Category: verbal

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orderly

I’m putting my house in order at the most incremental, cellular, specific object level. I must touch everything. Everything bears scrutiny. From the overlooked piles of intention to jumbled drawers and cupboards. I am caught up in the throes of outright mania for order– sorting, sifting, unstacking, and arranging everyday objects, glassware as well as curiosity cabinets full of odds and ends collected, squirreled away for years.

Partly this is evaluating stock for the theoretical etsy store, which I can’t seem to get off the ground– and partly it is just the hoarder’s habit of acquisition and utterly grudging parting from mundane yet enamored objects.

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balcony garden, redux

All I want to do is sit out on the back porch with the finches and breezes and swinging chimes, snacking on hummus and reading escapist novels– but I’m chased indoors by the broiling sun.

To work. Preserved by air conditioning and sucking down jars of cold water.

Just now a voracious gust attempted to yank the propped screen door off its hinges. Then suddenly everything is still, heart-shaped moonflower leaves swaying as if spent.

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balcony garden

I’m worrying my tomatoes may never ripen this year. It’s been unseasonably cool.

Another year and I long for the abundance of garden tomatoes in the Augusts of my childhood–fat slices sluiced with balsamic vinegar and olive olive and scattered with black pepper and scissor-cut basil.

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doomy

Hell, as that single searing jaunt through the Mojave Desert in the middle of July in a Renault Le Car sans AC attested, would be hot.

Under general heat advisory, Floyd and I hunker down inside next to the single chugging window unit. We maintain a cooler distance than usual, minimizing unnecessary activity. Larger mass of water consumption is notable on both our parts.

Lesson of the day: when the hot, grim, viral apocalypse descends, warlord kings will command access to clean, fresh water.

Which only makes the entire sold-out state of Michigan’s surrounding lakes so doom-drenched. Our largest Great Lake, so deeply voluminous and stormy clear– expendable in the name of commerce and industry.

Whee.

I have American History X out from Netflix. I’ve ordered it for some reason (Ed Norton), having recalled it (Ed Norton) as brilliant (Ed Norton) if nigh-unbearably grim, which today I think perhaps I should forego, for all the (sigh) Ed Norton.

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carnies

today I’m liking using navelgazer’s scrolling slideshow as an associative mosey back through the texty archives– so here’s another one, to consider, to reconsider, down the drafty internet eons from the heady Topic Project days of yore…

May 1, 2005

carnies.

The only carny I ever met was set up on a side street in Lower Manhattan—Ring Toss or Pea Wheel or what have you—Lorelei and I had run down to Pearl River for me to pick up some last-minute gifts/trash care of the Chinatown importers before my flight back to Iowa. I’d spent the week in long braids, littler clothing than I can fit into today, and had run the gamut of a line-up of metropolitan dates—at that stage I was chomping at the bit to flee my landlocked midwest life, feeling oppressively single, lonely, and questioning every last choice, not least of which the choice stemming from seeming inertia to continue on with the whole debt-incurring business of graduate school toward the ultimate, and long distance, goal of acquiring a Ph.D.—not to mention in a social science field when I knew myself to be a humanities girl through and through. Lorelei had moved east mere weeks before and had been living amid the musty waste of a dead or institutionalized old man’s West Side apartment, lining up his oddball and in places ingenious art collection for sale. Trying to keep the orphaned lapdog from shitting all over the place or driving the co-op members to action with its barking. New York. It all sounded good enough to me—intriguing at least if distinctly urban gothic—and I’d been shopping the New York Public School System’s web site for possibilities. I figured under the declaration of general literacy emergency even an MFA in poetry just might slip into a position at the front of a high school classroom. So this was intended as my initial, reconnaissance trip. Plus I’d been keeping myself busy with the dates lined up ahead of time online—somewhat flakey and sleazy across the board, but farmland beggars get down off their high horses and quit being so choosy after awhile. In any case, I felt just fine, sporting my particular exotic brand of pseudo-rural persona, done up in overalls with the tiniest of tshirts beneath and braids aided by sparkly little-girl butterfly clips—working that I’m-in-the-big-city-and-young-enough-and-desirable-enough-and-the-horizon-stretches-wide-before-me swagger—when that horizon literally split itself open with thunder a hundred feet outside Pearl River’s exit, and we dashed down the first side street and under a handy striped awning. We noticed then that the thoroughfare was closed off to motor traffic and lined with a series of such tented mechanical midway contraptions as make up a carnival these days—convertible trailers that uncollapsed to reveal a variety of culturally regurgitated Fun: Balloon-a-Rama, Spinna Winna, Hoop Shot, Rising Water, Frog/Turtle Pounce, Spill the Milk, and the like. Cheap plushies strung up swaying in the blowing rain. Hawkers leaning against their respective rentals each with the compulsory cigarette curled in a fist. Our guy shot us a lazy smile, invited us to try our luck, and, receiving a negative, proceeded to regale us with tales from The Life. In fact I’ve lost the details to the intervening years and doubt my own powers to reimagine the specific flavors of ramble and sawdust—chintzier and grittier than our wide-eyed romantic notions of carny life comprehended—but that tang of modern gypsydom—free agents contracting their chosen midway specialties, packing ‘em up and driving on to the next town in caravan with all the rest—or maybe packing in for a couple months to surf or hike should the notion seize—it smacked essentially of freedom to fresh-sprung workshop poets. And as we walked away, headed for the subway back uptown, Lorelei and I marveled together at the sheer weirdness of the world’s, and by extension our lives’, scope of possibility.

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squeaky

I have that squeaky-sinus thing, summer cold, yadda yadda, and it’s making me cranky. The spouse grows weary of my standard litany of plaint.

The aging, freon-scented window unit keeps things bearable in darkened rooms. Cicadas revs up for August.

I have decided to stop giving away good work for free. Let’s call it cranky and angry and be done with it.

I flop down on the unmade bed and lie texting confessional Facebook posts and then deleting them. It bugs me that Facebook makes it a fucking labyrinthine puzzle to figure out how to set my privacy settings so that certain people can see absolutely nothing about me or my life, motherfuckers.

Any minute now my nostril’s gonna squeak again.

Also I’ve wept about four times already today. Woo.

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godsmark

Self-styled creative retreat to T and J’s Michigan farm. Floyd and I are just getting settled. We sit out on the screened porch glider, listening to spring peepers, night birds, and one lone, distant jet.

I have escaped Chicago.

…

Sitting in the warm sunshine on the side door stoop, listening to the birds, I try to unwind this city self.

At the sound of a pickup out on the gravel road I jump up and holler for the dog, then realize he’s right there, sniffing happily at something in the grass just a few yards away.

I go sit on the back porch glider, dog trailing, and watch chicken tv for awhile. Chicken tv is extremely relaxing.

…

Things I forgot to bring:

  • meds
  • a belt

Things I have done so far:

  • feed cats & dog
  • collect eggs
  • wash laundry and hang it out on the line in the sun
  • set up creative work area
  • set up digital work area
  • email T&J
  • text Chris
  • drink coffee
  • locate a crick in my neck
  • train Floyd to stay close, come, leave Fern alone, leave Maisie alone, do not chase chickens
  • shout and wave arms at three large circling birds of prey
  • take many pictures

Birds I have seen:

  • several breeds of chicken (cluck-cluck-clucking quietly to themselves as they peck around under the bird feeder then SQUAWK)
  • red winged blackbirds (chuck-chuck-chuck or piercing cherroo– bullies at the feeder)
  • something delicate and shiny black with an iridescent purple head
  • something that looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo and a red ascot
  • something smallish and grey with a black cap and white on its throat and cheeks
  • sparrows with white racing stripes
  • a woodpecker with a red head

Birds I have only heard:

  • chickadee (chick-a-dee-dee-dee– which I hear in my mother’s singing voice)
  • cardinal (cheer cheer cheer)
  • crow (caw-caw-caw)
  • something crying too-WHEET with a rising pitch
  • something whistling whole notes round as a roll of lifesavers
  • something going chur-chur-chur-chur-chur superfast

One of the neighbors is chainsawing for a long time. I imagine a big tree falling.

A chipmunk skitters by.

 

…

For a moment I think I hear a crowd or distant loudspeaker voice, but then I realize it’s one of the gigantic hovercraft bumblebees hanging suspended in the evening spring air.

…

It’s remarkable how sound carries out here; there’s been an unexpected backdrop of machine noise, loud against the pervasive quiet: field-plowing tractor, that buzz saw, what seems to be a motorcycle rally across the lake. And tonight from a new direction what sounds like someone inflating a gargantuan air mattress.

…

Continuing the list:

  • red squirrels chirring and chattering from overhead branches
  • identified: brewer’s blackbird (shiny black/purple head)
  • identified: yellow bellied sap sucker (woodpecker @ feeder)
  • potful of red wigglers underneath the doormat
  • wren trilling and burbling up and down the scale with madcap glee
  • red winged blackbirds, clear and sharp back and forth between the bird feeder and treetops
  • fat matronly hens chuckling to themselves

…

At sunset the wind dies down and everything becomes quiet– all but a May-mad cardinal and the lumbering bumblebees. Spring peepers start up out in the marshy woods.

…

Crosslegged in wildflower studded grass, photographing 360• snaps, buzz saw just audible over the empty field to the east, occasional far-off jet crossing hollowly overhead, twin-engine grumbling crosswise at lower altitude, here and there a vehicle shushing by on the road down the hill, call and repeat from treetops and brush– and it hits me how this place got its name.

Displaying 2013-05-02

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drafts & inhalations

drawers

draftyThe halls of navelgazer shake off a hanging gloom of mornings, having languished forward through a sloggy season of desaturating monochrome.

spring parkBut out into this early April evening stride Sir Floyd and I, straight into a dozen springing drizzles, I stooping to snag blown bits of litter from the winter-neglected garden’s corners, draggled onward by dog tow…

When the doggone leash snags taut on wayward fork of ornery native fenceline (we’re constantly reconstructing after disassembling kids), and Floyd and I become of an instant equal creatures yanked sideways by momentum.

Senor Floggsbottom so abruptly displaced, dusts off dainty dog dignity, stands stoic, poised frozen til I’ve done my human part with opposable thumbs.

Stretching forth fingers and limbs indeed feels appropriately lively, bending self to touch world with actual hands, to clear away all the rubbish that’s been cluttering up my view.

daffodilsRestoring myself thus by gesture, I walk the park and play a kind of catchup  stewardship. Out in open air I begin again to think outside the frame of house and windows and look around our little park with a discerning eye, noting things throughout that could benefit from Earth Day volunteer attentions–

… benches chipping & mossy & rotten in places…
… pergola marked up with graffiti…
…gardens needing dead leaves and stems cleared out & composted…
… and of course the ever-drifting litter…

Soon enough though I’m sprung delighted from my little list of ills by bursting sprouts of bloom, unseen initially on walking out with a dim squint but suddenly springing into focus–

sneaky pokes of green shot up through trodden brown like hope from rain!
sudden! vivid! daffodils in sunshine brilliant hues freshening all around the sky-grey air!

drawers

Back home I pause, considering, from time to time, the stray homely oddments I’ve gleaned while out dogwalking down alleys and parkway fences, all my little treasure trove of left-behind things reclaimed from scrap– adopted and named and sorted into drawers lettered round things, shiny things, odd, orphaned pieces.

In places they’re little more than ragged tatters anymore.

evening lightReclaimed, resituated toys populate my houseplants, performing small scenarios of tropical and interplanetary drama in miniature.

The mourning doves are back out back– just heard one whir in for a landing.

Right before the end of day the house gets drenched with honeyed setting light, and I quite simply couldn’t be happier.