I am in (yet again) another transition. I do believe that I spend way more time in the interstices than I do in the actualities. Perhaps that is the lot of the creative soul. Or maybe it is what makes the creative soul.
What better place to look for myself than in my art and writing?
I have an altered book of sorts that I started 8 years ago when I started doing AEDM (Art Every Day Month) with Leah Piken Kolidas. She was Leah Piken then. At the time I thought to finish it quickly. As it turns out it is a work in progress.
Here’s a share from last year (11/13/13)
And here’s the piece I put together for today – yes, totally created a new piece, but based it on an old poem from 97. I have to wonder where my head was when I wrote this poem, winter doldrums? There are several around the same time and it’s as if I were creating a mythology because I recognize bits and pieces as taken from my life (I still have the purple scarf, and the fish is from a restaurant we used to eat at in the 1980s. And yes, I do have a bird feeder and very persistent squirrels, and if I remember correctly there actually were some dried blue flowers on my windowsill that were finally falling apart), but a lot of it is pulled from thin air.
Dining at the Red Sea Restaurant
12/18/97
It begins with the way things drop
from between lips like blue flowers
full of unnamed nectar reminding
one of a childhood memory – something spicy,
perhaps an undertone of medicine –
something hidden. Full of this I watch
transparent bubbles rise
from the mouth of the fish in the octagon bowl.
The fork travels from the plate to the air
in front of me, pauses, makes promises,
drifts back to the place where it began. Taste
is a thing to read about in Thursday’s paper
on the subway when the train emerges
from its dark tunnel. As Winter curls
its fingers across the window, I trace the sparkles
of ice, try to remember what my mother used to say.
Soon snow will come. Already
the birds chide my procrastination from perches
around the wooden feeder. Even the squirrel
has taken to hanging upside down from the feeder door.
Its small squirrel screams echo though my house, now
inexplicably empty except for the purple scarf
with gold threads flung in a far corner.
At the window blue flowers wilt, dry, drop
sapphires onto the peeling sill. By the time I notice
they too are echoes. I toss them into the water flowing
under the bridge the train crosses every day.
The forgotten words rise again and again, but I do not
understand the language; the sound escapes in bubbles
from my lips. Maybe the fish will tell me. When
the fortune cookie is served, it will not break.
Some things are best left unknown.
Along the line of seeking the me that might be revealed by my unconscious through my art, here’s Discoverature, a ceramic tile from the early 2000s. The name is taken from a poem daughter wrote in college, which got panned by the professor and was the only time in my life that she said: go get him, Mom. Her classmates loved it and I think it is magnificent, so I have included it here too. I will report that when I read it, she said: “Now, Ma, don’t read too much into this. It’s an assignment.” But you and I know about poetry, don’t we?
discoverature
Jessie Vitale
sand sloughs dead skin cells that cake
over true identities.
time requests masks for safety
measures against a world.
hidden secrets, deceiving lies of complete
control at all cost demand upkeep.
unconventional interests in unaccepting circles
force individuals into silence.
smiles on lips require constant
practice in unpolished mirrors.
search deep within, concealed caves hold
answers to the moon’s question “you are who?”
Finally, from the early 2000s (as is Discoverature), here is Mina Pauses. I find the image perfect for the Wylde Crone as it grounds the image in nature (curling plant, paw prints), spirit (spirals) an love (heart). The hair, of course, is my trademark “Wylde” significator. It seems that the poem from last year’s share is appropriate (and the autobiography there is that I burn wood for heat in my house – which on nights as cold as this is very very full of grace.).
Blessed be the air through which the acorn fell.
Blessed be the earth that accepted theacorn
against its breast.
Blessed be the water that fed the acorn as it grew.
Blessed be the sprout that climbed through the
earth back into the air.
Blessed be the sapling that grew in the shadow
of its parent.
Blessed be the years that passed, the roots that
spread wide and deep, the branches that reached
out and up, the crown that whispered secrets to
the wind.
Blessed be the end of cycles when things die.
Blessed be this wood that has come to me.
Blessed be the fire that warms my home.
Blessed be.
