We'd Have Been Married 27 Years

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Robert Reid 

IN ICTU OCULI

“Sorrow is my own yard,” William Carlos Williams, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”

                        My irises are blue,

Last November when winter was balmy,

            Unexpected, sabers slashed up through

                        A scrim of gold gingko leaves, in early

                        milky with cataracts, still

December the last iris unfurled

            Its frills, sinuous scallops bisected

                        Central from ciliary—blue ink pearled

                        I should have seen

From your fountain pen, blue lines crisscrossing

            Your atlas, blue veins traversing your wrist.

                        An unseasonal gift that Christmas morning

                        the cyanotic nails, looked

Blossom on the white wicker tray—the vase

            That held the last iris was delicate,

                        A milky blue.  “There’ll be more,” you say, “next

                        more closely at your hands,

Spring.  We’ll have iris for years and years.”  Blades

            Of green slice through the earth, this autumn,

                        Your ashes in winter’s bedded gardens.

                        not what they held.  

Back to It: 4631

For such a very long time, I've turned my back on this blog as a focus for daily writing practice, and I've begun to miss it.  I want to resume writing here, as I need a record of the little thoughts that aren't going into my fiction, teaching, poetry...I want a place for musing.  My notebooks are filling up with sentences that are as beautiful and true as I can make them.  I need a place for marginalia, for mosaic, a field where I feel free to play.  

As in this sketch by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, I think I'll turn my back on the desk and look into the mirror, see what I can write, what I can make up.  I miss this daily/weekly/monthly responsibility of writing and saving images.  I think FaceBook may have ruined blogging for me.  We'll see if I find anything interesting, or useful, or extraordinary to say.  

I've read over some of my old posts, and they're good.  This is not good.  But still, practice makes, if not perfect, at least more supple.  

So here goes:  Today I am interested in an article about a man who kept a Bonnard and a Gauguin hanging in his kitchen for 40 years:  

Galle(r)y Kitchen??

The article doesn't mention the Fiat worker.  I'd love to hear his side of the story.  Maybe I should write it...

I know that I should write, and write more.