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9 entries this month
Crescent Will
06:22 Sep 30 2008
Times Read: 1,222
She stirs again, restless tonight
In the bed she shares with her love,
Yesterday asleep between her thighs.
South wind sighs and winds
Down the tracks, nose to the scent,
The intoxicating scent of her skin.
She smells like tomorrow night
Stretched across bedsheets,
Incense and sex
And the warmth of her thighs.
She stirs again, restless tonight
In the bed where she thinks of me.
Her eyes see through the ceiling
To the medicine wheel whispering
The verdant shade of her eyes.
"South," whispers the wind
When four AM is at its darkest
When it is not easy to admit
The thinking, the wandering
And the warmth of her thighs.
Clips and Shades
06:48 Sep 23 2008
Times Read: 1,294
“Like a drowned rat,” she said, rummaging in her sewing case. It was avocado green, a shade so popular through much of the 70s, and I was completely fascinated by it because of its resemblance to her father’s tackle box. Both were hard plastic and featured dozens of little compartments in different shapes to perfectly organize the exotic things they placed inside. I suppose I never had a chance with a genetic predisposition for all things compartmentalized. I would grow up to have an appreciation for desk drawer organizers that would border on the obsessive.
“That’s just what you look like, you know. A drowned rat.” My mom held up her orange-handled sewing scissors triumphantly. For a Cajun girl, her assessment of my appearance made my cheeks go warm. In south Louisiana, river rats were a very real part of life. The cruelest of our schoolyard chants haunted my dreams and I worried incessantly that “fat, fat the water rat” might someday be aimed at me. My mom was so pretty, the youngest and prettiest of all the moms, while I bordered on the larger side of Just Right with pinchable cheeks that invited everyone over 50 to have a squeeze.
She walked toward me with her scissors and I knew that I did not like the look in her eyes. I gulped. She cut. I was scandalized the way only a second grader could be. Everyone knew that “all one length” was a sign of hair commitment and we all aspired to have Marcia Brady locks. Everyone but my mom. I risked a glance at her Tenille cut that she hot-rollered toward her face with a precision envied by the Osmond family and ice skaters everywhere. I was not impressed.
My dread grew in proportion to the pile of brunette clippings that heaped and deepened beside my Keds. Mom lifted my chin in her left hand while she fashioned bangs with the right. It was hard to believe that there could be anything left to cut, but she snipped away like a mad woman. I closed my eyes and tried to think of anything other than the itch that screamed along my neck, growing worse every second. "You've got to suffer to be beautiful," she quipped. It sounded only half prophetic. When at last it was over, my mother insisted that I look into the bathroom mirror while she whisked away at the tile floor. The dam broke then and my tears came so hard and fast I thought I’d die right there in the chair. My mom hugged me tight and cooed words I didn’t completely hear…words that sounded like “adorable” and “pixie.”
Staring back at me was a very sad little boy in a homemade yellow sundress. In the middle of his uneven bangs, a small hillock kicked up rebelliously. My mom muttered “cowlick.” She licked her finger and tried to smooth it down. The hateful lump would not be so cheaply bought, not even with the magic beauty secret of mom spit. Now that it had been awakened from its dormant sleep, that cowlick would become my lifetime companion. I wear my hair long these days and the stubborn cowlick shoves the right side directly into my eyes. Many are the mornings that I wake, glance into the mirror, and make a face at the drowned rat who wrinkles her own nose back in greeting.
Somehow, though, I’ve grown into my cowlick in the same way that I’ve grown into a new shade of the people I have loved. I see bits of them in the face that looks back. There was a time that becoming like the people in my family rankled. I was an individual, dammit, a rebel on my own course to set the world on fire. I could not fly out of their homes fast enough to make my own way! But as the lines in my face reflect the experiences of my life and reshape me so earnestly into the patterns of my people from whose cloth I was cut, I take hold of the cherished ribbon that binds me to grandparents, mom, dad, and even Aunt Eunice and her dreaded cheek-pinches. I wrap that ribbon around my kids. Allie snickers and moves the stapler to the tape dispenser compartment in my desk drawer; I glance at Caitlin and recognize the eye-roll that only a seventh-grader can pull off. I smile nostalgically, reach into the scissors compartment and think to myself that they could both use a little trim.
Composed
02:21 Sep 15 2008
Times Read: 1,443
I love the feel of charcoal and a fresh page in my sketch book. I run my fingertips across a new sheet, relishing the texture and the promise of this paper to romance my pencil, holding color and shape, clothing itself in the sweeps of my imagination. I think of new beginnings, searching my paper the way a sculptor might caress a new block of stone, my dance more humble, but the need to breathe life all too similar.
Soft, feathering strokes give shape to what exists only in my mind and I can feel the world pull slightly away from my fingertips where time keeps pace only with my heart and hand. Sound is muffled and there is only the the magic of a willow twig and the glorious feel of paper beneath my hands. The edges of the world dance just beyond my reach should I care to grasp for things of this earth. I am far, far from land and sea.
Oh, the smudging is my favorite part, preferring where I can, to use my own fingers, softening the lines and deepening shadows. All that I have within me belongs on this paper and I channel love, hate, and wonder into the lines that blend, bend, disappear, and emerge again.
The very last detail is all that is left. It is the step of transference, my breath into you, bringing you to life. I have left a space in your eyes. These are the brightest points in my sketch; the paper alone is visible, that same promise of new beginnings unshaded, but wearing still my touch where I brushed my fingers across the page when you were but my dream. You are the reflection of light within my eyes, the glint of tomorrow promised to me alone.
And I love you.
No Red, Red Rose Am I
20:33 Sep 14 2008
Times Read: 1,472
All that I have I do not give to you.
I want not all that you are.
My love for you has boundaries,
Which is the truth of love.
How do I love thee?
In the hand that reaches for you
Because my trust is well-placed there.
In the laughter that can match your teeming wit.
In the promise that I will neither lie nor quit.
My love is not sweet sixteen,
And often, I do not faint.
My heart sometimes skips the flutter.
We have world enough and time
Together at each day's start and close
To talk and kiss and lean on one another.
Often, my love is quiet
When you most need my voice, soft inside your ear
And not my silent lips and broken bits of fear.
My love is flawed and I am simply I.
No red, red rose of morning light am I
Nor is the blush of Spring upon my cheek.
Oh, love to hear me speak, yet well you know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
Grant that you never saw a goddess go,
And when I walk, I tread upon the ground:
And yet by heaven, think my love as rare,
As any love belied with false compare.
*Thank you Andrew Marvell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Shakespeare (allusions made to each,)and to all poets who have undertaken to capture the romantic mystery of Lady Love.*
PRIVATE ENTRY
20:27 Sep 13 2008
Times Read: 1,492
• • • • PRIVATE JOURNAL ENTRY • • • •
PRIVATE ENTRY
17:21 Sep 09 2008
Times Read: 1,544
• • • • PRIVATE JOURNAL ENTRY • • • •
A Choreography of Epsilon
04:13 Sep 08 2008
Times Read: 1,605
If the Earth must have an axis, why not me?
I am inclined in a skyward reach, arcing back,
Letting the soles of my feet extend to her core,
Forged anew in the furnace of her belly
Until my toes emerge, newly born from her polar crust.
I feel the dance of the universe in vibration
Along the length of my body and my soul rejoices.
Sur les pointes, pirouetting on the palm of the Creator,
I lengthen my neck, raising my face toward heaven
Where it is warmed in the aria of the morning sun,
And I am attuned to the ancient song of the stars.
Ghost Writer
18:38 Sep 05 2008
Times Read: 1,676
I am missing myself,
Walking the world one step, one step more…
The echo of my footfall empty to my own ear,
As empty as the words I hear myself form,
Words that paw at the ground
Snort, then circle around
I keep my eyes low
Wrapping myself in safe avoidance,
Like the blanket I tugged over my head
When I was a young girl
And safety ended at the edges of my bed.
I must ground myself
Must touch you again, one touch, so brief…
As though you are a wire surrogate
And I am a frightened chimpanzee child.
Reading the mirror shards
Reflecting the schoolyards
Ghosts so real to me
More real than the morning dew,
Where my dog rolls and celebrates the earth
With clear abandon
Each day scented a sun-warmed timeless mirth.
I have lost my place
Searching for the right page, one page, one page…
Mindful of the glue binding it. Binding me.
This mustiness I knew before my own name,
I am the child of books
And puzzled looks
Daughter of the written word
Lighting candles for a heroine lost,
Each letter murderously honed
Whetted on chagrin,
Penned with misgiving, each line painfully owned.
Camping in Mississippi...ahhhh. Crickets, diesel, and banjos21:30 Sep 01 2008
Times Read: 1,775
Hi, all! What a great sight it was to come back and see the updates and good wishes. Love you all and sure miss my VR stomping grounds.
We're still in the campground. They have wireless internet! BUT you can't get it from the site...too far away. So... I can access it via battery. Not a lot of time on battery, but enough to say a few quick hellos. Looks like the storm has been a much nicer fellow than we expected. Never underestimate praying on your knees with all your heart!
Mom has been doing some fine cooking...she saved everything in her freezer in 4 icechests. She is cooking red beans and rice right now. MB and Savvy have been perfect companions. I've done a lot of reading and am about to give Twilight a try. Allie lioved it.
I'm hoping that we'll get the green flag and be home day after tomorrow. I love you all and will try to recharge the battery and get back on tonight.
STABB, you are officially on notice. How dare you not be online? In fact, where the hell are ALL of you? :P
COMMENTS
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birra
12:22 Sep 30 2008
...visions of a slice of heaven...
BlackTea
12:28 Sep 30 2008
Jo....wow. Simply yummy.
CTyler
15:43 Oct 02 2008
'Yummy' description seconded.
Certainly conjures images.
toor
03:53 Oct 06 2008
THIS IS ABOUT ME.