Billy Elliot (10/12) Movie CLIP - What Dancing Feels Like (2000) HD

This, this, this--is why I write.

Not because I sometimes get published, not because I can't NOT do it (I didn't do it for 15 years and I have few regrets), but because once the stiffness stops and I get going, there is nothing, nothing like it.

Well, sex, but that's muscle memory, too.

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In the last month...

Eight poems were accepted; four of them are up right now--three at Parable Press; one at The Centrifugal Eye.

My MS was a finalist, still a bridesmaid, but the dress is a little more fetching this time.

I finished off two batches of 214 students and now have two more.

My 342 students are awesome.  I love them, their poems, their hard-working attitude.

I donated 18 bags of stuff to the thrift store behind my house.

I fixed up the man I was dating with my friend; they have moved in together.

I am a poem-writing, teaching yenta.

I have only cried once today.  That's an improvement.

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Stjepan Hauser "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix" (Samson et Dalila) by C. Sa...

Everything you need to know about my heart is here, legato.

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Channeling Medusa

I am strangely happy today--I think it's being surrounded by snaky hair and other writers.  As long as I meet no Harry Hamlin/Perseus types, I shall continue with twisty locks and sculpting all things statuary. 

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Happy New Year's Day

  Three Fragments from Virginia Woolf

                                            

) dens of lions, speckled eggs, decks of cards

) a skein of writers, a smart set

) a desk set, a settee, a nest of vipers

) two steps into the darkness but no more

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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