gluck.

2007-08-12T16:32:00.001-07:00

I am beginning a blog segment entitled "A poem a day" (I know, original...). I am going to post my reading of a poem I enjoy here everyday for your enjoyment!

An interesting question, indeed, from CloudyDayArt.com...

2007-08-08T18:19:00.001-07:00

Check out this link:

http://www.cloudydayart.com/2007/06/02/has-our-constant-online-connection-broken-our-connection-to-creativity/

Diane Arbus' Photographs: Americana and Suicide

2007-08-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

IT IS NOT THAT THE LIKES OF DIANE ARBUS NEEDS MY ENDORSEMENT to cement her place among the most respected and innovative "fine art" photographers in American history... It's just that I am curious about her. This is the best website presentation of some of her photos that I have found, and also the one where the above photo was found: http://www.duvekot.ca/eliane/archives/diane_arbus.jpg.

Arbus' photos enter in Sontag's book, which I blogged about previously, in the chapter discussing the uniquely American vantage on the art of photography. Sontag previously declared photography a uniquely "democratic" artform, which seems to predispose it to the American sensibility, which she sums up as "the American partiality to myths of redemption and damnation, [which] remains one of the most energizing, most seductive aspects of our national culture." ("On Photography" pg.48)

Arbus as Photographer Americana presents the idea that America is a sort of orgy of freaks, and the photographer is a new anthropologist. If you bring that concept of America into play with certain inherited national values, such as Puritanical ideals and the mythology of The Self-made Man, America does seem obsessed with oddities, with "redemption" and "damnation." What to make of all of this, is beyond me. What I enjoy about the exercise, is the chance to read a analysis of some piece of my own artistic inheritance. I feel unable to do what Sontag is doing, that is to shed my cultural identity and step outside of it, in order to have a better look.

In Arbus' own words, she admitted to having a fascination with "freaks":
"Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

I had an interesting conversation with one of my professors a couple of weeks ago, a piece of which is also called to mind here. He and I were discussing my semester in London, and began to compare experiences as Americans in England. Both of us came up with the impression of being the "Restless Yank" according to our British counterparts. There is something in the American culture that must constantly stir the pot, push the envelope, question...

Secondly, Sontag mentions about Arbus one fact which makes her, in our collective consciousness, a tortured Romantic of sorts: she killed herself. Sontag writes, "...as with Sylvia Plath, the attention her work has attracted since her death is of another order--a kind of apotheosis. The fact of her suicide seems to guarantee that her work is sincere, not voyeuristic, that it is compassionate, not cold. Her suicide also seems to make the photographs more devastating, as if it proved that the photographs to have been dangerous to her."(39). Following this "lead" I found mention of a work called "The Journalist and The Murderer" by Janet Malcom:

which I will have to track down and peruse. What creates this "destructive" relationship between artist and subject/art? I know that it is mimetic, in my own experience, of a certain kind of obsessive love, which is the unique product of certain persons entering into a relationship with each other. I am just fascinated by the process, and by our imaginings about it...

"Daffodil"

2007-08-08T16:13:00.001-07:00

Hey, look what I can do! Imeem.com lets me upload recordings of me reading my poems, and post them to my blog!

Sontag, iPhones, and Photographs.

2007-08-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'VE BEEN READING A LOT OF INTERESTING things lately which are really stirring the pot between my ears. Most recently, it has been (yet another!) Susan Sontag essay that is striking me profoundly. On Photography is the 1977 collection of essays which Sontag herself says "started with one essay--about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images; but the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex and suggestive they became." I, too, feel that photographs are complex and suggestive. I feel this way about 'art' at large, in all of its forms, but--because of my nature--i am most perplexed and vested in the aesthetic and moral dilemmas posed by those artforms which i participate most fully in. Photography would, obviously, be one of them. So, I am just beginning the book, but already the first essay has my head spinning with the implications of Sontag's thought trails...especially if brought up to date. She wrote the book thirty years ago. Take this passage, for example:

"Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them."

Now, begin thinking of the implications of this paragraph alone, if we apply Sontag's complex understanding of the way in which photos "package" the world and "invite packaging," in turn, to the most up-to-date technology in such packaging:

Two major realizations hit me while reading and thinking about this bit of philosophy:
1. I realized suddenly, instantaneously, that I scarcely even regard photos as physical objects. I, like most of the modern world, deal in digital space. "Space" being a complicated word to use here because there is not much physical space required, as the iphone testifies. For me, photos do not age and brown and crease; they can still be lost. But, I can have them endlessly at my fingertips, and their modified versions too are endless. I already use two types of software to modify photos, by virtue of the fact that I have access to both a Mac and PC all the time. And this software is FREE. I become my own editor, The autonomy, and what Sontag later describes as the "democratic" property of photography is heightened immensely by this technology.
2. The photos may be reproduced anywhere. This is something that struck me as profound months ago, when I was in Paris, at the Musee d'Orsay, watching an exhibit of Samuel Becket's works, including film pieces. I thought briefly, as I was taking my usual moleskin notes on the pieces i found particularly inspiring, that it would be cool to find one of these clips on YouTube and send it to a friend, so they could share the experience. BAM. My friend was back in Virginia. I was in Paris. And yet, I could bring her to that gallery space with me, in a sense, because Beckett's medium has now become portable and reproducible, in the fullest sense. The moral dilemma struck me as well: if this piece of artwork is infinitely reproducible, then, where does its integrity lie? I am no longer a museum-goer looking at a rembrandt which only exists in one copy. It's not a one-to-one correspondence.

Where is the art?

Or, where isn't the art?

2007-08-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

"Moma"

Laced tributaries formed
a watershed of dark
hair, hung like thread
at the base of a loom,
down my back.

Your short, papery fingers
pushed the blonde from your face
with nails like clean plates, encircled
by skin pulled back like fins
on the belly of a fish.

The foggy bathroom smelled of lemon.
The juice ran slick and clouded
with distended, lucent-yellow fibers
squeezed from a plastic bottle
you kept in the fridge.

My wavy, wet hair based,
and sent to play in the yard
by your Lowcountry voice,
I would swing between the willow
and sugary-sweet mimosas,

until the sun
offered enough gold
to wreathe it, like yours.

2007-08-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

"Carolyn Brown Green"

I.
I would perch on the deep green, marble counter, while
she placed the sparkling birds or delicate, round pearls,
first in one ear, then the other,
while she told me that the thing about pearls
is the more you wear them, the shinier they get.
I pressed my fingers until they formed indentations,
catching the clasp at the nape of her neck.
She asked me to, because her knuckles already buldged
like Cypress "knees" above the swamp;
besides, her nails were freshly done geranium-pink.

II.
Her maried initials were threaded through the pillow shams
of a canopy bed: elaborate soft white linen and lace, as pristinely sharp-cornered
as the collars on his shirts for nearly fifty years.

Next to the dresser, she, as a young woman, looked
back at herself, from a bone-china oval frame
chased in painted bluebells and forget-me-nots.
Her eyes were taut at the corners, her teeth
shining to match a double row of pearls
at the hollow of her throat, over the "v" of
branching collar-bones above a pale dress.
I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

The photo must have dated from her Coker College years
of high-wasted, belted skirts, and no curlers allowed at dinner.
She had been happy and had a "steady" then,
but grandaddy wouldn't leave her alone until she was his.

In a frame beside it, his big, pale eyes caught the light
beneath a heavy brow and a Citadel crew-cut.
Though they were no longer married by then, she still
bought him clothes at Christmas, and answered when he called
to ask what she was cooking.

III.
She would pull on the jacket to her cornflower-blue suit
when she was ready, and stick her feet,
into two different shoes, lifting the crease
of her pant leg, for a sidelong view,
always choosing some pair of less-comfortable, more-beautiful
leather heels, no matter where we were going.

She talked about Tokyo and Paris as though it was still the 1950's
and her wordliness could never be outdated.
She always said "Italian" as though it were "Eye-talian,"
affecting an accent though she was from "right there in Trio."
Wherever we went, people told her she was beautiful,
and I was beautiful, and so lucky to look like her.

I asked her how come she was a tomboy when she was younger,
and she said it was cause she wanted to be like her brother, Wendell.
And I asked her, after the divorce, why she didn't change her name,
and she said it was because Green was a nicer color.

<><><><><><>
(though this poem is based on the relationship I have with my grandmother, much of it has been fabricated or altered in some way to serve the poem, largely because of the creative direction of my creative writing class peers.)

carolina photos

2007-08-01T19:02:00.001-07:00

(just an update)

2007-08-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

as soon as a) my wi-fi gets up and running again, or b) i find the time to haul my laptop elsewhere, i will post much more creative writing stuff from recent weeks!

thanks for the patience...

visiting Home...

2007-08-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

GREETINGS, DEDICATED READER(S). So, I've been doing some thinking...and this is going to be jumbled. Because, I don't know exactly what I've been thinking about, only that I am about to start my senior year of college, work is slow and summer school is over. I find myself washed ashore in my college town virtually devoid of my friends (who have all scampered home for a few weeks' vacation, or work uncomplimentary hours to my own). So! I have had occasion for thinking. Ooooh.

Firstly, I have been visited by a few extravagant and kind gestures from the universe lately. I won't mention anything too specific, since the persons who supplied these actions need not be made starlets from my blog-o-praise. ha!

One of the incidences, though, does bear repeating: I had occasion to visit my hometown over the weekend, for a friend's wedding. While there, I dragged my boyfriend to see my childhood home. I lived there from my second birthday until I was fourteen years old; and the house was designed by my mother specifically for our family. I haven't been back in a few years. While there, Boyfriend and I were creeping around to the backyard for a peek, when the current owner of the house emerged, very wary of us. (In my defense, I had every intention of knocking once I established that there was in fact someone home!) A lovely barefoot woman with chin-length silver hair, pulled back from her face with a clip, demanded that we tell her our business in her backyard...my answer? "Hi. Sorry to bother you, but, I'm the little girl who grew up in this house."

We talked for an hour. The willow is bigger than the house, the mimosa is gone from the backyard, and the bradford pear from the front, black-eyed susans run along the new rought-iron and red-brick fence, caging a lab-mix and a basset hound. They took down the wallpaper in my brother's room, redid the master bath, kept my pink walls, closed off the upstairs and don't run the AC up there (oh the mold, was my mother's response later). The backporch was extended with a deck onto the garden, and an elaborate trellis of vines where our playhouse had been; the chimney sweeps still live in the chimney, and the robins in the back ferns. She called the vines "creepers" and said they don't flower, so that rules out trumpet flowers or 'yella jasmine' (the state flower). When we left she said "Ya'll come back now, hear?" and I was surprised that people still say that.

When we couldn't stand the sweat or bugs anymore, I climbed in the driver's seat of my car, which now felt like an oven, and drove around the neighborhood, breaking for the corn patch, bike paths, ditches, fields, and the house with the-asian-family-who-owned-Shoney's and (still) have a huge, vintage Big Boy statue in their backyard, along the way. It was some 7 hours later, when we were in the car on the way back to VA, that I turned to Mark and said, "I wanted a moment to myself at the house, you know?" He said he could tell, that after I was finished playing 20,000 questions about the trees and birds, I had wanted to just be there for a little while, maybe look at the grass, or the porch floors, or the curves of the railings. I had wanted a switch from my willow, I had wanted to run my hand over the basketball hoop.

I know that I am unusually sentimental, attentive to detail, and I come from a family overgrown with the urge to tell stories, impart memories, sanctify places... but, we all have that to a certain degree. I waited a day to call my mother, sure I would cry. And I nearly did. That much-changed house, in that dried up and dying town (i was overwhelmed by the number of vacant buildings), still calls to me after a childhood hell-bent on getting out. The taste of it has lingered with me for a few days now, making my coffee sweeter, my books richer, my thoughts softer. I put myself to sleep with a virtual tour of the house as I knew it. I made some peace with leaving that place, and rekindled a yearning for those roots, at once. These things are invaluable when I, and most of my peers, stand at a juncture, a precipice, a crossing, a change, and peer over. There's always a trail of breadcrumbs back, guys.

The newest in refurbished t-shirt designs!

2007-07-26T16:40:00.001-07:00

The inspiration for these designs came, in part, from a book entitled Generation T by Megan Nicolay...check her stuff out on the web at Generation-T.com!

update on the short-story conundrum: I wrote one that I might actually like!

2007-07-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

Charles and Amanda: thanks for the encouragement on tackling short stories. I am finding them a nice change of pace, after all...though I find I have to write pages of backstory before I know where the plot is going and can actually start my story. I am cranking out one-a-day for my summer class, and thought I would share what I consider to be my first successful (and incredibly encouraging) draft! Happy reading!

Jigai

I remember reading once that on receiving news of a death, one of the Presidents just held onto the receiver of the Oval Office phone for a long time, not hanging it up. It was like that. Eons of the even, deep tone on the other end. The softening of the blue glow from the cell-phone face. The sound broken off at some point by the whirling, pummeling edge of sleep. I awoke to the mustard-yellow flowers, cupping turquoise circles on the quilt. And then, the smothering descent of my memory.

Medium blue pulmonary, slipping down the page before me like a river. I followed it, eyes feeling the page for a cluster of arteries that marked highway nine. Another three hours, at least. I had already asked him if his Grandad’s funeral in Florida is the only one he’d ever been to. No, he’d said; there’d been six or seven, maybe. And black suits didn’t make him think of funerals. Pre-professional men had to wear black suits at plenty of other occasions.

I closed my eyes on the dusty heat, pressing the map against my chest, pretending that the map’s lines were mine, veins and arteries pulled to the surface like shipwrecks, held by a web of cranes. This time last year I was in Tokyo, on my way to Beijing, turning twenty and having my first panic attack in the airport. Walking made me dizzy so I lay down across white chairs, anchored to the white floor, an ivory relief complete with white wall. Laura brought me dim-sum and spicy nuts, which I didn’t eat.

That’s how I learned about jigai. Laura had bought an illustrated history of Japan from the English bookstore, along with rice-paper paintings for her live-in girlfriend. The descriptions had that tone I savored so much—the childish, direct explanations, and inverted sentence-structure. Laura read them to me, while I lay with the open end of a brown paper bag to my face, using my breaths to crumple it.

Ritual suicide, the book had called it. Women were given the twin attributes of being unable to bear pain (Laura and I had sniggered at that.) and being prone to solitude. They were expected, unlike the men who partnered to flay one another at the stomach, to use a six-inch knife to undo the jugular vein in themselves. This method—jigai—provided minimum disfiguration to the pallor and grace of the aristocrats, and saved them from dishonor in the form of rape by a conquering army.

When my eyes opened again, we were pulling off the interstate.

“Where are we?”

“Oh, about to Cedar Rapids,” he said, “we need gas.”

I sat up, wiping under my eyes and stretching the skin to the corners, pulling my pointer finger back to observe the black smudges of mascara.

“You want anything, baby? A coke or something?”

“Yeah, a coke’s fine.” I felt my limbs were heavy, and doubted I’d drink anything. Already, I felt the bile rising again. I thought about a lecture I’d been to on the morose melancholy of the Romantics, and tuberculosis. 160 miles to Winnsboro.

I imagined Grandpa, with his pleated pants, staggering out to the brick walk; I could see the dappled sunshine in his drive, the way it would layer over the sunspots and age-spots folded into his face over the years. Last time I was there, he had made a diagram, taping her medicines to a piece of foamboard, with labels…Zoloft, Diatrepamin, Seratraline, Chloranopam…pink, white, gel, powdery, indented or carved with tiny characters, they stuck on like pinned insects. (To the right, in parenthesis, the number of times daily they must be swallowed.) He’d started turning her plate, so she’d notice all her food, and had taken her white Chrysler away by then.

How could I go bravely into that dark night now? She used no knife, just the pink ceramic bathtub put in by his first wife, and too many pills. If I must go like that, I will tie down my thighs to my shins and face away from the door first. I wouldn’t want to be found wearing the contorted mask of death.

two shirts I recently hand-crafted!

2007-07-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

the short story blahs...

2007-07-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

FICTION WRITING IS WHAT I THOUGHT I wanted to do when i grew up. But, college came, and my dreams of writing semi-biographical novels went under with the tide, and I started eating, sleeping, breathing poetry. I blame my professors. Now, senior year of college, i find myself back in the driver's seat of short-stories. And they seem to be crashing and burning. I know that short story is kind of the way in which we live our lives--anecdotes, flashbacks, an afternoon filled to the brim with associations and memories melds into a life lesson or tacit metaphor...
It's just that I don't know how! I am becoming used to the peculiar agony of revising poems...revisiting every word a thousand times, losing sleep over the inclusion or exclusion of a certain image...did i close the door well enough? Does the reader get it? Did i bang him/her over the head with it? Does it even make sense?
This, I understand. Short story? Like, characters and dialog and description and stuff!? Like WHOLE SENTENCES? Parameters...rules...pagessssss? Somewhere along the line in the last five years, I have forgotten what it is to write a short story. So, I end up doing what I'm doing now-- pacing around, sighing, picking the cat hairs off my shirt and pants (he likes to help me write...by getting between me and the keyboard...), staring at the monitor, thinking that I know thousands of beginnings to stories...but nothing i can use. If I was any way-cooler writer from the past, I would be smoking a pack of cigarettes and cracking open a bottle of brandy to open the floodgates. But, since my writing process seems to take so long, it's probably better if I don't shave any years off my life just yet.

More from the hopelessly stumped short story writer soon... Se la vie.

Motherhood

2007-07-10T20:18:00.001-07:00

Motherhood

Laced tributaries formed
a watershed of dark
hair, hung like thread
at the base of a loom,
down
my back.

Your short, papery fingers
pushed the blonde from your face
with nails like clean plates, encircled
by skin pulled back like fins
on the belly of a fish.

The foggy bathroom smelled of lemon.
The juice ran slick
and clouded with distended,
lucent, yellow fibers
squeezed
from a plastic bottle
you kept in the fridge.

Wavy, wet hair basted.
Sent into the yard
to swing between willow
and pinked mimosas,

until the sun
offered enough gold
to wreathe it.

the annunciation

2007-07-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Annunciation

We walked
beside benches leading
to the Hirshorn
and through a gate.
We paused
to watch daylight drain
from the sky.

Four common sparrows:
brazen, blushed in sun
flashed first their dark-spotted overcoats,
then smooth, magnolia-blossom underbellies.

While they rose and dove
like bobbins through water,
embroidering the open-faced,
iron flower,
their high-pitched warble
kip, kip, kip, zeee carried over.

We stood
side-by-side, on a cement moon
planted in red brick,
snapping black-‘n’-whites.

I caught them all—
two facing, one’s back turned,
and the crowning glory—
his wings pitched back to the full
with invisible marionette strings;
his profile a fine cameo—
short beak, tail feathers tucked but splayed.

he looks like swinging ivory
against the stenciled, bare tree tops.

And I can hear Gabriel saying, “Do not be afraid…”

(((overdue images)))

2007-07-10T18:27:00.000-07:00

Aiden.

2007-07-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

poem fragments and drafts from my portfolio...

2007-06-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

poem fragments and drafts from my portfolio-in-progress...

“rewrite of someone else’s persona poem”

Rain soaked through your broken-brimmed
hat at the bus stop, as I changed gears
and clicked the wheel of my iPod around again.
I coasted through green, looking up to study
the waves of skin and rainwater cresting
to hair-thin carved lines around your slate-colored eyes.
<>

“rewrite of someone else’s poem to a mother”

You drive fifty miles to Charlottesville to find a beautiful dress,
curl your long blonde hair, tie the pearls at your throat,
keep the house clean, and two Christmas trees up
after Thanksgiving. Eliza nearly choked
trying to eat the noxious poison
of your blessed cold cream, scented like roses.
and Daddy’s never here to see your dress.
The cowering husk you’ve become frightens him,
though he had two fists in creating it, himself.
<>

“untitled”

You came home to me kneeling
where the wall broke onto the floor
and the cat mewing, circling,
green stuck to the pads of his paws.
<>

“red light, downtown”

I thought the girl in the milkweed-yellow
tunic was you, at first—
cowl neck and loose trousers,
tugging at the front door of St. George’s.
She (you) found it locked, and walked
on down Princess Anne. Eyes
like the blue-grey smoke curling
through her hands, she half-smiled.
I don’t know you. But, I thought
you were there in the loose brown
gathering of her hair.
<>

“Florentine summer”

I remember the smell of lemons
being combed through my wet hair
and you in the foggy bathroom,
sending me out to swing in the sun.

my hair will never be so light
as yours, though blonde crept
through it then, along the winged strands
curled up with sweat around my face.

It’s darker, now that I am grown.
But people know I am yours
when we go downtown together—
eyes the color of jade
in the shadow, and limes
wreathed in flames, in the sun.
<>

“fly”

Laced wings and frail grey blot,
swirling in amber. Thursday night.
A man walks by as I release you
to the pavement, between thumb and forefinger.
<>

“The Corner of Cherry Street and Main”

There is the flat-topped tin
carport, the out-of-place gym bar,
the out-of-use clothesline,
the well-kept hedge backing up
to a grass alley, two dirt
tracks beaten in by years
of yellow cars.

There are the blue glass bottles
aligned at the kitchen window,
and the woman who adopted this house
and all of us, stands elbow-deep
in soap and water, by the thin-crusted
pie on the cooling rack.

(i couldn't resist)

2007-06-28T20:21:00.001-07:00

take your art with you...

2007-06-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

these are photos that I have taken with my cameraphone; their low quality adds to the artsy vibe, and makes me think of polaroids...

"list poem" assigment for ELS 302...the scraps, and the draft...

2007-06-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

The scraps...

It’s the exact color of my dad’s 1989 Ford Explorer,
greener than the Trojan EZ wrapper at the corner,
greener still than your bedroom, but bluer than your kitchen.

Handlebars spread over with the rust of individual raindrops,
tea-colored as the river istea-colored,
shining, otherwise, like the river shines.
And tasting like your mouth after you suck
the summer sweat from my neck and shoulders,
if you mixed that taste with a hint of blood.

We take the front wheel off, to fit the car’s cabin—
this man I have never before met, and I, on the sunny side
of Grove Avenue in Richmond. He is easily twice my age.

The child on the stoop with him wears ethereal,
golden Spanish Moss for hair, and wastes no time
telling me the latest characteristic he has been taught
about himself: “I am this many,” he says, grinning
through his thumb, middle and pointer fingers.
(I remember someone telling me once that the dexterity
of children his age lends itself more readily to this display,
rather than one in which the thumb is held down.)

I refuse a bottle of water, and hand the man
his fifty-five dollars. He invites me in the blue
row house, apartment no.3. I say ‘no.’
He brings me cool, not cold, water apologetically.

The draft...

“Early-1970’s Raleigh one-speed cruiser”

the exact color of my dad’s 1989 Ford Explorer,
springs hanging like twin beehives under the wide seat,
the old frame, the added lights, original paint,
the crest bearing a burnt orange “R” that becomes a crowned peacock,
the year that the color burnt orange was popular,
the name of the town where my first love was born
printed neatly down the front.

the handlebars spread over with rust
in the shape of raindrops fallen
on the fan district of Richmond last winter,
the fact that the rust on the bars looks dappled in the same way
as the tea-colored and blue river water down the street.

the place where a bolt and a kickstand once were,
below it, the numbered inspection sticker looking more
like a thoughtless lower-back tattoo than an ‘amen’ at the end
spokes crossed like skinny, silver arms on a body that’s bored of standing up
air pressure valves that rest unevenly—the front tire’s
on twelve o’clock, the back tire’s at roughly half-ten.

the breadth of handlebars and lilt of frame that make
the glimmering sun suddenly seem to be playing
down the back of a dryad or a sea maiden
rather than on these pipes of aluminum and chrome paint,

then, a bewitching thought,
to write a name and number,
and tuck the half-sheet of notebook paper
in the crack of the door at the stoop’s summit:
“to whom it may concern:
if you want to sell the bike, please call me back.”

Columbia Poetry Review no.20

2007-06-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

(cover painting, Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary by Julie Heffernan)

I TRY NOT TO WALK INTO BOOKSTORES. I try not to walk into bookstores because there, like the animal shelter, or a non-profit thrift store, I can nearly always talk myself into spending money that I don't have. I'm a student, and as much as I long to bulk-up my bookshelves constantly, the public library is more my budgetary speed. However, I made a most rewarding bookstore purchase last week, the 20th edition of the student-edited Columbia Poetry Review. Sadly, I was not invited to the big party in April to celebrate the largest volume of poetry ever produced by CPR or to commemorate 20 years of excellence in publishing contemporary verse...BUT, I adore it all the same. And I think you should get your grubby paws on a copy too. There is nothing so refreshing to a writer of poetry than to read contemporary poetry. It was Kirby who said something to the effect that we cannot create the future of the craft without first participating, at least for a bit, in the contemporary movement of poetry in which we find ourselves. This is contemporary poetry in its most diversified collection...I LOVE IT!!

Also, you should check out the archive of back issues...
http://english.colum.edu/cpr

a riverside virginia summer...

2007-06-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

“Alley Bookshelf”

I rescued a bookshelf from the alley
today
there’s a bike there too,
gray Schwinn without a chain.
I think the girl we heard moving out
yesterday
must have left them.

(If it isn’t gone by trash-day,
will you call?
Ask Travis to mend it,
and tell him I’ll pay him.)

I know you hate that I walk alone,
but I need it.
You remind me this isn’t
one of my European cities.
Try not to worry.

Tonight, I sat by the river until I could
hear the geese but I couldn’t see them.
Then the train passed over,
and I knew it was probably nine.

A man like a shadow came,
and my lips were wet with tea
and my breath hot with cigarette smoke.
(I didn’t mean to buy them. I know you’re quitting.
It’s just that I walked up to the store, to escape
the paint smell, and they were there, buy one, get one free.)

And the shadow man asked me
to drink beer with him,
and if the river was nice.
And because I am a girl, slim-waisted, and pretty,
I told him “no, I don’t know you.”
But he told me how he sees me around this town
all the time.
“I see you around here all the time.”
Probably he and I are the only ones walking these streets.

He left, and I went to the alley,
and carried the bookshelf in.
Now, the cat is rubbing his face on it.
He thinks an alien, whatever doesn’t
smell of him.

I captured Feist singing 'The Park' live at the 9.30 Club in D.C.

2007-06-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Grizzly Bear at the 9.30 Club:

Feist at the 9.30 Club in DC:

old, found poem fragments.

2007-06-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

"There was"

There was a me that loved you.
But I stopped listening to her
years ago. She was always
wild-eyed and scary, stupid,
and crazy for love of you.

But I can’t hide from her longer.
It’s worth it to feel whole,
to turn around and hold her.
She had long hair and fewer
clothes. Remember?

<>

"Change"

She hands me a dirty canvas bag—
a load of change;
it’s so heavy around my neck,
crushed against my breast.
I fight the heat to breathe
and the lump topples into my trunk,
following me for days.

How can I not realize
that the change stifles?
(Because I carry it.)
Limitations dangling from
my shoulders, strapped around my eyes.

A burst of fresh air and
a still-aching heart,
a new loss.
These compete, change,
to unglue my notion of something
permanent .

Daydreams
and memories
That picture of a black-haired baby
circa 1986.
That is not me.

<>

"What is it that poets fear?"

What is it that poets fear, you ask?
What musicians fear.
Everything is filtered, fitted, made art
from an inability to do otherwise,
a self-destructive need to reopen wounds.

I look at pictures, you say.
Why?
Because they make me hurt.
They always make me hurt—
the gentle throb of not being
somewhere I used to be,
my former self, loving
whom I loved and perhaps
love still. Being.
I want to look at being.
And it is so small, rectangular,
colored—or not. Small.

walking...

2007-06-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

"While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act--so much for the Cartesian mind/body divide. Spirituality and sexuality both enter in; the great walkers often move through both urban and rural places in the same way; and even past and present are brought together[...]And each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience--so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do. This continuity is one of the things I think we lost in the industrial age--but we can choose to reclaim it, again and again, and some do..." -Rebecca Solnit, from the introduction to Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

HERE IN LAND-LOCKED VIRGINIA I spent a summer Sunday, circling classifieds and clipping coupons on a downtown stoop in "America's Most Historic City" (or so the back of the trolley car giving tours says). I take long walks here, but bipedalism has become a more conscious and recreational act, than its functionally transportative quality in my London life. I walk and write, in my head, and I think about the skeletal structure of the human body, our widened hips, and narrowing knees that let us walk this way, each body segment stacked on the one underneath like a child's dexterity toy. I am trying to keep myself conditioned to thinking that a walk of 20 blocks between my sub-let and my boyfriend's apartment is nothing...even in such a humid climate. When I am not walking, I am at least sitting outside. Something about the rhythm of exterior space is conducive to my writing, if not to my reading (I am frequently distracted by passing sounds).

...more results of these walking musings soon...

"out of the city/ and down to the seaside/ the sun on my shoulders/ and wind in my hair/ but sandcastles crumble/ and hunger is human..." (joni)

2007-06-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

I DID MAKE IT HOME from London, about a week ago, now. I wanted to write here...I craved to write here. But, the adjustment home has been one rife with the most personal sorts of discoveries. I spent a week at "home" with my family...I use this term loosely because my nuclear family no longer lives in the town where I grew up, and I am not sure that town is home anymore anyway. Perhaps the best I can do is merely transcribe some of my journal here...since that has been my refuge more than usual in the last nine days. Mixed--conflicting?--emotions plague me. I am having terrible dreams that jump back in time, and then forward, and are filled with unwanted encounters and scenes of violence.

I am in my college town, now, having moved out of my house and 6 hours north-west, as the car drives, to the place where my adult life seems is playing itself out. I expected to come home from London and find that I saw things as flat, lackluster, two-dimensional...rather, it seems, the older I get the more dimensions life has, and some of them are more than unpleasant...they are disheartening, disillusioning, and despairing. More than ever before, I wanted to see my beautiful, sprawling, traditional family with the eyes I had as a child. But families are made of people, too, not saints, or superheros. Their faults are not heroic, except from the distance of several generations. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that I spent many hours in the middle of the night last week scanning old photographs of my family into my laptop, and editing them. They are (mostly) black and white. And I removed the blemishes and stains, the aging thick paper, the matte finish and stamped and annotated backs, explaining who and where and when... The results are here. They are beautiful. I feel a poem-bud forming...

My other refuge as of late, has been the rich, sweet, sad music of Joni Mitchell...which I have always gravitated towards in times of contemplation. Song to A Seagull is my most recent acquisition of her discography...some lyrics of particular resonance are below:

"Song to A Seagull"
Joni Mitchell

Fly silly seabird
No dreams can possess you
No voices can blame you
For sun on your wings
My gentle relations
Have names they must call me
For loving the freedom
Of all flying things
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry

I came to the city
And lived like old Crusoe
On an island of noise
In a cobblestone sea
And the beaches were concrete
And the stars paid a light bill
And the blossoms hung false
On their store window trees
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry

Out of the city
And down to the seaside
To sun on my shoulders
And wind in my hair
But sandcastles crumble
And hunger is human
And humans are hungry
For worlds they can't share
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry

I call to a seagull
Who dives to the waters
And catches his silver-fine
Dinner alone
Crying where are the footprints
That danced on these beaches?
And the hands that cast wishes
That sunk like a stone?
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach Out of cry

Signs that Might Be Omens Say I'm Going...

2007-05-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

THOSE WORDS ARE FROM my second favorite James Taylor song ("fire and rain" takes the top tier), Fittingly, they are a song about returning to Carolina, which is precisely where I am headed in less than 48 hours. But rather than the oft-repeated chorus that gives "Carolina in My Mind" it's name, and from my experience its overwhelming local appeal, a line buried in the third verse describes my experiences now...

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say about the word "Omen."
I. Simple uses.
1. An event or phenomenon regarded as a portent of good or evil; a prophetic sign, an augury.
2. As a mass noun: prophetic significance; indication of good or evil to come. Freq. with modifying adjective in of good (ill, etc.) omen. Also personified.
II. Compounds. 3. omen-bearing, -hunter, hunting, -monger. omen bird, a bird used as an omen-animal. omen-animal, an animal whose behaviour or body parts are used as a way of divining future events.

It is precisely omens which I find around me in the last couple of days...There are a few strange occurrences, meaningless except for their proximity to my leaving, and their prior existence in my mind as conditions upon which I would feel it was okay to go...

1. I heard a Beetles song in public for the first time in 5 months of living in England. It was in an antiques shop on the north end of Portobello Road on last Saturday morning, which was rainy and cold. (Such is late May in London: High of 48F, 100% chance of rain, winds N-NE at 20-30mph) I stayed in the store just to listen to the song, knowing full well that I couldn't afford any of the old biscuit tins, furniture, or jewelry he was selling, and I was delighted to find that he was playing the entire album...
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this omen was not that I have been thinking for months about the odd lack of Beatles merchandise, or even an open acknowledgment of their music, or any other aspect of the "British Invasion"...no, what was stranger is that the Beatles song I was hearing was a cover of Louis Armstrong's "Sweet Georgia Brown". I didn't know the Beatles had even covered this song. And the geographical proximity of that woman's name, to my home, was uncanny... (The most respectable bit of audio-visual recording of this song I can find is Anita O'day performing it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958...but their is something so odd about a white woman singing the praise of a black woman's body...but, it seems to escape dandy onlookers, who look rather bored.)

2. I filled the final page of my Moleskine notebook...I wish I could stay I begun it when I got to London. Alas it was a month and a half later, or so...until then I was using an old notebook that was begun back stateside. However, flipping through it is a veritable recap of my journey here through a particularly beautiful aspect to me...the fragments of life i found so inspiring that I had to make note of them immediately, and new ideas that came surging into my head, or sketches of train passengers or birds, street names, beginnings of poems, etc... So, I bought a new notebook, and listed my American address inside the front cover. The smell of newly exposed paper is sweet...

3. The roses bloomed in Regent's Park. I have been sitting vigil from time to time in the circle of sticks bordering a pond over the last months...waiting... Well, the glory has come! Yesterday, every known color of beautiful rose, sweet-smelling and aptly, poetically named by shiny black plaques were there waiting for me...

4. My map of London fell apart at the binding. I live on page 38, for the record.

5. Yesterday, after my jaunt through the roses, I sat down in the library, and looked up to find a rainbow painted in the sky just above a few flats built in a typical Northwest London style...all brick with piped vents emerging from the roof line...

<> I think sweet Londontown is saying to me, "It's okay now...you can go." (But when I need her, I'll be back.)

Some things that are inspiring (to me) and free (for everyone)!

2007-05-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

1. Poems on the Underground...if you can't take a ride on the Tube, and spot one of these treasures, you can always surf their sight, which includes streamed audio of poems read aloud...or buy a book or CD...whatever you fancy!

2. In Our Time Podcast at bbc.co.uk/radio4 provides informative discussions by academia's leaders for 45 minutes once a week, on every topic imaginable!

3. Other fabulous blogs, including that which provides readers with (The) Dr. Gardner Campbell's Wisdom(!)

4. Picasa Photo Editing Program from Google. You too can edit your photos to make it look like you have a professional camera...

5. The Hype Machine...a site which archives music blog entries, allowing you to search by artist for blog postings and downloadable mp3s...or just browse what's most popular...

What Will I Say When They Ask Me: "How Was London?"

2007-05-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

IT IS THE SURREALITY OF THIS EXPERIENCE which permeates me now. I am in the library. Read: I am supposed to be studying. One more final exam on Thursday, and then it is homeward bound for me. (Don't get me started on the idiocy of the English education system...I finished classes 2 months before my first exam...)

In the last couple of days, I find myself feeling utterly overcome by a profound sadness at leaving this city behind, to the point of paralysis. And then, just as swiftly, I emerge with a sense of mobility which is beautifully stimulating, after so many months of suspension...even stagnation. You see, I have never had so much free time as in the last 5 months. One would think that this situation would be one of supreme liberty. Except that it isn't, in a modern world of instantaneous knowledge, perpetual motion, and burgeoning technologies. To stand still as a human being in the present (perhaps especially in the "developed" world) is akin to that moment in evolutionary history, when fishes first shimmied onto land and made their gills breathe gaseous oxygen. In other words, we are at a junction.

There is no doubt of the cultural relativity of this aversion to free-time. In France, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, in London I see advertisements daily which encourage Londoners to take long weekends, and more vacations. In Japan, and in China, work and school last through all of the light hours of the day, with extras, such as language classes and music lessons, designated to the time after dinner and before sleep...vacations are a symptom of weakness.

I don't think it is sad that I crave structure. I don't believe in nostalgia for a time in which people worked less, and whittled more. That is a near-impossibility in the world we live in now. (It is not a devolution in which we (humanity) participate, but just a sort of constant metamorphosis through history... )

These last 5 months have actually been surprisingly productive for me. (On the whole. At first, I experienced a complete loss-of-voice and creative power because of being completely uprooted upon arriving here in January.) After that, I wrote a lot, sporadically, and devoured books quickly and insatiably. I spent hours in museums, drifted through parks, took trips, probed for new music, wrote postcards, took photos, painted, sketched, and created clothes...

All of this creativity, though, was tempered by the threat of days "wasted." I am not one to rise early, if I have no destination at which to be. I crave structure, as an individual, and as a product of my cultural and familial heritage. There were days where the plethora of entertainments and choices laid before me in London were paralyzing. Jean-Francois Lyotard alludes to this in one of his works...the idea that too many choices is a kind of prison in which the modern person finds themselves. We suffocate under the weight of infinite freedoms.

So, how will I answer the question: "HOW WAS YOUR SEMESTER ABROAD IN LONDON?" Undoubtedly, the answer will change with the audience, with the passage of time, with stepping off of that plane back on American soil, with regard to how much of an answer is actually desired... But the answer will be something like this: people should do this. It suspends your reality for a while, to the degree that is possible.

My experience was by no means average. I will not tell other people to study abroad, or not to. I will not tell them what it is "like." I can't pretend to know what they will get from it, where it will fall in the general trajectory of their lives, what it will do to them... (Is it contradictory, having made this declaration, to know that I will in fact answer some of these questions in the course of polite conversations? At least I cannot see myself answering them, or indeed describing "my" London, without tempering it with the obvious...this was my experience, through my eyes, my ears, my hands, my nose, my mouth, my brain, my heart, my soul...)

Maybe I am even less inclined to provide a stock description of Study Abroad, because I was not a part of an American program...I simply entered a foreign university, without a study abroad program, amongst students who are here permanently. They have established social networks. I found myself in the position of a transfer student who would not stay. It is artificial, to break into a three year process, and exit it again, bypassing the beginning and the end. For some people this breeds a kind of freedom which will make the 5months they spend abroad into the most fun time of their lives. For others, (and I fall into this category), a natural inclination to solitude and intensity, will reap a very powerful interaction with the place itself--with the city--rather than with the acquaintances acquired.)

The process of living in a foreign country for a finite amount of time, parallels so many other experiences more common in our culture. It is like entering a university community, knowing you will exit it. So, to my friends who have just graduated, I feel an nth of what you feel. I am excited to go home; I am tremendously sad to leave London. Mostly, it is as if I am wearing my nervous system outside of my skin. Everything is overwhelmingly pleasurable and painful, at once.

Fashionosophy(?): "one man's trash is another man's treasure."

2007-05-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

THIS PIECE SHOULD BE SUBTITLED, 'It is Possible to Look Cool in London for 1£ or Less.' I am packing, and therefore recounting the many gifts that londontown has bestowed upon me, with her bounty of fashionistas and never-ending pine for the dapper, drag, hipster, goth, punk, hippie, intellectual-blase, femme-fatal....and every other fashion-defined character known to the wider world. There is kente cloth here, and a never-ending rainbow of saris, monk's habits, the clergyman's somber black, children's uniforms... London is a town of trends, and virtually invented the notion of "insta-fashion" with stores like Topshop, which are designed to deliver a new range of trends every couple of weeks, restarting a feeding frenzy for whatever colored skinny pant, day-glow accessory, or strange set of glasses is the MUST-HAVE of this moment. The trend-chasers inhabit just one of the fashion bubbles of this city. They are not the majority, but more-so than in other European cities, give 13-22 year-old Londoners a homogeny, even if their sameness is defined by chameleon-like changeability.

I remember posting early in my 5months something entitled "has anyone seen my ability to communicate?" about the disorienting affect of this multiplicity of fashion signals. The artsy niche exists, just above the poverty line, and in some sort-of dance with the insta-fashioners, characterized by open condescension and veiled influence on the part of both groups. An article just last week in The London Paper, hailed this season's concert-going chic with the mantra "wear it like you just don't care." So the point is, then, to spend more time, money, & energy on your clothing than most of the free world, and yet look as if you simply wake up in the morning and put on whatever pants happened to be draped over the love seat on your way out the door?

This raises ethical questions for me...I think. Are we all fakes? Is London a city of people in which complete embrace of materialism has taken place. And materialism, a vice which every major religion warns against, is rife--but why? and to what end?

A sort of philosophy of fashion is something I circle often. I wish Susan Sontag had just written a book called "Regarding the Fashion of Others" because then someone could tell me what the hell is going on...and what it means. Instead, I just participate. And while I participate I struggle. I try to make what I know is a social convention (that of wearing clothes) into a vent for personal expression. Which is trite. And not exactly what I mean. Damn. I will try again. Why do I put on clothes that are a bit 'strange' and often provoke comments leading to conversations with perfect strangers on trains of in coffee shops. I am not talking about the usual "Oh, I love your handbag! Where did you get it?" of my mother's generation. Rather, people like to enlighten me about their interpretation of my dress, and pry until they loose an answer to why I think I wear it. Hence, I feel constantly conflicted in my search for this philosophical summation.

(Just last week a man came and sat at the table I was using in a coffee shop. He asked me why I wear so many representations of the color-spectrum, and whether or not my beads mean I am Buddhist, and why do I alter the clothes I wear?...My standard answer of "because birds, trees, colors, and Buddhas resonate with me..." did not satisfy him in the least. The conversation stretched for an hour, while he told me what he thought it meant...)

What I find interesting about dabbling in being an AMATEUR clothing designer, or even just a seamstress, is that persons demand that you take a greater responsibility for what you wear, if you had some hand in creating it. Some level of skill and what might be called "taste" is certainly involved in selecting and purchasing clothes. This process is something which teeters between a belief in cosmic rendezvous between a person and a garment, and some kind of sophisticated method for sifting through the infinite options for what one wears. And then there are those people who profess to not care at all about choosing their clothes: a) I find it nearly impossible to adopt their mindset, if only for a moment b) I don't think it is true. We are visual creatures. Quoting Walter Lippmann in the year 1922, "Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real." I propose that in the 85 years since Lippmann made that statement, we might substitute "the visual" for "photographs"--the visual orientation of our present culture is ubiquitous and moves at the speed of immediacy.

So, fashion, as perhaps one of the earliest forms of visual communication, predating photography, cinematography, and certainly the capacity of sights such as YouTube.com to make a movie "viral" instantly. Fashion is secondary in the visual communicative arts only to the human body itself, and the gestures which it is capable of exercising. In other words, fashion is extraordinarily important. And while I may still find myself a bit overwhelmed about the infinitesimal niches of London's fashion world, at least I know that they matter. The matter a lot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I intended this post as a kind of brief showcase of the items which I have "thrifted" (bought at second-hand stores, charity shops, and markets) for the equivalent of 2-3 US dollars, in order to prove that cheap fashion can be pursued in this town, and to illustrate the creative, challenging and perhaps primal hunt for the fashion that resonates with you, after it has been discarded by some other human being. Those clothes follow, along with a few which I "crafted" and altered significantly...

you are a being unto yourself, with whom i have fallen in love, London.

2007-05-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

SINCE I SEEM UNABLE to steady myself in this process of leaving London after 5 months, I spent the last several hours packing furiously, and then combing through my notebooks, dislodging a couple of lost ideas for poems i had made note of, which you will find below. I am eager to hold the people i love best in this world close again. But, London, to me you are a being unto yourself, and with whom I have fallen in love. It's been the steadiness, the humming and the millions, and the parks, and the river, the graceful buildings, the charming chatter, the million million idiosyncracies of a rhythm i've learned to step in time with... It's the city I love. And the city I will miss. Without the companionship of Londontown herself, I would have little life here to speak of...

Bee is blind.
Bee is blind to everything
but symmetry.
Symetros: same measure,
from the Greek.
And they say Galois
was the most romantic mathematician.
Did he glance down
to find the flowers symmetrical enough
to please a bee
on the morning of his violent death?

“Response to the piece ‘Forms Without Life’ by Damien Hirst, at the Tate Britain”

Look at the shells.
Look at the shells that were living
and then calcified
and then died lastly
when you took away the cool
soft flesh inside.
Look at the shells
strung up around your brown ankle.
People kill things to look at them.

<>

“Response to the piece ‘Preserve Beauty’ by Anya Gallacio, at the Tate Britain”

They lose all their petals
bleed brown and drop
from between plastic panels.
Still red at the edges?
I’m surprised.
Isn’t that, after all,
where one first meets the air?

“Perhaps this Is Innocent Love”

She asked no questions
when her mother stood, in the hot train.
She leaned into the sweet calf
of her sleeping brother,
and pressed her bowed cherry lips
to his birthmark,
a small brown island
afloat on a milky sea.

“goddesses”

Sulis, to Brittania
you are goddess
most lovely, long-limbed
and marked by fluidity.
Move, move through
the waters you lift from the sea
and lay flat again on the ripening fields.
Brittania
nestles into you,
like the green clasp
at your chokered neck.

Minnerva, how far
you follow men of leather
thong and helmet tall.
Do you know where you go?
Goddess of wisdom, is it wise
to fight the waters?
You cannot strangle gentle
Sulis, nor rouse her to anger.

Watery Dreams of Brighton and Bath...

2007-05-25T15:11:00.001-07:00

pictorial.

2007-05-21T14:26:00.001-07:00

some black 'n' whites that've been burning a whole in my pocket.

2007-05-19T19:38:00.001-07:00

a year and going strong

2007-05-17T18:28:00.001-07:00

as it happens, the one-year anniversary of this blog was some 48 hours ago.

yay, me.

some collected poem fragments that I may never edit...

2007-05-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

"Second-waver"

When they call out I unconsciously
Swing my hips. Even if they’re ugly
Or only fourteen. Even if I profess
Erudite aloofness, and cling tightly
To feminist things. I’m a second-waver
Perhaps, thinking hips, breasts, babies
Are a thing to sling on and champion.
Creator of the free world, Iam.

<><><><><><><>

"Cat Name"

Curl to the side, exhausted, sweat easing down
Off my spine, and all I could think was, first,
What will I call her if she has grey fur and green eyes?
If the eyes are gold, what will I call her then?
Winding through the names of this place,
And ticking them off as too ordinary, or presumptive.
The names of the places I love here. At least
One name must be beautiful enough, strange enough.
Rolling over to open the window—air, noise
Of a deadened party, now just conversation.
Hair stuck to my head and drifting, now to dogwoods
From last spring that I read under, to a poem
I know well about the swinging of birches
Smiling softly at its coquettishness. I want her to be coy.

<><><><><><><><><>

"Rain Fragment"

It’s supposed to rain for the next ten days
in my adopted city. The window across the way
squeaks shut at odd hours like inhuman screaming.
It doesn’t matter now that I know the person inside
wants protection, not to wake me. Now that I
hear only the fall of rain, and never my thoughts writing.

<><><><><><><><><>

"New Chain"

I bought the watch a new chain today,
complete with a gold skeletal key,
a stick to off-set the round,
clammed timepiece. The new chain
makes the watch rest at my navel.
It belonged to my mother’s mother’s
mother. We are chained umbilically:
womb to womb to womb to womb.

<><><><><><><><><>

"the spanish boys"

Trying to save money so walking
down willow way toward home.
Trying desperately to count the beats
of my feet through strained inattention
to the Spanish boys behind me and
their persistent, piercing rushes of breath
like morning birds, and chants:
que bonita, London-lady, tu hables español?
(yo hablo, sure. only not to you.)

I’m too old, too old. And their taunts
only make me rethink the bright
scarf and brighter shirts I’m wearing,
stretched and pinned over the hips
of my self-skinnied jeans.
Too childish? Impish? Playful?
Studying again a meticulously cultivated image
of bohemia, loosely musical, hipster
with its own high—original.
Perhaps the creative shouts too loud its own name.

<><><><><><><><><><>

"May Daydream"

Somehow, love, if I grow my hair long
and you shave your beard off,
we can make peace with our former

selves. The selves that didn’t know—
and couldn’t love—each other yet.

I can see us, brown from the sun,
and chaining our bicycles up.
We’ll wear old shirts and paint
the walls brighter colors. This thing
that we are, you and I, can last.
It can last a long time.

<><><><><><><><><>

"leave it all, boy"

Moma says that France has killed my wanderlust,
but not my wonder, not my lust. I confide that knowing
the names of streets in this town has not saved me.
I’d sell it all, boy, leave it all, boy, to go home,
to go to you. I’d find a shop and leave my books,
to be sold or used. I want to sell all my shoes
but the Spanish blue ones, the nice, new ones,
because you said you like the way they photograph.
If I could board the H.M.S. Belfast this evening,
I would split the ocean wide. It’s docked
a few blocks from here, just a few blocks of neogoth
to find the Thames from here. Just a few weeks
by the sea to you on Her Majesty’s Ship and it’s possible
for me to get to you. For me to get you, boy.

<><><><><<<><><>

"see air"

As a child, I thought I could see air
In the concentrated circles of bruised
blackish light, dots appearing and receding.

<><><><><><><><><>

"what i know now"

What I know now is the sway of trains
while the heat in them stays miraculously still,
pinned on every brow by the fingers smudging,
smudging, over one eye and then the other, wiping
at the heat that doesn’t sway. If it did, it wouldn’t
be hot. This afternoon I relished loneliness,
and read a paper, creased and wedged behind the seat.
The train was hot, despite mere May, and a child was
sleeping with dangling feet.

<><><><><><><><><>

“The days”

The days lengthen like columns of ash,
grey, tipped down and smoking on the dish-edge,
carved like a glass flower face.
(I am forgetting to purposefully breathe.)
Not sad, but long, these days with no one.
I read of dictators and lovers, of the 1950s
and the 1700s. Where are the fairies?
I liken the days here to the terrifying visage of a witch,
framed in shell-pink in the corner of the cover of my fairytales,
lodged in a wooden cupboard in the top floor of my childhood home.
My father’s smoking office was next to the playroom.

It is the contrast of nothing with something
that creates meaning.

<><><><><><><><><><>

“Mornings”

I put on the lotion that smells like every morning
in your apartment. Cat, wet hair, coffee, school.
If I close my eyes now and ignore the TV belching
from a neighbor’s window, then my hands
start to dance (I think of your sister, and a piano.)
I can see you on the couch, holding a mug, telling me
about your grandma through tears, and how I
make you think of her for no definable reason.
The cat is on the chair back. We have moments
only to make it to the car, pour half your coffee
out into the grass, and wait for the engine to warm.
We have moments only, to climb two flights
and burst into a circle of desks, clutching poems,
coffee, sleep in my eyes. We have moments only.

<><><><><><><><><>

“It.”

It’s cold out. Why? No reason. Just that May
in this city is sometimes cold.

What did you do today? Slept. And? Read.
Why did you sleep? It’s cold, I said.

Where did you go? Nowhere. No, where?
To my yellow house on Hallmark Dr.

<><><><><><><><><>

“Language of the Eyes”

I.
It is I who remains an individual. They bleed
into each other with the constancy of that running
tongue, arching so swiftly that I hear no words,
nothing that might pass as an utterance,
except where it is interrupted. Emotions I hear,
and rightly, in the pitch of the voice, or see—
a hand circling madly, pointing; eyes darting, rolling,
averted, dark; lips splaying open in smiles, or clinching
to frown. Only the cat penetrates my isolation.
I realize with obsessive visual concentration,
that I am surrounded by dark-eyed men and girls,
and only this cat (nameless, called only ‘chat noir’)
has eyes as luminescent as my own, my mother’s.

(Mother,) I have not signed their contract, or rather,
no one signed it for me. I babbled differently
as a child; distinctly, I’m sure, as I was
an early-talker, in chains of consonant-vowel
combination, through fistfuls of cheerios
and toothless drool. How inspiring were my blue
eyes then? How charming were my first,
nearly indiscernible, words? How long did I point
and ask, again and again, for names of things?
Simply for the pleasure of naming things, I laughed.

Now, a girl of twenty, the youngest at the table,
my own impotence at expression is maddening.
I did not learn this. And what I know is useless.
Years of hard study and a life devoted to the nuances
of my own language, earns me nothing of interest
here, at this table of rambling minds. A poet’s
mind, in the midst of incomprehensible language,
is a tortured consciousness, turning and turning
the alien sounds to make them something gives birth
to desperate exhaustion. My own estimation of
my worth is erased here, at the Table of Babel, where I am
no better than the cat, discernable by light eyes alone.

II.
One week without refuge from the language,
and I feel tired. When we retire to beds at night
I read with replenished voracity, trying to push
out the echoes of their constant sounds. Bizarre,
how quickly a mind begins to record and assimilate
the sounds of another language, as a kind of music,
flowing incessantly through my head. I think
that this echo of language is very much like the sensation
of methodic rocking, while laying in bed after a day
spent out on the ocean in a boat.

On the fifth day, one of my eyes goes red
gradually through a long dinner, of fruits, nuts,
duck, cheese, bread, chocolate—every sensation
lush, and more distressing for the absence of talk.
The next morning, Easter Monday, my eye waters
of its own accord at the breakfast table, over strong
coffee, croissants, and ever-present Chat Noir.
I wear my glasses.

Linguistic castration seems to have found
its amusing metaphoric counterpart in the redness
of my eyes. Eyes, after all, being the literary world’s
referent for testes, produce half of the dialogue
of human creation. Mine are watery, red, bleary
and useless…worse, agitating, for days.
For the next week of barely using my language,
my eyes burn with constancy. We go to the city,
I meet a doctor through translation, and am given
drops to wash my eyes. I can see.
Is it coincidence that only then can I communicate also?

<><><><><><><><><>

Garments I've made (sort of) recently.

2007-05-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

"America is my country, and Paris is my hometown." (Gertrude Stein)

2007-05-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

2007-05-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

Dear reader(s),

I doubt there's but one of you left. I have been more than absent in the last month. I am busy...living, and the thing about a blog is that when you make it about travel and movement and time then you get afraid to post things once you've fallen behind. Alas, like an old favorite sweater lost at the back of the closet, i have (hopefully) rediscovered the joys of my blog. I have big plans for posts...with my photos from Paris, and many poem fragments, random musings, and maybe some things i have crafted.

So, sit back...relax. I'll do the rest.

xoxo,
Whitney

Photography: Brittany, France

2007-04-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

Photographs: Brittany, France

2007-04-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

Photographs: Normandy, France

2007-04-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

These are photos from my holiday in France...

the KEATS HOUSE at HAMPSTEAD: "I find that I cannot exist without poetry..."

2007-03-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

A SERIES OF EXTREMELY INSPIRING EXPERIENCES HAVE come my way in the last 24 hours. I will post about them here, seperately. I got up this morning after falling asleep, as per ususal lately, with one index finger snug in the book (which happens to be Gregory David Roberts' memoir, Shantaram right now) that i'd been reading when i drifted off, the lamp still on and everything. It's cold in London right now. Very cold. We have had several boughts of ice and snow whipped horizontally by 25 mph winds, which become wretched rain showers, and make the temperature feel as though it has dipped below freezing. So, spring lasted a week. It will be back, and the trees are still budding, though the last snows seemed to have shrivelled the daffodills for good. Anyway, I have been saving a trip to Hampstead Heath--a former village that is now part of Greater London to the north of the city center--for a long day, and a nice one. On waking this morning, though, I didn't feel like waiting anymore. I packed an orange, a couple of books, my habitual map, and both sunglasses and my umbrella (such is the weather in London), as well as a hat, gloves, and an extra sweater to layer in case the wind really whipped at the Heath.

I made my way there via a few of my favorite charity shops (or "thrift shops" in amerispeak). First, the one on Vauxhall Bridge road that is on the scenic route through my neighborhood to the closest tube stop. Then I rode the train for half a dozen stops, and got out at Nottinghill, the chic mouth of the Portobello Road Markets that come alive every saturday. It's not my favorite section of the markets; that title belongs to the Ladbroke Grove train stop at the other end, where every saturday hundreds of ad-hoc stalls are constructed from pipes and plastic, full of bins that exist just so you can plung your hand in up past the elbow and pull out a forty-year-old cotton scarf, which is back in vogue. The Portobello markets are as dizzying as any open-air market...and the wares run the gamut from trendy vintage clothes, independent designer bohemian wonders, in-house telephones shaped like an ear of corn (yes, it's real! and yes, i wanted to buy it!), the best falafel I've ever tasted, antiques, street performers, stores that combine asian and native american traditional dress (strange, no?), every type and color of hat or boot a person could want, and Myrtle Beach t-shirts from the 1960's forward (that's right, Mom. If only you had kept all the stuff from the giftshop at the amusement park...we could charge £20 (40 american dollars) for one of those hideous orange airbrushed numbers...).

So, the markets. I made two £1 purchases at a thrift store--a purple t-shirt bearing the words "pour la frime"(french for god-knows-what...but i think maybe something about for the society?...i'll update when my Parisian friend Alexia gets back to me on that...) and the most incredible pair of piano-inspired flats with a tiny kitten-heel and a cut that allows the proper amount of toe cleaveage to show. I love making an incredible find at a thrift store. It takes hours, and sometimes you completely strike out...but there in a floor-level shelf in the back corner of the dank and dusty show, under some baby bibs, were the piano shoes...in my size...for £1! I struck gold! (let me briefly put this in context for those of you who do not torture yourselves with living in the second most expensive city in the world (at least i'm not in Tokyo, I guess)...a pair of shoes at a regular chain shoe-store, the equivilent of DSW or Payless will cost you from £30 on up....that is, $60...and I am talking that much money for children's shoes...like for keds. Occasionally, Camden Market's shoestores dip down to £10 or £15...and thrift shops sell for as little as £8...but £1!! never, £1!!! )...Here are the beloved new shoes:
I have never gushed about my role in world-capitalism before on this blog. Perhaps, dear reader(s), you think me a bit shallow now? That's alright. For me clothing is exactly what the root of the word textile implies...clothing is a text. It is a visual language spoken, rather unconsciously usually, by everyone graced with sight on this planet. What you wear is a carefully constructed message, even when it's not. So, I can't bring myself to affect the erudite distain for the body. Rather, I turn my body into a canvas, in the less permanent alternative to tattoos...which are hip now...but also reveal something deeper about the age in which we live...people's attachment to visual stimulation, their sense of personal autonomy, and construction of media...but that's another post altogether. So, clothing. If you are a regular reader of the Green Eyed Muse, you know that I make/embellish a lot of my own clothes. It's a creative outlet. The story is similar with my affinity for "thrifting." Anyone with enough money can go to a designer store and find a gorgeous piece of clothing to wear for every day of the week. This is especially true in London. In London you can drop millions of pounds on one outfit, if you so choose. I prefer to be a bottom feeder to this chain, though. Thrifting is down-and-dirty work. You can't carry a cup of coffee into a thrift store, not if you're serious about it. You need two hands to pry apart hangers and dig through bins. It's a scavanger hunt of sorts for treasure. And you need an eye, an eye for the potential in a garmet or shoes or scarf (it helps if you have the skills to alter thrifted clothing to fit you properly...). So, there you have it, an impromptu blurb on the virtues of thrifitng.

Leaving the thrift stores, and fighting the crowd back to the tube, I stopped in a cafe run by a sicilian family. I asked the guy for his recommendation...and to have it "for take-away" and he heated and brown-bagged a slab of bread, cheese, tomatos, mushrooms, and chicken that was twisted into the shape of a boat. I ate it on the platform waiting for my train. It was incredible. I caught the train north to Hampstead. It was getting on into the afternoon at this point and I didn't want to miss the Keats House, which closes at 5pm. I walked the 15 blocks or so to the Keats House, down Hampstead High St., up Downshire Hill to Keats Way in the bitter cold. Just wandering around the old homes and traditional English gardens of the former-village, knowing I was in the haunt of literary royalty, was a thrill. The house itself, though set in pretty gardens, is unremarkable but for the man who lived there. By the path through the gate is a small sign "Keats House: visitors please enter by the back door of the house." (As if we were close friends dropping in for one of Keats and Brown's dinner parties-turned-salon-discussion of poetry, politics, and art.) The house is small, and there is scarcely any furniture remaining in it. However, there are original manuscripts in glass cases approximately where Keats is thought to have written each of them during the two years he lived in the home.

John Keats (pictured above) was born in 1795. He wrote his first poem in 1814 at the age of 19. He died of "consumption" (the disease we now call Tuberculosis) at the age of 26 in 1821. He most likely contracted the disease from his brother, whom he tended until death, shortly before moving to Hampstead. Keats is one of the so-called "Big Six" canonical Romantic poets. He is of the second generation, and undeniably the most tormented because of his short life and the knowledge that he would die in agony. Keats fell in love with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne (pictured above) while living at Hamstead. They were betrothed but Keats died before they were married. He didn't die in Britain, however. The last-ditch treatment for consumption in the early 19th century was a trip to a milder climate, for those who could afford it. Keats, therefore, travelled to Rome where he died and is burried.

Keats touches most young students of Literature in particular, because of his early death. He covered the span from teenage angst, to sober responsibility, loss, love, depression, and death in his poetic career lasting merely seven years. To hear some of his works read aloud, visit the BBC site.

I barely scratched the surface of life at the heath today. There will be more to report from that northern corner soon, I hope.

Ambient Jazz at the Whitechapel Gallery...

2007-03-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

IN AN ARTICLE ENTITLED "ARTFUL LONDON" THE NEW YORKER claimed "the original purpose of the Whitechapel Gallery was 'to fill the minds of the people with thoughts to exclude those created by gloom or sordid temptation,' and for a hundred years this bright space in London's East End has been succeeding..."(March 5, 2007 issue).

That seemed to be the effect of the Whitechapel Gallery on everyone gathered there last Friday, though they all seemed to be far removed from more-stereotypical east-enders. Rather than a myriad of skin colors, languages, and ages...which defines especially the east-end, but also all of London, there was an overwhelming sense that my friend and I were in the midst--instead--of the ghost of the East-End that first inspired this gallery. In the 1960s and 70s the East-End became a sort of bohemian enclave for artists, poets, writers, musicians, and other creative spirits. Rent was cheap in the wild-eyed, hard-fighting, less-beautiful borroughs of central London to the east. The East-End's heyday of communal creativity has been grown over, yet again, by immigrant working communities. But the remnants of that time and the romance of its memory are visible...in Whitechapel Gallery, Brick Lane, Spitalfields market...and its newer incarnation is peaking, in places like Whitecube gallery. The creative spirit is far from gone in the East-End. And the crowding of so many cultures is as rife with beauty now as I am sure it was then.

So, we sat, among silver-haired men and women, in black-framed glasses, with colorful fringed scarves piled high around their necks, black clothes, and enough of an aloofness mixed with an obvious joy taken in the arts to make me wish for my own fiftieth birthday to come around, so I might claim a piece of their obvious erudite and persistent enchantment with the world. I admire, and am a bit mystified by, men and women who maintain their ability to chase books, art, music at its cutting-edge through their whole lives. Life-long learners, they are, interested in the whole world...they just don't seem jaded, the way that so many other people do.

The venue within Whitechapel can only be reached by a green-lit alley and industrial staircases right now, while most of the gallery is undergoing major renovations. Emerging from the bare walls and the choking smell of new paint, we found our way past a tiny red sitting room with an inviting large leather couch, into a room with glass ceilings, a few tables, a floor-level set up of musical instruments, and a bar lit from beneath the table and framed in mirrors. We waited an hour in the buzzing room, sipping organic ale and wine, and having a too-loud conversation. We seemed to be the only foreigners.

By the time the music started, the room was deadly silent, and packed with extra chairs placed in every available space, and spilling into the hall. Every seat was full. And every person was completely silent. The woman sitting on the same wall-mounted booth as me, to my right, even slid off her several silver bangles to preserve the absolute quiet. The bartenders were completely absorbed. And buying drinks, between the songs of the set of course, was an exercise in leaning in close, whispering, and then witnessing the precision with which the two men gently pulled bottles from the ice, and tipped the till upwards to release the drawer without its customary *ching*. I can only describe the mood as reverent.

And the music itself! The band, a recently created collaboration of several veteran jazz musicians with a bit of a vision, was eclectic and serious. I knew the show would be good when we walked in. Every man had sheet music perched in front of him. There were standard drums and a snare drum, an electric piano, a cello, two saxophones (one fat, one thin...played alternately by the same man), a laptop synthesizer attached to pedals, a trumpet, and a gourd-shaped object with a tube through the middle that acted as a voice-distorter. The set was incredibly moving. The thing about jazz anyway, and their particular version of ambient jazz, is that it can be as quiet as breathing, and invasive, and swelling with so much emotion that you actually feel the music, more than any other, rather than hearing it. The band is called ONL. You can buy their newly released album on the website. Fantastic.

The gallery has Thursday night poetry readings as well... Very exciting.

two poem-drafts I wrote on the bus tonight...

2007-03-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

“Homeless”

Even the homeless seem complacent in my adopted city.
Finished crouching outside the rushing warmth of subway mouths,
they lie, mummified, in doorways and alleys.
I imagine briefly, with the rush of air down the step from the bus,
that I too had to become well versed in the virtues
of an eave turned this way, or a grate, or the torturous
promise of a hovel in proximity to The Cardinal,
Ye Old Shakespeare, The Victoria, or any other pub,
with their darkly painted wooden frames and gilt letters,
belching smells of bangers and mash or the caramel
gaze of shining Strongbow pints in the window glass.
It is a fantasy as brief as my shiver, turning a corner.
And I am wondering how I intellectualize their suffering
and do not make myself cry for the shame of it.

“Royal Gala Apples”

Here they’re called “Royal.” Your favorite apples
unmistakable in their red and yellow brush-strokes
still tinged in unripe almost-green. And “Gala” just as sure
as one of the thousand parties you’ve thrown.
Did they rest in a china bowl in your biggest house
in town? When Moma was a girl and you kept
it spotless. A stage always set for the characters—
mafia dons or homeless men, it didn’t matter.
And in my imagination the people he brought around
to look at the immaculate house grow bolder,
crazier with each recollection of the recollections.
Were he himself a character in a book, I’d say
he could be counted on for little but his warmth
towards strangers, the crippling largeness of his heart.
I hope the apples were there as witnesses.
When I bite them standing on Portobello Road
in cold London late-March rain, I feel
the warmth of sea breeze, and I can hear the scratches
of a thousand palmetto fronds on the windows.
I smell your heady perfume as clearly then as at other times
in the morning café-rush or the after-work train.
They take me home so quickly that it carries my breath away.

St. Patrick's Day Parade in London.

2007-03-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Moleskin(e) Chronicles...

2007-03-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

MOLESKIN: according to Wikipedia, a moleskin is a type of fabric, a refined pelt of a mole, often manufactured by British mills... The article also contains this interesting association for the word 'moleskin'...

...A moleskin is also, allegedly, a pink (flesh coloured) piece of covering for the genital area of a female. The name derives from the shape of the covering. Such were often used by moviemakers in Hollywood. The most famous incident involving a moleskin, was when Janet Leigh lost hers during the shower scene of Psycho. Not thrown at all, she merely remarked that no-one (meaning the staff present) was seeing anything they had not seen before...

MOLESKINE (with an 'e') : is a trademarked brand of tiny personal journals, that, according to the parent company Modo & Modo, "is the legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin...originally produced by small French bookbinders...by the end of the twentieth century the moleskine was no longer available..."

Perhaps more interesting, is the exhibits of last October in London (alas, I was nowhere-near-here yet) which showcased a number of moleskines by famous artists and writers...

Long story short, I am not meaning to plug a product. In fact, I am only a recent devotee of my own little Moleskine, but confess to keeping it everpresent in my daily life here. My last journal tuckered out and was full to the brim. And it was lined...which discourages and distorts doodles. So, last week, I bought a moleskine. Then, upon finding the double-entendre imbedded in the word itself, I warmed to it...as to all powerful, and seemingly serendipitous metaphors. So, here begins the Moleskin(e) Chronicles...which for lack of modesty, show forth what the moleskin(e) hides...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An excerpt from the moleskine of a conversation I had with a stranger on a bench today. There were children playing around me, and it was a rare moment of connection with a live human being among all of them in this city-hive...

HIM: do you have any children? you seem to enjoy them...

ME: No! Uh, no, I'm too young. (embarrased laugh and then the thought "actually biologically, and even socially, i am not too young...")

HIM: i'm Ali, by the way.

ME: i'm Whitney.

HIM: Oh, Whitney. (over-pronouncing the "t"...a common Britishism) ...like, 'witness,' right?

ME: Yeah...I guess...Whitney, like witness.

HIM: very nice.

ME: do YOU have any children?

HIM: (hesitates with a deferring laugh...) Me? Well, yes. One. It's a bit of a story. I made one promise to myself, and that was to never have children. But, then I met a Japanese girl in 1997, and I, well, I made a mistake...

ME: hm.

HIM: ...sweetest mistake I ever made though...

ME: I'm sure.

HIM: ...three years in courts, and now I have to stay with her if I want to see my son. How many children do you want to have?

ME: Two. A girl and a boy.

HIM: both by the same husband?

ME: Well, yeah, ideally...I guess so...

HIM: Why?

ME: Um... hopefully I will love him and like him steadily and enough and that is what I will want...

HIM: Love? Like fancy and like and affection and sex... I am not sure they belong together...

ME: hm... ...I have to go now, I have somewhere to be. It was a pleasure to meet you, Ali...

(and then I realized that we had conducted the whole conversation without questioning each other's nationalities...)

Oxford, England: "Sweet city, with her dreaming spires" (Matthew Arnold)

2007-03-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Blue blue daydreams...

2007-03-07T16:55:00.000-08:00

poem fragments, unfinished because of a very special visitor...

2007-03-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

The following are a few poem-fragments that have appeared to me in my walks lately, especially through Regent's park. They are extremely unfinished...but i want to publish them because i haven't written any poetry here in too long a time. I will start again with more poems, and finished ones, in the next week or so, after my beloved visitor flies back home...

<><><>

El cielo de la boca…the sky of the mouth,
as if it were infinite yet unprotective.
He interrupts, amplifies my English idiom with his
own Portoguese one. El cielo de la boca…he repeats,
while I push a finger up, behind my teeth,
inviting and reinviting the soreness
of yesterday’s harsh, hardened Spanish bread.

In London, each man and woman carries
his or her own heaven— celestial bodies
that fold, wrap and strap themselves
for pockets, bags, backs of baby buggies.
Only the infants’ heavens are transparent
to God’s heaven: clear plastic zipped
over tiny faces, wheeled, and seeing
ceiling, sky, ceiling, sky, ceiling, sky.

Most heavens are black heavens. Somber,
sophisticated, elegant, complicit
with other colors— even, in this day,
with the rich tone of wet earth,
they are subservient to purpose.

Those who see, record the colors
of some heavens, the patterns of others,
as they float like half orbs over heads.
Those who hear, note the sound
of crackling firewood. They are still, needing
closed eyes under their tent, to find
the sound in its purest form.

Yet,
perhaps only the child, with eyes
untrained, can discern the possibility
that water sounds are like fire sounds
when they strike on the heavens.

El cielo de la boca. The sky of the mouth
can be as impermeable, as painful
as the modern, portable heaven.

<><><>

Spring has Sprung in London!

2007-02-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

I TOOK A FEW PICTURES TODAY in Regent's Park, so happy was I to see flowers and green green grass! The following poem is part of a project to bring poetry to the public via the advertising space inside London's tube carriages that touches my heart! Read more about Poems on the Underground and browse the archives!! This one really encapsulates the profundity of watching plants grow in the city...

The Very Leaves of the Acacia-Tree are London

The very leaves of the acacia-tree are London;
London tap-water fills out the fuchsia buds in the back garden,
Blackbirds pull London worms out of the sour soil,
The woodlice, centipedes, eat London, the wasps even.
London air through stomata of myriad leaves
And million lungs of London breathes.
Chlorophyll and haemoglobin do what life can
To purify, to return this great explosion
To sanity of leaf and wing.
Gradual and gentle the growth of London pride,
And sparrows are free of all the time in the world:
Less than a window-pane between.

Kathleen Raine (b. 1908)

Sitges, España para Carnaval: "Societat Recreativa El Retiro"

2007-02-24T12:22:00.000-08:00