so, i'm grateful for the 4 hours a day it's dangerous to be outside,

it gives me much time to read and read and read.

i take books as lovers and cannot inhabit the real world until our affairs are over.

just finished divisadero by michael ondaatje; a quiet but forceful book, it tore me open and

 sewed me back up by the end; a supremely satisfying read if you're into good books.

now an excerpt from a rainy day past, its def not any close to this weather now- but it's nice to remember

beautiful day to be at the beach here in savannah, 

but where am i going the spend the next 12 hours?

oh yeah, in the inkjet printing lab staring at a computer.

not quite the same as being outside...

I should have begun with this: the sky.

A window minus sill, frame, and panes.

An aperture, nothing more,

but wide open.

california

i dreamed i drank an arrow shirt
and stole a broken
pail

...but we live by the grace of the simple fact that our bodies take good care of us.  It's in this sense that I tell students that they have to be able to trust themselves.  What we all have to do is to use this bodily wisdom, staying close to the kinds of processes and ideas and emotional anchors that are most appropriate to our feelings, to ourselves.  You can't evade your ideas, which are precious to us, but micromanaging our ideas can be as much of a hinderance as they are a great help. 

... When we are young we are self conscious, we think about what people think about us.  As artists, the more we think about our audience and what we are trying to present, the less, perhaps, we are in touch with the physicality of the experience, the particulars, the minute details of our experience.  

Emmet Gowin, talking to John Paul Caponigro

You wanted happiness, I can't blame you for that,
and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy
but tell me
you love this, tell me you're not miserable.

P.S.

I close my eyes and see 

a seagull in the desert,

high, against an unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I'm writing to you

all the time,  I am writing

with both hands,

day and night.

What made me cover that which I could not have?

I’ve felt undeserving. In this bright land

that changes from yellow to green and back to yellow,

I remember seasons, things I bring with me from far away

and things that hold their breath as if for shame.

Carol Frost, from Matins

ps: look what i found through the magic of the internet. nothing ever goes away it just floats around forever in the goo of the web... uhm, 2006? maybe?

Sackdresses dyed the sun

as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass

against the leading of the tenements,

the warehouse holding medical supplies.

I waited for my bus by that window of trusses

in Caucasian beige, trying to forget

the pathological inside.

I was thinking of being alive.

Alice Fulton, from Industrial Lace

In this, your future, waves rechristen the sea
after its tiny jeweled lives
that hiss “Us Us” to the shore all day.
Where’s the kid called Kateydid? the moonfaced
Kewpiedoll? The excitable pouting
Zookie? The somber O-Be-Joyful?

Lost girl, playing hopscotch, I will do what you could.
Name of father, son, ghost. Cross my heart and hope.
While the sea’s jewels build shells and shells
change to chalk and chalk to loam and gold
wheat grows where oceans teetered.
Alice Fulton, from Fierce Girl Playing Hopscotch

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Jack Gilbert, from Failing and Falling

small update from an already busy week,
next little sneak peek, related to this

oh walls in savannah, you amaze me in your decrepitude.

Quiet now, sorrow; relax. Calm down, fear ...
You wanted the night? It’s falling, here,
Like a black glove onto the city,
Giving a few some peace ... but not me.
David St John, from Meditation

Happy Weekend to Savannah, and Almost Weekend to all of the non-student population!
A couple of less serious pages from my journal, some friend snapshots from this summer past and a Geertz quote that's been haunting me. Enjoy!

The drive to make sense out of experiance, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs. And, this being so, it seems unnecessary to continue to interpret symbolic activities -- religion, art, ideology-- as nothing but thinly disguised expressions of something other than what tey seem to be: attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.
George Geertz, anthropologist

While subjectivity will continue to reign supreme when it comes to our individual preferences for one type of photographic print process over another, the subjective nature of those personal choices will thankfully remain the very source from which art derives one of its most beneficial pleasures.
-Huntington Witherill, on why he stopped printing silver gelatin in 2006

Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You’ll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

If you don’t appear

at all one day they think you’re lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

Frank O'Hara, from A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

words from Written On the Body, Jeanette Winterson

post script: i made a yogurt-anything cake with bleuberries and a lemon glaze... originally from Ina Garten, secondarily from Smitten Kitten, who is amazing. Gosh I love Blog Land.

gas is gone

and alka seltza runnin gas

a close race

outasight/you

name it

toilet paper

halfway honest politicians

there’s a shortage

folks/please

step right up)

a crisis

(come in closer)

A International Disaster

Definitely Takin Place

from On the Loss of Energy

anew, afresh, again.
final series as undergrad.
"Driving to Ikea"

How do we come to be here next to each other

in the night

Where are the stars that show us to our love

inevitable

Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness

and the rain

falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh

the black men waiting on the corner for

a womanly mirage

I am amazed by peace

It is this possibility of you

asleep

and breathing in the quiet air
June Jordan, Poem for My Love

And how much courage it requires to get up in the

morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates

you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and

refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white

laughter and applause

from, Entry in an Unknown Hand

breathing space,

momma, this one's for you.
found during a daytrip southerly, it actually looked just like this.
(how bout this as a print for your wall?)

Riding out

from this town, to another, where

it is also black. Down a road

where people are asleep. Towards

the moon or the shadows of houses.

Towards the songs' pretended sea.

from Legacy

I almost slid off, once

Imagining this cloud was a pall

And the moon was a body.

I don’t know who put coins over her eyes.

frank stanford, crest

...my identifying features

are rapture and despair.

Remember this one? It made it into the SCAD photo exhibition that will take place next quarter... deepest gratitude to Manuel and his friends who allowed me to photograph their memorial. 

...and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin

And you could use some help today, packing in the dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and grinning with terror flowing over your legs through your fingers and hair...

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is to think of her for what she is:

one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, "To rather be harmed,

than harm, is not abject."

you do look a little ill.

but we can do something about that now.

can't we.

the fact is your a shocking wreck.

do you hear me.

the wind is so strong today- the rushing of it through the trees in my tree house & the sunshine all cold and sparkly like on the ceiling and my bed is enough to utterly transport one to an imaginary beach.  the wind is so frequent it's exactly like standing with the ocean in front of you and not being able to hear anything above the surf.  beautiful day to stay in bed here in my oceanic treehouse, but a dangerous day to ride your bike to the library...

Jude put his hand up to his mouth and said down the table I think Jesus is going
off his rocker get Simon to tell you what he asked me
Simon says he didn’t want to talk about politics or dreams or nothing he just said
Jude next time y’all are over in Mesopotamia why don’t you pick me up a few
bottles of that wine they make over there
sure thing Jesus I says

Frank Stanford, The Last Supper

Nothings a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself,

with myself,

give up my life for my life.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

glass, but that comes later.

And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

shut up

I'm getting to it.

Richard Siken

Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:

spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for.

     

Heather McHugh, From the Towers

And your hands, for example,

like a warm liquid on my face

don’t evaporate as you take them away.

Nor are our betrayals silent,

although we listen only in passing.

We’re learning how to walk unlit streets,

to see threats instead of trees,

the right answer to a teenager

opening his knife. The answer is yes.

Always we couldn’t do otherwise.

Michael Ryan, "Prothalamion"

The woman I love is greedy,
but she refuses greed.
She walks so straightly.
When I ask her what she wants,
she says, "A yellow bicycle."

Robert Hass

If you're in Savannah today, you know what I know.
It's oatmeal weather: dark as midnight, cold, and incessantly rainy.

Knuckles of the rain

on the roof,

chuckles into the drain-

pipe, spatters on

the leaves that litter

the grass. Melancholy

morning, the tide full

in the bay, an overflowing

bowl. At least, no wind,

no roughness in the sky,

its gray face bedraggled

by its tears.
May Swenson, October

Many names, most given up as routinely
As the secrets of friends. If you're a cup
Will my lips profane your own? If a comb
Will I feel your teeth against my neck?
If a wall I will be darker than your shadow.
And if a door I will unlatch you, letting in
All the little foxes from the vineyard.

Averill Curdy, The God of Inattention

today was: staying in bed, cigarettes, and arthur miller. but damn it was beautiful weather, so glad i got these windows.

How will it be

to lie in the sky

without roof or door

and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift

how will I hide?
Mary Swenson, Question

A man sees a tiny couple in the distance, and thinks they
might be his mother and father.
But when he gets to them they’re still little.
You’re still little, he says, don’t you remember?
Who said you were supposed to be here? says the little
husband. You’re supposed to be in your own distance; you’re
still in your own foreground, you spendthrift.
No no, says the man, you’re to blame.
No no, says the little man, you’re out of proportion. When
you go into the distance you’re supposed to get smaller. You
mustn’t think that we can shrink and sell all the time to suit everybody coming out of the distance.
But you have it wrong, cries the man, we’re the same size, it is you who are refusing to be optically correct…

Russell Edson, The Optical Prodigal

having neither planes nor curves nor angles,

are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane

like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon.

It is a living surface, almost wet.

Lucency breathes in and out.

Rainbows shudder across it.

And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering,

Be very careful. Be very careful.

My bed in the boughs, my blanket the clouds.

And this bed above the world, it's so full, just myself and my imaginary bedfellows who soak in secrets and keep me warm.

i live in a tree house.

one thing has nothing to do with the other,

but both are still true.