How's Your Semester Going?

Oh, To Be a Teacher

You look at me and see an official nag

Someone whose job it is

To catch and lock away your every opinion

Evaluation

Your decisions

Your changes of heart and mind

You look at me and see an ear the size

Of a woman

But not a woman.

You see an outstretched hand

A demand

You see the mask of the crown.

You do not see me.

Heat Waves and Reasons to Love the South Anyway

As hot as it gets, and of course, no one can complain this summer with any originality, there is something  always cooling about the magnolia in bloom. Even on a sunny street, the scent of this large and stately blossom drops the temperatures for the length of a inhalation.

oh, well

i refuse to apologize for not blogging. I'm sorry, I just can't.

What's interesting. The new (and curiously chubby) homeless guy who arrives at the Harris-Piedmont pocket park at dusk each evening when the light is just enough for him to unroll his bedding, sit cross legged and snug between his over-stuffed gym bags, pull out his journal and write.

I've been watching him at this for three weeks now. He's punctual and regular and doesn't show up just often enough to make me worry and often enough to make me want to wave hello.

He leaves each morning around 7:30.

Something about this one makes me feel as if i'm participating in a fictional event. I think it's his big butt.

Sisyphean Labor

Sisyphean Labor

Those tasks we pick because they seem small

enough to hold in the palms of our hands

or even pocket are those that grow to full size

and must be hoisted shoulder high and carried.

Pick carefully and for love and old age.

Rather than a single rock, I discover

some days I maneuver several odd-shaped

stones bound together slip shod

and my day is a juggler’s holiday.

Ruining Work

Lately, I take whole pieces of paste paper apart and put them back together, so they are both different and the same. They are done to, violated, experienced. Then I rather sadistically try to restore the piece’s beauty with red thread sutures, reminiscent of bloody little bows. The piece has been restored and lives with the beauty of the surgical survivor, the heart torn, the face undone. But alive.

I tore apart a nice paste painting done on a cheap drawing paper…a kind of happy accident, a kind of weed.

But once reconstructed (with difficulty, cheap paper is non-responsive) the individual pieces needed texture, perhaps a media gloss, wax, a spray of some sort. Pretty little sutures were not enough. In fact, they caused more pain.

I love leaving clues behind, evidence of a former wholeness. I think the cheap paper piece still longs to be its original whole and not the two columns originally, carelessly envisioned by me. I moved into my idea too fast and with the kind of assumption that always yields a typo, a misspelling. Here, a misstep and a waste of a potentially nice book cover.     

Every piece of art must be breathed into being carefully and with complete presence. In this piece, because I never looked at its parts or what “deconstructing” it would mean, I destroyed. It’s sad…like bad plastic surgery.

Run it through the sewing machine?

Sisyphus Hill

Pushing the rock up the hill is

not temporary,

It’s everyday. Some artists

think of the rock as the

sun rising, arcing and setting.

We push it with our labor —

those parts of life we push,

pull, carry, shoulder

day after day — those bits

are contained in the rock.

Night time or bust.

Lillie Day 10 - Crating Miss Lillie

Gosh, I'm busy! With very little time to call my own (by my standards, anyway; readers with children and husbands need not respond) the fact that I've got a stack of papers to grade is the only thing motivating me to post today. Or is it?

Why no. No pun intended, but today marks the first day Lillie spent in her crate without either peeing, pooping or both.

She did both the first day, so I placed the spare "wall" thus shrinking the crate to her size.
She just peed on the second day, so I washed out the towel and replaced it with another and left her less water.
She just peed on the third day, but took down the wall, so I replaced the wall, washed out the towel and replaced it with another.
Then I did a laundry.
She just peed on the fourth, fifth, six and seventh days.
On the eighth day I took the trainer's advice and removed the towel.
On the ninth day she peed and pooped. I flushed the poop and washed the plastic tray with the new spray bottle of urine stain and odor remover.
On the 10th day I took the advice of my chiropractor, who welcomes dogs to her office and her life, and added a T-shirt of my own. Not a clean one.
On the afternoon of the 10th day I arrived home to a dry crate and a dry dog.

Tomorrow we try this again for a longer stint. Good luck, Lillie.