How To Build an Owl
A gorgeous little poem by Kathleen Lynch, via swiss miss.
Be sure to check out Kathleen Lynch’s other poems, I love her style!
Category Archives: poetry
and the green three-toed sloth whistles far and wee
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
—[in Just-] from Chansons Innocentes by e.e. cummings
Fooling around in my journal pages recently. I couldn’t think of what to paint after I’d done the striped clouds on this journal page, and slowly, out of my not-caring and my not-thinking of very much at all, came this cahracter. My queer little balloonman is neither lame nor ominously, sexually goat-footed; he’s a harmless giant three-toed sloth, sporting the greenish fur that many sloths develop during the rainy season, as a result of algae growing in special grooves in their fur. Sloths, like sly satyr balloonMen, communicate (far and wee) with whistle-like sounds.
Below, painting of a bunch of slightly sinister allium blooms that was really an experiment in laying down blocks of background color using a large square piece of foam, and the sort of rippled texture created when you pull the foam away from the wet, semi-translucent paint.
I find the subject of flowers—unless they are stylized into ornamental ones—very awkward to do…am not used to drawing or painting realistic ones at all. I’ve been asked to do a painting of flowers for an acquaintance’s mother, in exchange for the 6-meter roll of absolutely gorgeous Belgian linen painter’s canvas that he didn’t know what to do with and just gave to me. So I have been trying to get used to the idea of painting flowers, though I realize that these alien-looking spore-balls are not what he means. The guy is a local drunk and a grease-monkey off the oil rigs…i.e. very working class, and I’ll bet my money that his idea of a good painting of flowers is “like a photograph”. I can hear the echoes of countless old biddies at the art stalls in airports the world over: “Oh, my, now isn’t that clever?! They look so real, just like a photograph! So clever“. (Oh, hey, now there’s an idea. I could get a flower photograph blown up and printed on canvas, then shlop on some transparent textural acrylic medium to look like dimensional brush strokes. Dear old mum probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Just kidding. I may be a cynical person, but I have a little integrity. So I am thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, because I would be happier doing a large close-up of a flower than the usual “flowers-in-a-vase on a tablecloth” arrangement. But really, I don’t have an idea, yet…it could turn out completely different from anything he, or I, anticipate!
Like this:
Sweetness
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ….
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
Sweetness, a poem by Stephen Dunn
Like this:
Bleezer’s Ice Cream
Filling up on music these days… loving this fun little song by Natalie Merchant from her Leave Your Sleep album. Despite the strange combinations of flavours, the list made me hungry last night! I love her voice. Check out my 8track mix, with Bleezer’s Ice-Cream as well as Maggie and Milly and Molly and May…originally a poem by e.e. cummings, both from Merchant’s album. I threw in some other tracks, too…about poets, about love, about sailors, and something to strip to.
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run Bleezer’s Ice-Cream Store,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before,
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
why not do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list:
COCOA MOCHA MACARONI
TAPIOCA SMOKED BOLONEY
CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW
CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW
TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO
TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO
LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN
MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER’S ICE-CREAM STORE,
taste a flavor from my freezer,
you will surely ask for more.
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
come on, do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list.
ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI
YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI
SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH
SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH
BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE
POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL
PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM
PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM
AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT
PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT
BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER
CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER
COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD
CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD
ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP
TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP
GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA
LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA
ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET
WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER’S ICE-CREAM STORE,
taste a flavor from my freezer,
you will surely ask for more.
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
come on, do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list.
Related articles
- Shredded Wheat Ice Cream (ideasinfood.com)
Like this:
Huntsman and quarry
I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that’s neither noble nor complex.
Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.
—sonnet from Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939) by Edna St.Vincent Millay
Painted this in one afternoon. I’m going through my “unrequited lust” stage, now…this always happens when Kris has been gone a month or two. Who would believe the dramatic episodes that a woman living alone can go through? Funniest part about it is that, on the surface of things, life continues in its normal way. I go to work, I meet friends, I shop for cat food and apple juice. But my libido is in turmoil, and my demented nights seethe with a sexual appetite that unnerves me. I tend to drink alone a lot, at this stage, and play a lot of velvety-voiced jazz, and dance in the dark with my arms wrapped around myself, and read feverish poetry, and fantasize. Some nights I feel like screaming with the frustration, and think that I must have an amorous encounter—anything! anything!—or throw myself overboard! I feel like a teenager. Or a cat in heat. Hence the painting, and the fragment of sonnet (that I painted from memory and have only just realized I got wrong…it’s “nightfall” not “midnight”).
It seems so ridiculous when I write about it, and right now I laugh at my histrionics, but believe me, I’ve spent quite a few sleepless nights staring at the moon this past week, thinking that if someone perhaps came along in the dark now, I might devour him. Would I? Not really…I still possess a shred of reason, and that’s always been enough to prevent me from doing something really stupid. But god, I ache for some serious lovin’!
The ground, so solid and dependable just a few weeks ago, suddenly seems like a soft, treacherous film floating on a swamp. It’ll pass, it always does (maybe it was last week’s full moon?) but until then, I tread softly! And paint, paint, paint…
Like this:
Strawberry Moon
When I have baked white cakes
And grated green almonds to spread upon them;
When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberries
And piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter;
When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working;
What then?
To-morrow it will be the same:
Cakes and strawberries,
And needles in and out of cloth.
If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter,
How much more beautiful is the moon,
Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree;
The moon,
Wavering across a bed of tulips;
The moon,
Still,
Upon your face.
You shine, Beloved,
You and the moon.
But which is the reflection?
The clock is striking eleven.
I think, when we have shut and barred the door,
The night will be dark
Outside.
—Interlude by Amy Lowell, from Pictures of the Floating World (1919)
A quiet love poem. I enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry, in general, but the imagery here—of strawberries, needlework, and the moon—feels a little like home right now.
It’s coming up to strawberry season again…the prices are dropping, and the fruits are getting massive. I remember reading, in a copy of Farmer’s Almanac that Dad brought from a trip to the U.S, that Native Americans gave each full moon in the year a name. Full Strawberry Moon is actually the name for June’s moon, but since we’re getting strawberries now, it’s my Strawberry moon month.
I love strawberries. The story is that my mom wanted to eat strawberries when she was pregnant with me. No idea whether that’s actually true, but it may explain my voracious love for the plump berries. Though broccoli makes me wild, too, and I don’t recall Mum ever wanting to eat broccoli during a pregnancy. Besides, that’s not a very romantic before-you-were-born story, is it? “Your mother wanted to eat nothing but broccoli when she was carrying you, and you looked just like one when you were born; that’s why you have curly green hair…and smell a little funny.”
Related articles
- Seasonal Eats: Strawberries (fitsugar.com)
- The Earth May Have Had Two Moons? (adailyglimpse.com)
Like this:
Nana wheels and some lively kishka…
Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.
—Repulsive Theory By Kay Ryan
today brought 26″ crocheted doily wheels…
and snakey things that Kris says are кишечник (‘kishka‘…intestines). I prefer to think of them as happy spaghetti and mie goreng noodles… 
Related articles
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- A Rather Lovely Doily Wedding (aratherlovelywedding.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Not-So-Still Life
Lucked out this morning…had one of those serendipitous moments of everyday gorgeousness as I sat down to breakfast by myself.
It was cold on deck and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. I pinned a bedsheet to the clothesline to air it, then shuffled around getting something to eat. I had wolfed down most of the kalamata bread in dry chunks, had peeled and quartered an orange, and was about to pour a second coffee and bundle away to my work table inside (out of the wind and cold) when the arrangement on the table in front of me stopped me in my tracks. All I had to do was move that old brass lamp a little to the left, and take the picture.
The sheer unlikelihood of an arrangement like this forming by itself, in our utilitarian and generally unattractive home—rather than having gone around trying to set things up for a photo—and then my having spotted it even though I wasn’t feeling creative or receptive to anything, strikes me as being ten times more precious than the beautiful or attractive things that I work on, think about, influence and pour my creative resources into.
And it made me wonder whether there mightn’t be two kinds of creativity—the kind that imposes itself upon the world, making something out of nothing, “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land…” sort of thing…and the kind that simply looks around, and sees the beauty and perfection that has always just been there—and which one would I prefer to have?
Or maybe they are two sides of one coin, and you cannot have one without the other?
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