Ephemera for Christmas--Santa Head

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Inexactitude of Aubade

Sunlight in an Empty Room, Hopper

This morning, something touched the curve of my hip, and I awakened, thinking for a second it might be you. Only the sheet slithering to the floor, only a touch that echoed a touch I once took for granted, your hand in sleep, burnishing.

This morning, you're a little bit farther away from me; this morning, I'm a little bit closer to going where you are. And where are you? And why are you there? And where? And why? And....

This morning, I long for something--the scent of your skin, the scratch of your beard, the thunder of your laugh--and I remind myself that thunder is an echo, it fills a void.

This morning, this mourning.

The Young Widow, Gosselin 

BROWN STUDY

Cy Twombly on influences, on secrets

"I would have liked to be Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time. I had a Poussin period in my head. I did Woodland Glade and it was a kind of romantic English thing rather than Poussin. It was just a homage. Just someone I had respect for. I had different crushes on different artists. But I look a lot at Poussin and I have got a whole set of etchings for example. I've always wanted to do brown paintings, because when I was in school I realised in that great room at The Frick Collection in New York, with all those incredible paintings, that the secret to great paintings is brown. And that is one of my great ambitions, to strive to do a brown painting."

brunette, bay, coffee, chocolate, brick, toasted, ginger, rust, chestnut, hazel, dun, auburn,tawny, umber, fuscous, tanned, browned, bronze, bronzed, tan, dusky, sunburnt, seared, sauteed, toasted, sepia 

If I had a choice, I'd like to be an artist like Twombly, to make art and make a life and not worry so much about what others think.  I started late on this poetry business (2007), and after five, almost six years, I feel that I'm ready to start writing my own poems.  Rejections from Rattle, from At Length, from the Oxford American--one of the best rejections ever--for my long poem (which is damned good) only solidify this desire to write more long poems.  I know that the poems will be all right.  Some editor will love them some day.  

Woodpecker, Woodpecker, Woodpecker

When I looked up my Native American horoscope, I was pretty sure that I'd be a big cat or a snake or something else that slinks or slithers, yet I'm pretty happy to be a woodpecker. In fact, my favorite image in all of my poems is that of a woodpecker--maybe I was channeling my inner self-regard when I wrote it.

Here's the poem, which (as are all but a handful) is dedicated to Harv, our long marriage, and how I would rather walk with him than almost anything.  I miss you, sweetheart.

"Taking a Walk with You"

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Caddy Compson, Talk to Me!

Ragged, Unkempt, Strange: On William Faulkner | The Nation

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[HD] Noisettes - Every Now And Then (Live - New Pop Festival 2009)

There's a curtain between Harvey and me, and I want nothing more than to tear it down.

Let the light back into this empty room.

Curtains.

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BLUE FIFTH REVIEW: Studio Version

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."  Pablo Picasso

"His face is smeared and dusted all over with marble powder, so that he looks like a baker, and he is completely covered with little chips of marble, so that he seems as if his back has been snowed on; and his house is full of splinters of stone and dust."  Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting

"Millions and millions who have died...are blowing about.  The dead are blowing in your nostrils every hour,  every second you breathe in.  It's a macabre way of putting it, perhaps, but anything that's at all accurate about life if always macabre.  After all, you're born, you die."  Francis Bacon (studio above)

Here's my take on what inspires me.  "Unchained Melody: The Studio Version"

(quotes and photo from "Bacon Dust," Cabinet)

Pulp Fiction Illustration: Ray Bradbury

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Post in Which I Don't Curl Up like an Ammonite

"The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also take the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unravelling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college."  Kate Zambreno, Heroines

Feminine pain--from cramps to childbirth--doesn't count; it's the curse.  You bear it because you're female.  It's bearable because you're female.  You're female.  Grin and bear it.

Men, however, can be terrible cowards over a toothache, or an ingrown hair, or a sore toe, and it's "Boys will be boys." That sick-male cliche makes me want to punch a pillow. Damned if they can cry at movies, though, or have tears well up when their children are born.  That's girly.

I am 1000 times braver than Harvey was.  And it didn't make him less manly.  Or me less female.

I am more Medusa than Penelope.  More Klytemnestra than Cleaver, June.

I bare it.  I bear it.  I bore it.  I have borne it.

And if my daughter EVER hears that she needs to be more of a lady, to be girlier, I know she'll take out someone's kneecap.

And if my son is EVER ashamed to cry from happiness, then I have failed as a parent.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Corn on the car--I have this postcard.  I love the lemon wheels and the convertible.  We found it in a little antique shop in Carbondale.  (We being Harvey and I, and I can no longer use we any more, because there is no we, no Pamela and Harvey, no Pamela and Dez, no royal we because I am not royalty or even a pretender to the throne like Anastasia Anna Anderson, although I am as Russian as many Romanovs).

Word of the day:  DRIVE

And sometimes Dez would put the top down on his Jag and we'd drive and drive and drive and my hair would fray from its French braid and hit him in the face and we'd laugh and laugh and laugh just being together driving fast and the simplest stupidest things would make us so happy and there would be velocity in the days and velocity in the nights and it just figures that on the day of gratitude he would be in Norway and I would be inching back toward spinsterhood and

Hello.

I have no ambition.  No motivation.  No--well--drive.

(No commas in paragraph three in honor of the Radish King).

TRUTHS THAT I DON'T WANT TO ADMIT:
1. I am terrible at being single. I am worse at being a girlfriend.  I was good at being Harvey's wife.  And that leads me to #2, which is that
2. I am pissed at Harvey for dying.  I am so angry that I cannot forgive him for dying.  I know it's stupid.  How do I forgive losing my best friend and partner and husband, and I am sure that this has led to the realization that
3. Being really sick doesn't make me saintly.  It makes me mean and whiny and I can't stop looking at my biopsy site which is now the size of a saccharine tablet or those new awful pink candy hearts on Facebook posts, which leads me to muse on the following
4.  What do I put on Facebook (oh I wish this was a joke).  I am not in a relationship but I still feel kind of married.  It is complicated. I am no longer a wife and no longer a fiancee and no longer a girlfriend and no longer a lover, and I am not really a widow, which leads me to the following monostich
5.  In the middle of WIDOW is I DO--which is just meat in the beartrap jaws of those W's.

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For Dez: VARYKINO

In my deepest fantasies, I am a Russian heroine kissing her love farewell at a train station.  There are furs and tears and troikas, and maybe a little Tchaikovsky in the background, and (to steal a line from Spencer Reece), "snow falls like rice."

I think Dr. Zhivago has had a pathological effect on my idea of romance.  I dream of this dacha, often.

Tomorrow my last love leaves for Norway.  For work.  For three years.  There were no sables or sleighs, no symphonies, but tears last night, this morning?  Falling:  Articles from a Russian sentence, satin strap slithering from a shoulder, spill of sheets to the floor the first night we made love.

Whiteness for me is elegiac, the edges of an old photograph,

That out of the frame.  

Here is a snowglobe all shaken.

Here is a love slipcovered in frost.

Here is a woman who has had her Russian, her romance and her stereotypical end.

Here is her life with ice at its heart.

Warm me up; I'm so cold.

Mosaic, Part Two

I still think that broken is beauty potentiated.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/44824832@N00/7415484404/

RESOLUTION:  I am going to take care of myself, my children, my art: 

"The artist has to love, he has to love what he is making...so that beauty may become connatural to him and inviscerate itself in him through affection, and so that his work may come forth from his heart and his bowels as well as from his lucid spirit. This undeviating love is the supreme rule." Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism

In words of one syllable:

 1. LOVE YOUR OWN WORK BEST.
2. WRITE FROM THE HEART, WRITE FROM THE GUT, WRITE FROM THE SOUL.
3. WORK TILL IT FEELS PART OF YOU.
4. YOUR WORK IS PART OF YOU. 

5. AS DALE RAY SAYS, TAKE CARE OF YOUR WORK, AND YOUR WORK WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU.

 

Detritus, Krissy Wilson

I've been thinking, as I often do when ill, about what remains, about remainders, about clay columns of pipes, china doll heads, singleton chess pieces, sea glass, transferware fragments, all sorts of shards that line the water's edge....all the pieces I looked for once, what remains after the descent into the river of grief.  What remains of me?  I miss Harvey, and yet I fell in love again.  And came up gasping.  I was immersed.  And I need the sky.  And I need souvenirs, something that shows I came, I saw, I loved.

I think I fought so fiercely against the Pretty Boy and longed to lean into his embrace simultaneously, because he's probably my last love.  

I told him goodbye.  Months ago.  I stopped taking his calls.  

And I waited for my life to go on.  And it did.  In  a mosaic sort of way:  Start.  Smash.  Rebuild out of the pieces. 

For the past week, out of nowhere, I fell apart.  I fell into fever, into shaking chills, into the topography of crimson rashes and a purple-as-the-center-of-Queen-Anne's lace breast lesion, into the arms of the ER doctor and into my sickbed.  Friends had to teach for me; co-workers had to cover my shifts; my father had to drive me to a doctor's appointment.  I had scarlet fever.  I had a MRSA infection without any visible signs of a cut.  I had a breast lesion that required multiple biopsies (and my sister died of breast carcinoma, with symptoms like this).  My hair changed texture.  The soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers peeled away, like onionskin.  The skin over my whole body sloughed.  I had shingles--a raspberry patch over my left scapula.  

Today, after 10 days of antibiotics, I'm weak but otherwise fine.  My biopsies were negative, although I have another one scheduled after the rash, just to be sure.  There's nothing but bruising on my breast to indicate I was ever ill.  (And eight pounds disappeared from somewhere--but I cannot see where).  My skin looks better than ever. And yet, I'm falling apart.  

During that time of extreme illness, somehow he knew I was ill.  Somehow he knew I was afraid of dying, as my sister did, from a breast cancer that was diagnosed out of nowhere.  And he knew just when to call, and he knew just what to say:  You lose your breast?  I still love you.  And  You lose your hair?  I still love you.  You love me and all my hair fall out, right?  And he researched reconstruction and trompe-l'oueil nipple tattooing, and he said all the right things, in the broken English and that Badenov accent, and oh my god he is so pretty.   

And the guy whom I've been seeing?  He found out I was sick and had to have a breast biopsy and broke it off with me.  Not a word, not a text, not a phone call in days.  I guess he's gone to BOOBS R US to look for a new sweetheart.  

Today, after thinking about love and loss and the likelihood of ever being someone else's baby, I've decided.   I'm making something new out of something old.   

I'm 55, and I'm tired of running.  I'm staying put in my house with my daughter for at least the next two years.  No more fantasies of moving to Nashville, to Norfolk, to a teaching job of my dreams.  It's here for two years.  

He's 43 and moving to Norway for five years (long-term job, leaving right before Thanksgiving).  He has no furlough for months.  

You are the love of my whole damned life, he tells me.  

The love of my life died, I tell him. 

I lost my wife and my son, he tells me.  I won't lose you.  

You don't have me, I tell him.  

I have you repeatedly, he tells me. 

Can you dial 1-800-IMPASSE?  

He's a conundrum:  innovative, intuitive lover; maddening, jealous fiend.  The only letter he ever wrote to me was 3-1/2 pages on how Barack Obama saved the American economy, and one sentence about my eyes blue as fjords. 

 

He's economically dishonest but emotionally honest, and that's another conundrum.  

Next week we say goodbye to something, if not farewell, with food and flowers and physicality that I thought had ended with Harv.  (As the French say, formidable.  As he says, хуй его знает).

 

After that?  I have no idea.  All I know is that I don't know how to feel this way.  I have forgotten how to feel.  

I think of the artificial songbird from "The Emperor and the Nightingale." I sing her song.  What's left of love is a locket that won't stay shut.  What's left of my heart is a sprung gear. 

What do I make of this? 

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Caravaggio in Kentucky

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.

For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish

School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,

Already bent to drink.

(originally published in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry)

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Southern Festival of Books--Photos, Butch Coone, Wunderkind

Chet Weise, Bang Candy Company, rocking the Marshmallow credo:  "Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy marshmallows, which are kind of the same thing."

 Daniel Nathan Terry, showing us his tattoo, before he reads some beautiful poems.

Three Poets:  Joshua Marie Wilkinson, superstar; Chet Weise, supercool; yours truly, super-accessorized.  Please note $3 cowboy boots, which I scooped up at a Nashville yard sale, as well as great dress and not one but two irons--one flat, one sad.  (And I have never realized that 5 feet 4 inches, even in cowboy boots that add another inch, is so flippin' petite).

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One Ring to Write Them All: Pamela Wears Sterling and Reads a Poem after James Dickey's "Cherrylog Road"

I was told by a fancy Southern journal:  "We love your poem about James Dickey, and we will never, ever publish it."

Perhaps that's the best--and most truthful--rejection letter I'll ever receive.  My poem takes Dickey to task for writing a poem in which a teenage speaker (male) has sex with another teenager (a young woman) in a junkyard, then roars off on his motorcycle, and leaves her without a goodbye, much less an orgasm.  

Throughout Dickey's poem, Doris is completely silent, so I gave her lines and a backstory, and I have her talk about sex--how it wasn't good for her--and church and whippings and how men use women and how women are both trapped and able to escape that world and that mindset.  (Can women say that? Bad sex? Men being selfish?  Can you write about that? one Nashville reader asked me).  

Well, this woman did.  And I read it in Nashville at the Southern Festival of Books.  

Oh, yeah, there's a little strychnine in there.  And snake handling.  And movie magazines and Mary Worth and my favorite lipstick, Cherries in the Snow.  And a couple of black dresses and the Begats in a red-letter Bible.

If anyone ever publishes this poem, I'll be surprised.  That's not the point, really.  I know I'm a better writer for having written it.   It's going in my next collection, which is probably going to be called BACK TALK.

Photo by Butch Coone, Bang Candy Company Reading, Southern Festival of Books

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GEORGE MICHAEL: "KISSING A FOOL" - Royal Opera House, Sunday 6/11/11

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SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

Card 1 (The Sun) : How you feel about yourself now  »

You are feeling abundant happy and joyful - if you don't, be assured that you are about to enter a period of success and fulfillment. This is a time of pleasure, vitality and good health, travel and holidays to be enjoyed. Good news around children or the conception or birth of a longed-for baby. The Sun heralds an ending to difficulties and a time to celebrate with friends and loved ones.

Card 2 (Wheel Of Fortune) : What you most want at this moment  »

The cards suggest that what you most want at this time is a turning point in your life and positive change - well expect it now. Life will go up a gear or two and events will accelerate forward. Destiny is at play here - have you noticed a number of events that seem rather a coincidence? This is synchronicity, trust it and go with the flow.

Card 3 (The Hermit) : Your fears  »

You are frightened of being on your own and loneliness, and you simply don't know quite what to do. Take time to relax and in time you will have the answers. The Hermit signals a warning not to make hasty decisions, so try not to get too stressed, and if you have been unwell this is a time for rest and recuperation.

Card 4 (The Lovers) : What is going for you  »

New love and commitment will enter your life, even if there's no one on the horizon - be prepared for a surprise. Throw caution to the wind and expect joyous and happy times ahead.

Card 5 (Judgment) : What is going against you  »

If you allow fear to stop you from taking a chance or a new possibility then you will lose out. Do not ignore the new opportunities being presented to you - a decision, new job or relationship could change your life for the better. Do not refuse change when change at this time is vital - feel the fear and do it anyway. Outcomes may well be delayed, however this is a time for positive action and not passiveness.

Card 6 (The High Priestess) : Outcome  »

Your intuitive powers are at their height at this moment in time; only by listening carefully and trusting them completely can you embrace that power. Do this and you will make strong, clear, self-assured decisions. Allow for flexibility and expect promising outcomes.

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Sunday Blah, Blah, Bleh, Bleh, Blues

Ten Reasons to Live:  (Alphabetical, not actual, as Faulkner would not be penultimate).

Bakelite.
Cashmere.
Cats.
Daughter.
Henry James.
Rhinestones.
Son.
Tea and honey.
William Faulkner.
Wimbledon.

One Reason Against:

I miss love.  Sex for me is causal, not casual, which is why I have only slept with a handful (okay, a handful plus a couple of digits) of men in my lifetime.  And for me, it's always men, especially brunettes with glasses.  Bonus points if they're artists.

Whenever I try fun, I end up sad or married or, in the case of my first husband, both.  Or in the case of my second husband, blissful, faithful, fat, and sassy.  

I do miss Married Pamela.  She was a lot less healthy, but she was so much more joyful.

As consolation, though, there's poetry, and because my friend CHET WEISE is the greatest charmer in history, there is this.  I'm one of the afternoon readers, and I'm also reading at the after party.  How cool is this, to read at a candy factory!  I'm taking my long-ass James Dickey poem there.  Maybe the South won't rise and hang me, in effigy or otherwise.  My imaginary friend Butch is coming to take photos.  I have two perfect dresses, well actually three--one grey, one black and tan, and one red, which I always forget.  Which should I wear?

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