Crazy Blog

Since I changed over to the new blog, the Google blog, I've been rather frustrated because I go from not being able to log on to not being able to upload my paintings, so without access to such features I'm kinda fucked and more than a bit frustrated by it. I hope the Google Gods read this and make the necessary changes.

By the way, my positive thinking for the moment is screwed if you didn't notice.

Happy Holidays

May each of us experience the miracles and the magic of this season.

What the hell? I'll name this something other than the date

Skeletons

Think of the rib cage.
Think of the lobster
clacking inside its trap.
--Albert Goldbarth

1.
We find them everywhere
scattered throughout our houses,
below the front porch light,
on the window sills—
these exoskeletons of bugs
who shed their lives,
but leave their shells to litter.

As a child, I found locust shells
clinging to the sides of trees,
studied the gross bodies,
the filaments of legs,
grotesque shapes of hair? eye?
antennae? They float

through dreams and land
in our hands, so delicate
we could crush them.
So we crush them.

2.
When you find a skeleton,
you must always assume it could be human.
But she doesn’t want to listen,
insists it’s dog or cow—a rib cage,
half of it, curling up out of the ground,
grown there like a morbid ivy,
and now we cannot find it.

I question my daughter about the route
they took the day they ditched
school to hang out in the park
until time to walk back, catch
the bus, begin pretending.
It was here, she is saying.

But here there is nothing
but prairie grass and trash.
Were there trees around it?
Maybe one, and we found it
in a ditch--half the rib cage intact!
It had been there less than a month ago.
But not now, and now I’ve scared her
with all this talk of human remains
and foul play. She’s ready to go home.

In her mind it’s no longer a cow.
But some poor child abducted
from its mother. My son
just wants to go play. But I am dead
set on finding this rib cage.

I wander over the lot,
peer in the ditches,
stare down the ravine,
until I find it. But they have scattered—
my children and the bones
across the grass—vertebrae,
one rib, a femur—as best I can tell.

And now it looks human to me.
My kids pouting, each for different reasons
have come to stare at the bones with me.
We argue about the kinds of bones
and what it all means. They insist
the vertebrae are much too big
and must be cow or deer.
We finger our spines
trying to detect our own
human circumference.

I don’t know.

Then we glare at the femur
and think it’s much too short for anything
human. So, satisfied, we give up.

We go to the playground to play.
On the way, we find the imprint
of an ancient sea creature pressed
into the sidewalk, which we step over.
We race to the tusks of a plastic mammoth.
And there, we hang.

Fleta Dyer Memorial Fund

To make a donation to the Fleta Dyer Memorial Fund, please make checks to "Fleta Dyer Memorial Fund" and send to the following:

Garnand Funeral Home
412 North 7th Street
Garden City, KS. 67846
(620) 276-3219
gardencity@garnandfuneralhomes.com

Now, rest easy--and many, many blessings to you.

Thursday, December 7, 2006

My apartment is filled with the most lovely and lively jungle of houseplants. My siblings and I shared my mother's plants that have been her companions for many years. I also took plants home from my mother's service. Her funeral service was very beautiful, and she had hundreds of people in attendance--friends and family that I remember from the most ancient of days. Though I am sad at her passing, as of late I have felt very strong and happy knowing she is now with me in spirit and helping me from a grander perspective. For me, this is very real and rather strengthening.

I made little contribution to the funeral service that was organized by my younger sister. My little bit was the memorial program. I included a picture of my mother that I am not able (yet) to upload here, but it was taken when I was in high school, and I love the picture because not only is my mother very pretty in it (as she always was), but she is so very happy. We separated her out of a picture where my sister and I were acting silly with her and she was laughing. I want always to remember this way--with this joy, which of course is her perpetual state now.

Since I couldn't include her picture, I have shared a folky painting I did of my kids, "Interior," which I had given to my mother for her birthday in July. Sadly, she didn't have it for long. You can see the influences of Matisse in the work. And yes, you guessed it, here's a poem:

The Snow Drift

Cows watched me through the ringing snow.
I stood atop a drift as high as the house and listened.
They stared silently across the low fence. Eyes pressing
out sadness. I grew afraid of large eyes staring.
They knew something I did not know of being lonely
in the cold. I turned from that cold, did not hear it slip
past to make an inexorable place inside.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

This piece is called "Tranquility." And below is a poem influenced by traditional country music--in particular, Hank Williams' "So lonesome I could cry":

Trash Truck

Each Monday morning,
just before dawn
the trash truck comes.
Whines with its sing-song brakes
in the alley outside my window
and wakes me from my long, black sleep.
Lights quiver from the truck
like stars in the blue-cold daybreak
and its beauty stuns and saddens me
in my half sleep. I strain my eyelids
to watch the man raise bins to the lift
then climb the platform and yell go go.
Too quickly the truck is passing away.
I turn over to go back to sleep.
All I have left is its image slipping.
I am lonely
and I don’t know why.
Lord knows, I don’t know why.