When it twists through the crystal doorknobs
and casts rainbows on the posters
my mother gave me, from her room
in Andrews, I know that winter fails me.

The light is short-lived, the purposeless
forgetting to sleep early enough,
forgetting the light will rise without them tomorrow.

The new books I’m reading. . .

“Winterizing the Porch”

In early November, after the four-day-rain
that had been Ida, you spent a day
taking the pots down from their perches.
You raked the dark earth, with it’s rootlets,
and cobwebs of mold into bags, feeling
out the bulbs for inspection.

The sacks of spent earth you carried,
door to door to stairs, through the house.
The pots up-turned and stacked,
pinks and yellows and rusted blues,
along the railings and splitting planks.

And so completed what I could not,
in one version–
the winnowing, and hollowing out of winter.

. . . like a squirrel. The World Series is blaring in the den, competing with the soft clicking of saliva that is the sound of a cat washing himself. I feel desperate. Winter is upon us. The studio is decorated for Christmas. That means only one thing: sixty hour work weeks, no free time, exhaustion, and the onslaught of poor health. Physically, mentally, spiritually, intellectually I am trying to fortify myself. Frantically, I stuff my brain with books, flit around without committing to anything, while I feel the aching need to write, the fear of not properly digesting the few afternoons I get to be outside. It’s coming, my brain says. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming.

I have a poem about St. Gertrude knocking about in the back of my brain (the companion piece to this one about St. Benedict. . . I know I could easily write a whole series of poems about saints. . . they fascinate me.), and one about the Moro Reflex.

I am swallowing Julia Cameron’s memoir, Floor Sample, in gulps. She makes the writing life sound so. . . doable. The way that I know it when I am not so estranged from it. She writes Morning Pages. I want to write Morning Pages. I wish I didn’t need sleep, for this very purpose.

In the meantime, I took a trip home to the Carolinas weekend before last, and a walk around our neighborhood a few days ago. Here are some pictures, and here are some more.

Black Hand Coffee Shop

The walls peeling, sunburned plaster
giving way its whitewashed foreskin.
metal gauzed flesh to hold the holes in place.
Pipes vein with termites–
The cats are sleeping (fatter than before)
but that, at least, has not changed.
The dregs of summer are doodled across
a chalkboard in weak sunshine, and coffee rings
swimming across tables. Men talk
about cars between their navy blue polos, stamped
over the heart with logos of pledged companies.
Machine-white, the stitching more orderly
than lane painting on the streets.
They drive black and burgundy cars
to fraternize with the coffee shop boy’s tattoos,
talk of shows he plays instead of sleeping.
We’re closing up, killer. I’ll have to bring the table inside.

St. Francis
In this city, St. Francis can
exist in so many places at once,
unafraid of the scissoring ferns
gliding along his throat and through
his arms. Unaware of the greyhounds’
lifting legs at his feet.

The Chinese Girl
Three or four, she follows
her mother down Park from the restaurant
to their apartment. Always there, with the cheap
booths and faded picture-menu of meats.
Her whole life, these four blocks.
Walking, balancing, a book, a toy, trailing
twenty feet behind her mother’s panted, sandaled feet.

Her mother, a back she rides, same straight black bowl cut hair.
Her father, soy-scented, constant as the empty
fish tank on the counter. Signs about how much to spend
to use a credit card or a check. The blinking red-lighted
corner, the smells; will these be her memories
when she’s twenty-something, and with a man.

Acorns
The september squirrels are fatter,
more violent- pitching oblong shells
down the tin roof. Everywhere there
are thatched tops from the nuts, like tiny
chinese rice farmer’s hats. They are not brown
all-over, as one thinks, but bear a bowl
of dusty, minted green. Sometimes left uncracked,
having been shaken loose by mistake and sent down
to lie with the gravel and dirt, the mushrooms
and grass that scraggles under clover, paper leaves.
The earliest parachutes of late August.

Dancing Woman
A woman dances when I get to the park.
For her dogs, red-faced, bulky head-phones
blinking silver with the dying sun.
She twists through first one hula-hoop
and then another. In passing cars others dogs bark.
A woman walks a spotted hound
and a new baby, arms and legs suspended
from the papoose held around her throat.

I WANT TO LIVE INSIDE THIS WOMAN’S PHOTOS:
Just look at her Affair With Coffee.

Cindy Loughridge has such an incredible sensitivity to light and color. What else is there in great photographs? Except maybe her love of the common drama.

My original 23 Things Post is here.
I wanted to update myself and the world on what I’ve accomplished:

No. 5
DONE!!
my lovely friends Liz & Mike are getting married in January. They let me take their engagement photos. . . Unpaid, but professional. And outside of the studio. And a huge learning experience. A few of my favorites:

No. 6
So far, so good. And we even managed to rearrange the whole apartment into a more livable, wonderful space.

No. 9
Also, done. In some respects, at least, I got to see a bunch of my nearest and dearest college friends a few weeks ago, when one of them came back to The States for a bit. There are still a few that circumstances and geography have estranged. . . but, on the whole, I am getting to see people I love sometimes, though they are busy and far away.

No. 12
This will have to wait for next summer. August scorched my plants to death, for the most part.

No. 13
I need to be more intentional about this.

No. 15
So far:

. . . and, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is underway. . .

No. 19
Recently, I have been blogging more. Feeling the desperate need to shore myself up against the impending Christmas season, and the 60+ hour work weeks that will define me for 3 and a half months.

No. 20
I’m getting very close to the end. I have to meditate on my finale!

bla, originally uploaded by Angélica Vis.

i am enamored of this girl’s work. and her (various) haircut(s).

losing focus, originally uploaded by Katherine Elizabeth.

i want the space to craft such photos. . . one day.