What Inhabits the Sky- the first edition

What Inhabits the Sky

Birds, of course

            And kites

The ambitious leaves of tall trees.

Ideas masquerading as loose feathers

The inevitable wishes of young girls

The prayers of a multitude

Stray bullets

Arrows on a mission

Chimney smoke

Jet stream flashing

Neon darkness

My eyes, my eyes

Your finger point north

Go home. Go home.

Lillie 's first Christmas

Her first Christmas with me. A year ago she may well have been lost. From the records I was given by the Pet Shelter, she was picked up in January in Valdosta.
She's very happy now!

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?