Here’s my offering for Art Every Day 20:  Necklace and earrings made with ceramic, copper and beads.

One + One Saturdays are for one poem of mine and one I want to share.  My own offering this week is a prose poem of sorts (or maybe it’s just an essay) I wrote in 2000.  At the time, son was in the throes of his addiction, where he stayed for a long time.  He is great now.  Working his AA program, being an active member of his community, giving back.  Just in case any of you out there need hope.  Miracles happen all the time.

Annie Dillard’s Skin
         by Tammy Vitale

Annie Dillar’ds world lays on the page in front of me.  She writes so that I slide into it like skin.  Zip it up.  Make it mine.  She’s that good at capturing where she lives.  Read “An American Childhood” and you can see its beginning, how she moves into her world, constantly awakening.  Read “Holy the Firm” and see it encapsulated, struck down to its very essence (she is older in that personna, can poeticize the prose precisely).  She writes to her journal, to the world.  I can’t do that. People look at my paintings and ask where they come from.  I say, “That’s where I live.”  And I try to write it out and then they say that my pictures and my poetry are one and the same – both leaving them lost.  And it seems that the more I try to leave openings, the more my world is inaccessible.  Except to me.

I’ve written a lot in journals.  And I read my journals. I like them as much as Ellen Gilchrest’s except that she writes about Rosedale, Mississippi, where her grandfater is from and she knows more about it than I do, even though that happens to be where my Momma was from.  And where Momma’s sister has lived her whole life.  But I’ve only visited twice.  I can’t draw from this dustydrawlingdreaming place like Ellen.  The only thing I have of it is my Momma’s memories and I’m not sure of the line between made-up and real – she never wrote anything out and memory has a trick of changing the details.  The specifics get hard to nail down.

Lately I don’t write in journals at all.  I tried to get re started, using the guidance of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” but I guess I wasn’t dedicated.  Or maybe it is the fault of the clay I now play with, the clay where words appear, just like my last painting, as if out of the air.  Not connected to any structured form or thought, just hanging there.  Keys to doors should anyone find one to open.

Maybe it’s that the things that are accessible are too hard.  It’s easier to stay in my head in a world that I’ve made.  A modicum of control, if there is any such thing.  So let’s try this.  Here’s something accessible.  I find myself the mother of an 18 year old boy.  The very bodily image of the man who fathered him, the man who broke my eye finally after I allowed him to break my heart and later I broke our bonds (though I continue to find thintrailingtangles of strings, like cobwebs, that I have yet to follow back to their beginnings).  At the moment the 18 year old is in the process of breaking the umbilical cord, so to speak, that all teens must break.  And this breaking is harder than that with his father; the truth is, it tastes exactly the same, this breaking, like blood on your tongue when you’ve chewed too hard in your sleep.  Do you do that?  My dental hygenist is always remarking on my cheeks, suggesting ways to stop bloodying them.  Asleep.  I do all that asleep.  Annie Dillard says we all keep going to sleep and waking up, that being adult we tend to be awake more and forget the transition stages.  But I live in the transition stages.  Aware and unaware.  Never sure which is which.

Which is probably why my art and poetry are so odd.  What I take for reality is a miscalculation.  And vice versa.  I can see where others might get confused.

**

This next is from an unpublished poem entitled Psalm by Anita Barrows  that I found in the book “Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World” by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown:

And I would travel with you to the places of our shame

The hills stripped of trees, the marsh grasses
oil-slicked, steeped in sewage;

The blackened shoreline, the chemical-poisoned water;

I would stand with you in the desolate places, the charred places,
soil where nothing will ever grow, pitted desert;

fields that burn slowly for months; roots of cholla & chapparral
writhing with underground explosions

I would put my hand
there with yours, I would take your hand, I would walk with you

through carefully planted fields, rows of leafy vegetables
drifting with radioactive dust; through the dark
of uranium mines hidden in the sacred gold-red mountains;

I would listen with you in drafty hospital corridors
as the miner cried out in the first language

of pain; as he cried out
the forgotten names of his mother    I would stand
next to you in the forest’s

final hour, in the wind
of helicopter blades, police

sirens shrieking, the delicate
tremor of light between

leaves for the last
time     Oh I would touch with this love each

wounded place