Still Life Means There's Still Life

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Remembering You as Silhouette and Ash

WIDDERSHINS


You come to me in a dream that’s a wash of grey over pen and ink lines (Koh-I-Noor ones you loved to draw); you’re wearing your pearl-grey suit because grey suits you; your hair curls like smoke, the way it once did when you smoked, you ask, Pamela, do you see me? I haven’t been this thin in years! You’re flat-black construction paper;

--This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. We now return these words to your regularly scheduled poetry notebook. Had this been an actual poem, it would have shown up elsewhere.

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Florence + The Machine "Dog Days Are Over" LIVE Acoustic at SIRIUS XM

I hope it hits me soon. These are the dog days, indeed.

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Children's Carnival, Paul Landacre

Harvey's studio is cleaned out--everything is blank in preparation for Raleigh's move into that space. The painter comes tomorrow to give her the sapphire walls of her dreams. When I stand in the completely empty space that held such laughter and light and clutter and collage and where we read so many books together and took so many naps together and laughed and loved each other so much on his bed of books (headboard and footboard were bookshelves), I feel like the woodcut above--everything in my life is bleached of color and breached of joy. What should be wonderful (redecorating, reclaiming, restoring this 1880s Queen Anne) feels curiously colorless at times, as though I am painting from a child's tin of watercolors and no wash sticks to the brush, and the thick white paper with its curious tooth and texture stays blank.

Can I just write that I hate being single? Can I just add that I hate dating just as much? Can I just add that although he worked primarily in black and white, Harvey gave my life its calliope, its coherence, its context? I have gone from carnival to colorless...

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A Year and a Day: Alchemy of the Light

This is Algerian Shops, a painting by Louis Comfort Tiffany. (How I love his middle name). The work begins--the real work of bringing warmth and heat and life back into my home and life. I have been sad and will be sad, but it's also time to look at the light again. I love Hopper's light for its solitude; I love the coppers and golds and bronzes and cafes-aux-or of this painting by Tiffany for its liveliness, its bizarre bazaar/brazier warmth.

(I stopped at a yard sale today and bought a brand-new lavender candle. I'm luxuriating in its scent right now. Lavender for remembering and warmth and dreaming of France. Someday I'll go...Lavender also reminds me of The Spoils of Poynton and Rebecca, great houses with dust sheets and treasures and the scent of lavender ghosting the air in stately sarcophagi of rooms. I don't want my house to be like that. Lavender, yes; sarcophagus, no).

A pomander with lavender--there's a start...

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Harvey Ellison Parker, 8/16/1964 to 7/14/2010

This year, and every other year.

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Sean Hayes/Boom Boom

Boom boom goes the day

This is the last day I saw my husband alive...he was singing to me from Sean Hayes' music on the way to Sewanee. Harvey, I love you, I will never forget you, and I will write to honor your memory, the way you wanted.

Everyone say just a little word more....

Tell your love that you do and you will and will always...

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This I Believe

"Typewriters have souls." (The Manitou, 1978 horror film)

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Today's OneWord writing practice: CAST

Cast of characters; cast-off sculpture in the chalk-edged garden, cast of my arm, wrenched from its socket and snapped like a sapling in a storm while playing among nasturtium; think castoff or castaway or cast my lot, think Castile soap, (washes out her mouth when the words are wrong); think castanets clicking off the beat of time of the beat-up girl who cannot keep the beat and her father slaps her till her Cuban heels come down correctly (the studio dyes her hair, plucks her eyebrows, her hairline, casts off her name, and she's cast as Gilda).

Kahlo

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

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Envoi: Here is What I Believe as a Writer

From the preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

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Purged

I have finished editing my possessions. The carpets are being cleaned on Tuesday. After that I rearrange and resort, clean off my closets and paint two rooms, buy a little furniture for Raleigh and the den, and pack for Sewanee. While I'm there, I'll plan a deck and a backyard garden for next year.

I don't know whether I'll continue this blog. My friends read my Facebook posts, not here, and most of my favorite blogs have gone private, so I don't feel the sense of community that I once did.

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Absent

3652 books--with more to go.

All of Harvey's clothes from his studio.

50 pairs of shoes gone (45 pairs of these were mine).

Sixteen bags of clothes donated.

Three dressers, two mirrors, two tables, and a desk donated/given away.

All three of Harvey's expensive suits--given away.

Basketball goal, swing set, lawn furniture--sent for scrap.

Three truckloads of miscellaneous china and antiques sent for auction.

One dumpster filled with all of Harvey's old art project materials--half dissected encyclopedias, books, boxes.

Discoveries: A pair of amethyst and black pearl earrings that Harvey had bought me--stuck away in a trunk. His self-portrait in watercolor. Art, art, art that I'd never seen before. 10 pairs of reading glasses.

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