bas relief of home

I find it impossible to title posts before I’ve written them (titling poems is even harder– thinking up lines that might serve for titling is a doomed venture, viable poems seldom proceeding, yielding virtual drawers full of unused lines too singular to incorporate organically). typically I stumble over possible title words like gravel while drafting, tumbling handfuls to good-feeling combinations in the process of editing.

I’ve been thinking lately about the many possible places, instants, and details that define “home,” having just visited one of them– and having even more recently returned to another. homes that were and homes that are. I return to snow and blackened streets, brown-black trees, things standing out in the cold as outlines of themselves, palimpsest of footprints ringing the park.

I sit beside the front window of my third floor apartment and reacquaint myself after days away with the sensory details of daily life in these parts– pedestrian traffic, street traffic, train bell clanging. suburbia was and is another world, both different from and the same as it once was: new shiny stores, parking lots, municipal library; eternal mothers with coiffed greying hair, christmas-themed sweaters of primary colors, ankle length fur coats tip-tapping across the street in the village; tailgating drivers, deserted streetscapes dotted with for sale or lease signs, christmas light festooned front lawns and orderly facades.

my mother in perpetual powder blue robe and quilted slippers; my mother seeking me out around midnight with a flashlight through the dark back hallway to where I lie in bed after tiptoeing in from visiting with my sister; my mother laughing off losing her train of thought, apologizing for eating slowly, backseat driving turn by turn by turn, my mother’s running commentary; my mother gone to bed early, sleeping late, talking from the other room; my mother’s saved gift boxes and cereal boxes, magazines and clothing, my mother’s plenty drifting spare rooms and closets, sediment of intention burying itself– my mother, my self.

my father sitting reading enormous tomes in his barrel-backed library chair, my father typing away at the computer in my old bedroom for hours, finishing the times sunday crossword puzzle at the breakfast table in minutes; my father cooking farm-delivered bacon for breakfast, four slices each, hunks of meat roasted to succulence, damned roast beef hash; my dad scowling and false-laughing and real(I think) laughing, telling tales at the dinner table; my father looking down, taking his time to answer, not hearing, my father enduring.

last night I dreamed of a prep school reunion set at huron mountain– convergence of anxieties and identities and situational drama. the details are sketchy at best, eroded to the vaguest feeling.

days these days

here’s how it starts: I’ll flail around wasting time for awhile– seemingly intentionally, as flagrantly wasteful as I can imagine being– for the emptier the pursuits, the sooner I grow bored with my own stink of purposelessness and take up beginning something (beginning being fraught with possibility and dread).

maybe start small with getting dressed. I can handle getting up to go play with wardrobe, putting on this and that, guided by texture and color, delicate details, minor outrageousness. then move on to doing things to hair and face. make myself my own bygod barbie head. practice seeing reflected the artist I want to be. what color would she wear today? lately she likes teals and slate blue with brown or grey defined by black, pima cotton, buttons and small gathers.

eventually I’ll veer off into taking snapshots with my iphone. lazy girl’s photography. rearrange cutups in a cigar box stage, suspend leaf patterns from pieces of wire and copper nails, dab on paint and stray bits of language. lazy girl’s art. blog a bit with an exaggerated air of carelessness and lack of capitalization. o, the everlasting creative twostep of approach/retreat.

yesterday I set up the alt.computer to amend the artplay table into digital hybridity with the addition of a wedged-in cabinet lifted up on blocks (in the end the tire jack didn’t work) and now have a prime windowseat command center for a range of creative endeavors.
floyd so enjoyed the view that I made him his own little window perch.

in the process of getting the workstation setup, I semi-ceremoniously shoved over the uppershelf flotsam to make way for printer/scanner, and consequently have some rearranging leftover for someday– my grownup’s dollhouse area of objects.

this afternoon I donned a farmwife white apron with blue embroidered swallows and relished the slip of pepitas clicking into a bowl. concocted a rich autumn soup from winter squash and eggplant with goat cheese for zing.