drawing

Eat Me

1
Our relationship with food
is complicated–

calories, allergies,
chemistry, biology

Food never comes to our table
without context—

farm, factory,
consumption, waste

Food once grew itself–
humans gathered—

fruit, tubers,
grain, seeds

2
Do you know your food?
Haven’t we met?

earth, air,
fire, water

Can you name what it contains?
Read my label.

flavored and colored fruit pieces
treated with sodium sulfite to promote color retention

Can you point me out in a crowd?
Do you recognize me?

carrot, apple
corn, sunflower seed

Eat Me.

I didn’t really understand the NaPoWriMo prompt, but my poem has two parts and the food talks.

It also gave me an opportunity to resurrect some old drawings that prove I once knew how to draw still life. What do you think Aletha?

Can you guess what I made after I drew the second one?

Site

Hollow mute barren.
What is left
of the flesh
but bones, bereft?

Where
are the thoughts and prayers?
Fallen—buried in the sundered earth.

Unseen currents scatter
the fragments that once
cohered.  Ashes dust
atrophy rust.

Gone–
what once was written in stone.
Fallen—buried in the sundered earth.

What will future archaeologists, whether human or from alien civilization, will make of us? is today’s NaPoWriMo prompt. I’ve used Muri’s Running Repetition form (I hope I got it right…) for my reply.

Abstracted and Possessed

Abaft of my vision,
blurred yet somehow still, I feel the presence of
cats, tense with
delight as they
edge along the shadow and
furtively slither through the hallway,
gracefully falling into a nonchalant
humdrum sprawl in a patch of sun.
Indulge us, they seem to say–
Join us
K.  Leave your word
lines behind and
migrate into this lazy light.

No calamities will
occur if you
pet us, pay attention to our
quiet majesty.
Really.  If we make you
sneeze, you can brew
tea, and you will be fine.  Our fur will not
upset your respiratory tract.  Though usually
vigorous in my avoidance, I
walk right into their trap,
xactly as they knew, in their
youthful, smirking,
zen superiority, that I would.

The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write to write an abecedarian poem–not something I would normally do, since it feels like you are forcing some of the letters (like x) to work somehow. But when I looked at the Random Word List from Sunday, the word cats jumped out at me, and also the fact that most of the letters of the alphabet were represented among the words. Almost all the beginning line words in my poem are from the list, and I just fudged the x word.

I really am allergic to cats, which I discovered when my roommate moved to Pittsburg with her boyfriend and his dog and left her kitten behind. We had never given him a name, calling him Mr. Kitten, which became, appropriately, Mr. K. I had to give him away when my asthma got too bad and I ended up in the hospital, something that still fills me with sadness.

But I’m still an easy mark for a cat.

extended

Even though paint, tint and grey do not exist in the Oracle tiles, those were words that I kept seeing this morning. After I figured out how to make them, the rest of the words fell into place.

When I was looking for art, I came across the above drawing, misfiled among some old collages. It seemed just right, and I went looking for the right folder, which contains a series of landscapes I did inspired by some landscapes I had seen by Georg Baselitz, which had black lines and spare use of color. The one above is colored pencil on an ink marker drawing I did as one of my original black and white ideas. That uncolored drawing is below.

Later on I painted the landscape without black lines, in gouache (the top landscape). I thought this sequence, backwards, contained the feeling in the Oracle’s words today.

the black-tinted shadow
of sleep
paints an ache
swimming through the whisper
of stilled sunlight

a grey language lies
beneath the early sky

as a raw mist plays
with the bare bones of time
you say less and less

Seventeen

Nothing
remains, except
this quickened memory–
how brief and wondrous it was, that
first love

A cinquain for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday, with the photo prompt above by Terri Webster Schrandt.

Frank @ Beach Walk Reflections posted this week about love. His meditations always make me think of music and I considered all the love songs I knew, and how difficult it was to capture the essence of love in words. This morning I put on Donovan’s Fairy Tale album and the first song, “Colours”, struck all the right chords, as it had when I first heard it 50 years ago, conjuring that time and space in my life when the complexities of the future did not yet exist. Ephemeral, but nonetheless still very real, even now, from this far away country where I presently reside.

My Dream About Dogs

The dogs were here first.
You think you own them, but no–
they lead, you follow.

Other dogs, other
people, entangled within
a rocky landscape.

It’s always winter.
You must work hard, struggle
to get anywhere.

Where is it?  You no
longer even think you know–
the pull of the leash.

You’re cold and you need to feel–
breath shortens—leaves misty trail.

Ingrid at dVerse asked us to write a poem inspired by a dream, and Sarah’s W3 prompt asked for a poem of 14 lines or less about dreams.

I remembered these sketches I did of a dog–I think it was from a photo Nina sent me of one of her dogs, but I’m not totally certain–and found them in an old sketchbook from the early 1980s. The collage is from one of Jane’s prompts I did in 2016.

I often dream of dogs–I’ve lived with them, but never owned one. Clearly they have a secure place in my mind.

December 8, 1980

the flames are warm–
we hold hands
against wrath

what is the context of
the naked soul?
is it pure love?

who invented hate?

Britta at W3 asked for a poem with a date for a title, responding to her poem “the theory of everything”. I composed a shovel poem from this line: warm hands, wrath of soul, love, hate,

My illustration is a Japanese Bunraku puppet representing a demon, but I was also inspired by another of Brendan’s Ekphrastic photos at earthweal, below.

Imagine if someone would just give us some truth…could we all shine on?

Forty-two years. Who do we think we are?

also linking to dVerse OLN hosted by Bjorn

trick or treat

if is a word
that seems to gravitate to me

a word
I qualify my meanings with

as if
as if

nothing is allowed to be
permanent or definite

who is the them that is
me?  define me

I think perhaps
I will choose to be someone else
I must accommodate myself,
defer to my mask

while the other me
struggles to understand what
we both have
in common

am I who they think I am?

or am I a secret
that will never be
explained?

These drawings of ventriloquist dummies in the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky were inspired by a book of photos of the dummies taken by Matthew Rolston. The Kick-About prompt of a circus immediately brought them to mind.

Haunting and aware, I had always wanted to try to capture some of the sentience of the photos in a drawing. And so I did, randomly opening the book to 4 different faces. 

One of the essays in the book says they are meant “to suggest life”—but any supposedly “inanimate” object so entwined with a human life is alive.  Any child can tell you that.  They may have been separated from their humans, but these faces remember them.

You can read more about the Vent Haven Museum here, and read more about Rolston’s book here.

still

life
and death
structured together, partnered

nothing
to subtract
or to add

rended,
essence floats
beyond secrets–incandescent

Picture credit: Britta Benson. This photograph was taken inside St. Cecilia’s Church (built in 1739), Heusenstamm, Germany. 

A haynaku for Colleen’s #TankaTuesday Ekphrastic prompt, using Britta Benson’s photo, above, as inspiration. I’ve also used words from Jane’s Oracle 2.