12/4/10 a snow angel
It's a lawn ornament at a kitsch-y little house in the town where I grew up, near the apartment of a musician friend of mine. I've driven by her as often as I can lose my way over there, and really she always points me my way home. She's about life-size, I was going to say, but since no one knows if you can really dance a googolplex of them on the head of a pin, or if they are, as some of my New Age cronies used to say, as big as a mountain, I don't know. She's about the size of an average human, then. I think I've seen her, wingless and temporarily animated, a few times waiting serenely in the lobby of the DMV, as if she has drawn a number. And definitely I've seen her in the building where I work, the family justice center, waiting for her child support case to be called. She holds a little platter or basket with two hands--it's where you can put the geraniums or petunias in the summer, snowdrifts now in winter.

12/3/10 Freshly ground cloves
My hair would have been this color, if I had henna'ed it in college, like all my friends were doing--dark brown with an almost iridescent auburn layered on top. A bay horse in the sunshine. These cloves came from the co-op and I've never had them this moist before. It's like the difference between dry sand (most cloves you get at the store), that pours methodically like it's in an hourglass to measure time, and damp sand (this batch) that clumps together and wants to hold a shape, maybe the shape of a dark moist cake. And the smell, with a wood, almost sandalwood undertone, with fruity flecks in the middle, and a top note a little jasmine-y. Cloves like this you want to make something out of, add to henna to color your skin, you hair, you want to bathe in it, soak your bedsheets in it, dry them and toss around a bit in them. Cloves like this you want to dance to, to drop grains of it in peace talks between warring parties, and have the old soldiers suddenly remember the touch of their grandmothes. Cloves like this you want to cast in a subway tunnel so that the mindless commuters will think suddenly of a splinter they tried to suck out of their thumbs when they were eight and had been digging in the dirt. Cloves like this should be carried in a small pouch into banks, so that everyone there remembers the fragrant wooden blocks and carved cars of their youth, their own "Rosebud" beloved as they are worrying about the numbers on their pieces of paper. Cloves like this should be dropped by pinches into rivers to bless and consecrate them with the blood and sheen and fragrance of other places.

12/2/10 Blessed by birds

This is a flashback post. I just saw a picture of St. Francis portrayed in a film with a little bird on his hand. And it reminded me of magic that I experienced with Fred, with birds. Here is what happened--I was making him leave one night, early in our courtship. Because my son was asleep and I didn't want Fred to stay over that night. So we were having that sweet goodbye conversation outside, where my driveway empties like a harsh apron into the street, no it was the wee hours and dark out and maybe he was showing me a constellation and maybe we were looking at star charts in the middle of the seldom-traveled street where it's easier to see the stars without houses and trees in the way. And we were saying sweet somethings I'm sure and looking at the charts and each other--it was the beginning of a few sweet something years. And all of a sudden something huge and weighty and dark and heavy and silent and looming rushed through the air near our heads and landed on the dead-end electric wire a few feet above. Swinging like a circus high wire act, quietly, heavily it sat--a plump, suburban great horned owl who had come out for conversation with us, I assume as well. We politely tried hard not to stare, but it was hard--this guest was so unexpected, or maybe we were to her, and so close.
The other time was when we were having one of about half a dozen breakup conversations a couple of years later. These bird blessings bookended the relationship, and we were sitting unter a blossoming fruit tree on the St. Paul campus, just trying to summarize the good things before trailing off, and this bird, that I took to be a hummingbird at first because it was hovering. But no, it was a bluebird that flew up from eating bugs in the park, flew up under the lightly-speckled with blossoms boughs where we were sitting on the ground, and hovered there, staring at us a few feet away, as we talked about its presence, color, species, meaning. It hovered several infinite moments and then sped off, just as abruptly.

I think now I will have to write about crows in the city, since they are the key to life here.

12/1/10 So many things to say
Yesterday at the book arts show, with all those books of poems and chapbooks of observations and pictures with legends and legends without pictures, I knew there was a lot to be seen, said and heard in this world, thoughts jumping off pages into the corracle of a cottonwood leaf drifting down the surface of the river, its infinitesimal weight sitting as a rounded meniscus, making of the water a pillow. The thoughts on the page, a thought drifting....huh? oh yes....So many thoughts to think and express. If I'm ever at a loss again, I'll just go wandering through the corridors and links of these blogs like I just did and find poets talking about the moon, garbage, homelessness and motorcycles all with commensurate passion. Passion, in all the words, feeling and expression and moonlight and shagbark and leaves that float even on the icy river and sometimes lights and hairdos and okay even family blogs but you have to skip a bunch of words and just make somthing of them. Surf the blogs and start to follow some. Find the words, the passion, the things about the universe that most people try hard not to notice, lest they become too poetical, too engaged in seeing the infinitesimal, in feeling the ghosts.

12/1/10 a rapid recovery

Not sure what brought on the soreness, but it's always good to feel instantly, surprisingly better. When that happens, there is this huge glowing corona of energy around the joint that was sore, and you keep walking around with unexpected lightness where you're not sure you ought to be feeling it, like you are almost tripping over the empty space that used to hold an unbearably painful wound.

11/29/10 a Brit-flavored pub

Dark and fusty, with coats-of-arms in frames on the ceiling above the bar. Fusty because we don't allow smoking indoors anywhere anymore in this state, and I don't think this place has been properly aired out since the law went into effect five years ago. Fusty because it was kind of dark and I didn't even notice the colors of the wall--they could have been made of wood planks, for all I remember. And don't ale and whiskey drinkers love their political posters? On all the walls, calls to dissent and speak one's mind. Lovely and enchanting. And most of all, and I want you to know it is a great effort for me to acknowledge this: Pub food. My friend had some kind of meat pie with handmade crisps, and I had a basket of fries. Both meals came with a glop of rust-colored goo in a portion dish. Waitress called it cajun aioli, but when I tried it, it didn't taste. I ate a few crisps before ordering my own chips. And the food, let me just say, tasted like it was made in a joint where the sweat of one's brow is appreciated, and good friends are as comfortable as old sweaters, and no one cares whether you've washed your face yet that day. But fabulously so, and to find it in the land of renovate everything was awesome.

11/28/10 a collection of prints
Let's face it, going to see art anytime is fabulous. It's arty, it's topsy-turvy, it's giddy and florescent and fun--it's little pieces of metal and wood and paper and flecks and blobs of paint and other colors spread and strewn over their matrices so as to wake you up & draw your attention--first to itself, and then to the world around you that it is commenting on. Too abstract? Linoleum cut story prints, flat and black and heavy, I like how block prints are so dark, like heavy shadows, like shadow puppets. And the painted colors, not sure what process that was, the panoramic nature shots, and how did she decide which roots under the washed river bank to paint? And the polymer prints, chickens around a yard, chickens!!! I so want to do art around chickens (but for now, I'll have to focus on songbirds), and the poem on the weird metal cardboard wood shapies, like a disassebled letterpress with poetry in two languages, the warms of wood and paper, and the cool of sheetmetal and ink. Warm and cool, shredded and burnished, sanded and filed. One of a kind books. What if I made a book and it was only for a one-time reading, or only to be read at a certain place, a certain exhibit. Prints are great when they make you think about the world, about art, about yourself.