I’m weary, and sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy. The secrets that fill them are an extra weight I carry with me always. In the terror of those times, they were a fuel I swallowed eagerly, and they kept me alive then. How could I know that they would stay within, bricks cemented to my core?
We all had secrets. We were chameleons. Pierre/Paul/Hans—he had so many names. Were any of them real? Where are you? I’ve wondered for over a decade now. Oh, there have been rumors—he was sighted in Moscow, in Buenos Aires, in Singapore—but none of them have checked-out.
Yet, I can’t rest. I comfortable here in Maine, living on the pension from the job I’m not allowed to talk about. But I’m going back to France. I have one final lead to follow.
I’ve returned to my spies and Hopper for Linda’s prosery prompt at dVerse. She asks us to use the line: “Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,” from Mary Oliver’s “Spring Azures.”
Today the gray has strayed, and sunlight deepens– a color called cold water blue– unfrosted are the ripples where gulls and geese sway and gather on the shifting sand to sleep and talk and play.
Today there is no fog, nothing obscured in the grayish gloom, or hidden in ash-tipped cloud-rooms— today is clear, the sun is bright
joy, despair, most anything– one day, one night, one vote, one note of kindness can make a change, so
today I’ll take blue water and sky. And the hour in between dusk and night, dawn and day, the color of jays, stones, and glass robin’s eggs and midnight sky–ask when the moon sings a silver lullaby and forms a halo ‘round her face,
what is that place? And can we go? Perhaps, in dreams. I don’t know,
But today I’ll take the blue of peace and ripples that go on forever, one making another, another making one, lines merging in changing colors, sometimes grey, but today it’s blue and sun.
I went down a rabbit hole of blue yesterday reading Brainpickings and then following the links . And then today, the river was blue instead of the gray or tinted-pink it’s been. I haven’t been anywhere or done anything special in weeks, so I can only muse about this. I am happy that there were no big violent mobs yesterday, though I’m still anxious. I hope all goes well on Wednesday for the inauguration.
I have cooked and baked though.
Mandelbrot (aka Mommy Cookies)
No knead Artisan Bread
Merril’s Movie Club: We watched One Night in Miami (Amazon Prime). It’s an excellent movie based on a play by Kemp Powers, who adapted it for the screen, and directed by Regina King, in her movie directorial debut. It concerns a meeting in 1964 between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown right after Clay won the heavyweight title. The main, crucial moments of the movie take place in Malcolm X’s motel room where the men discuss, argue, explain, and try to make sense of their private-public lives. It feels like a real “room where it happened” historical moment. The movie is fictional, although the meeting did take place. The movie seems particularly timely right now.
-Marcel Herms “All the talk about getting results”
-Christine O’Connor
-Kerfe Roig “I was born (after Yayoi Kusama)”
All the Strands Carried, Come Together and Dissolve
The talking heads talk, on TV screens and from online streams, pontificate and remonstrate elucidate, and then negate— but flowers do not wait
for thoughts and prayers, the analysis of fools’ blares. Unaware of blithering-blather, the slathering lather of rabid madness—
feeling neither hope nor sadness, they simply do
until they’re through.
And, I am born, as are you– in their petal-dust, scattered or buried, river-ferried or eagle-carried, or by winds and air brought here—again, again, again–
then on a sigh, we’re here to live until we die, and nourish once more the flowers that grow and glow— with a wave to bees, a waltz for trees—
a balm we seize, a thread connecting bodies, earth, air, sea- from the stars reborn, hearts, heads—we.
Say there were shadows—there whispering beneath the fog—and– say there were blue-sprayed shapes watching with silent sea-tongues who wanted you to see
~beyond~
and after, and if, the bitter blows come, there is still the luscious scent of summer rain and a dream of light, of moon-song’s lingering silver after a storm.
Today’s message from the Magnetic Poetry Oracle. She always knows. The photo is from my walk earlier this morning.
These fuzzy-brained days– I’m a hand-puppet, waiting for direction, a sense of what to do, which way to go some sense at all to my sensibility—magical realism it may be when the surreal is real in this inside-out and upside-down world—where is the key to unlock it?
Somewhere, a butterfly flutters, and the world shudders; Somewhere a rabbit hops, escaping a predator, or setting off a bomb. Crow caws, and I open my eyes, there is light, crystalline bright— just over there. See?
For Paul Brookes’ Special January Ekphrastic Challenge, Day 9, I’m responding to “Ennui with eye “(KR) and “Ignore the real world forever” (MH).
-Kerfe Roig “ennui-with-eye-by-marcy-erb”
-Marcel Herms “Ignore the real world forever”
I’m weary of the grey January sky– the pewter-plated clouds simmer in gloom but never warm, despite their chafing, and their mumbling conversations drone on endlessly, causing the wind to bite in reply. And I–
I want to ignore the real—this forever-frost that beckons with a glistening smile, and then attacks with fierce lion claws, pinking my skin, but
I want color, bright red blooms and blue horses, grazing on emerald grass. I want to wake from a summer dream, to a robin gathering golden rays into song.
An unlikely traveler, with no longing for adventure, only a desire to live without fear.
Money exchanged, his life rearranged– one suitcase and a view of storm-chased clouds and waves like horses, galloping toward a hazy horizon, somewhere ahead
perhaps, there’s a quiet island, a house with windows looking out on azure sky and singing seas, golden-downed ducks and geese with bicycle horn honks—he laughs, it would be
a dream, he thinks, as a whale breaches–and for a moment they are eye-to-eye, connected, branches of the same ancestral tree– all of us–swaying to a universal rhythm. Shuffle, slide, snap, and with jazz hands twirl, smile. Tilt your head, in wonder
I liked all three pieces of art, but I responding to Kerfe Roig’s “Clarity” and Christine O’Connor’s (CO13).
Kerfe Roig “Clarity”
Christine O’Connor (CO13)
Clarity
Coming home from the ER, I felt a sense of clarity amidst the exhaustion, and in the over-awakened midnight hour, an owl hooted over and over again
calling for love, not warning, I decided. And for love, we returned to the hospital as the sun rose over the bridge to light the shadowed city streets.
Unfinished
There are ghosts in the secret garden drifting through the flowers’ birdwing-flutters, she senses them, but they are masked, invisible against the bright blooms, unfinished with this world, outside of time, inside the walls, they wait.
