Still at conference. Tired. Learning much. Sort of. Wrote poem but think maybe I better stick to elephants! Two more days!!!
Posted tagged ‘manicddaily’
More more output (sketch pad)
January 15, 2014New Output (pics)
January 14, 2014
Feeling a bit more comfortable (and well-fed) at legal conference I am attending. I still mainly stand against a back wall sketching as I listen and hoping people think that I am taking voluminous notes. (It is not, in fact, a bad way to listen as while sketching you are not, for example, checking you iPhone.)
Your encouragement from yesterday was most kind, and made me feel much less lonely here. Thanks.
PS – pictures posted not very well from phone – if you suspect you are not seeing the whole image, such as it is, please just click on it.
Just Getting By (With Pics)
January 13, 2014I generally try not to write too much about my work life in this blog. But desperate circumstances call for desperate measures, so today is an exception.
Okay, I am not truly desperate. What I AM is at a law conference in Orlando, Florida, studying up about law. (I am a practicing attorney for those who do not know.) The law part is interesting, except that the lectures go on for seven hours each day, and they are held in a huge very self-contained hotel in Orlando, Florida where they charge substantial amounts for internet in the rooms.
It is what many would consider a very nice hotel, and honestly, on one level, I am terrifically grateful that I can be here. But on another level, I also feel very–out of place.
I will not give the example regarding the lecture mentioning a famous painter whose estate generated a famous law suit. (I felt out of place there because I seemed to be one of the very few people who actually just love that painter’s paintings, regardless of monetary value or law suit.)
But here’s something–at the opening reception, everything they served was either meaty or a dessert! Okay, I sound whiny. Just because I don’t eat meat or (very often) dessert– It all looked pretty good. From afar. Not touching anything. Kind of hungry. All by myself.
I am just not a blender-inner, not a networker, not a hale-fellow-well-metter. What I tend to do in these conference situations is stand in a back corner and draw in a little notebook all the time listening intently. (I really do listen.) (I promise, say I, to any clients out there.)
As a result, I am posting today’s output because it really is rather lonely here (in the lobby), (listening to other people congregate), (and still, at 9:42, not certain what to do about dinner.)
Encouragement is encouraged.
P.S – a few of these drawings are for a specific book project–the one with the little girl and her mom and little girl and dog, though these are very preliminary sketches. (If your browser does not show whole pic and you want to see it, please just click on it.)
Lonely In A Florida Kitchen Morning
January 12, 2014
Lonely in a Florida Kitchen Morning
The words “low fat” do not feel like friendly greetings but name calling–hoots from the side lines of cabinets, shelves, fridge–they shout from every vantage point–”low” a descriptor of her brain state; “fat” an appellation for her personal container.
Though in her case, it’s more a heaviness of mind than body; too many unloseable layers.
As she shifts through the cupboard, “natural” clangs in. The straight faces of the boxes frankly amaze her–she, who knows perfectly well that cardboard does not shout in nature–
“Whole,” sneers the double-plasticked.
She remembers apples.
They too are body-bagged. Still, a burst of fellow feeling lifts her as she bends into the crisper to grab one, crunch.
Or rather, not crunch. But as something like sustenance syrups down her throat, her sense of good and evil is also re-affirmed.
She feels like an interloper withdrawing, she and her prize, as if she should back away, as if, like a time traveler, she should do everything in reverse. She hears at her back the silent fury of the “fiber,” the glares of the cornered cellophane–all those individual wraps of what were once food stuffs–so angry–as if she were the one who had labeled them–
And then, just as she steps back to the spare bedroom, she catches at the roof of the neighboring house, a pane of sky. How is it so perfectly blue, so blankly solidly blue? How does that happen here? Almost every day?
She goes back to the counter, reaches deep into one of the boxes. Breakfast cereal from a pseudo health-foody company, bought, she suspects, especially for her visit, or perhaps, one of her prior visits.
The oats and all the other stuff that make it–that is, what is left of oats and all the other stuff that make it–are shaped into little tan hearts. Too sweet, her mind says, as she crunches, too refined. She reaches down for another handful, and then crunching, another.
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Here’s a little sketch done while traveling. I am having a hard time posting, and so although I was in part inspired by Shanyn’s wonderful prompt on dVerse Poets Pub, about looking out a window, I am not linking this anywhere as I fear I will have a hard time returning comments. The photo is of a Florida sky, but not as clear a one as that described in the piece.
Wintry Mix
January 7, 2014
These are all pics taken before the big melt and the new cold. We had a jump of about 70 degrees and back over the last couple of days!
In city now and with dying computer and without my main mobile posting device i.e.iPad– so not sure what posting I will do for a little while. Take care.
New Mother, Turning To the Kora
January 4, 2014
New Mother, Turning To the Kora
When you still fit
my arms
like an instrument
beating rhythms
at my heart, you would, at times,
cry without cease,
without reason–without reason that I
could reason out–and I, almost without
reason myself, would play a music
of Kora and guitar
in which the strings,
sounding of bells,
plucked us from the closed-in walls
and wails,
lifted us
from the hard wood floor we walked, transported us
to some bigger brighter world where sun streamed
vibrationally, where leaves echoed, where
life strolled, where tears caught in scrunched cheeks seemed almost
ripples re-centering a well
on a day when one
craved water, a natural wrinkle
of wells and water.
Whirled shine glinted
upon our faces whether we looked
up or down, and even though, in that apartment,
metal gates shadowed the nearest windows;
we knew–even as an infant you could hear–
that the music held want as well
as tinkle, that knells mourn even as
they proclaim, that the lone also
harmonizes,
still you at last would smile, me
too, as if both of us were tuned
by those stringed scales,
so gratefully tethered.
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Here’s a draftish sort of poem just written for Marian Kent’s prompt on With Real Toads to respond to the wonderful music of Ali Farke Toure and Toumani Diabate–I love this music! When I was a new mother, I had a record that I used to listen to again and again –part of the subject of this poem. It is magical beautiful music. Thank you, Marian, for reminding me of it. (This poem has been slightly edited since first posting.)
On the Second Day
January 3, 2014
On the second day
of the two-thousand-fourteenth year, the world turned,
two cities in Iraq, two boys in Elmhurst, burned:
others saved from ice–nice–though that same ice
was melting all too fast.
Tomorrow rises
too often an occasion for more ash.
Still, we prise the phoenix:
still, we prize the phoenix;
still, we believe
in phoenixes.
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Here are 55 grim words (excluding the cheating title, which is truly part of the poem) for the G-Man. (Galen–I know apologies are unnecessary, but I feel bound to say that I HAVE written cheerful poems of late, but none have been in 55 words.)
I refer in the poem to certain events in the news yesterday–bombings in Iraq and a terrible fire in Queens, as well as the saving of the scientists/tourists in Antarctica.
The first picture is self-explanatory–the second a lace of ice on a window. It is now about minus 6 on our thermometer, during the day, the temp got up to a high of about 1 or 2. Beautiful but a little scary to walk around in–if you worry about things like the ongoing integrity of your cheeks or nose or even throat. (I had not before realized how cold air can burn going down.) I feel very lucky to be able to have the mini-adventure of going out into this cold, and the great blessing of a warm place to come back to.
Resolutions (Found Behind Old Ear)
January 1, 2014
Resolution (Found Behind Old Ear)
Past years, I resolved to be oh so much better,
to learn what I’d stored up in what seemed less wetter
spots behind each of my ears–oh my dears–
experience, surely, would keep me from wrong,
(the way that it hadn’t the prior year long.)
But the truth is life’s short, and craves what it will.
Oh it wants, yes, it wants, really wants, its full fill.
This year I won’t bother to aim towards my lessening
but instead I here vow to seek out more blessening.
“No red wine”–that line has cast less than a ripple
on the pond of my life, the barest of stipple,
So. for now, I’m just going to plan on some tippling–
And since the word rhymes, let’s not forget nippling–
By that, I mean fitting your fingers ‘round mine–
and your lips and your heart and your patience divine–
(for flesh is just great, oh flesh is just fine–
yours so much warmer than even red wine–)
But when, through the years, you’ve dried ear-behinds–
you find that it’s also plain sweetness that binds–
sweetness of words, “I love you’s” at night
when one of you gets up and without any light
crashes a door on the way to the loo,
cursing the shoe, oh the shoe, the damn shoe,
but kissing its owner when slipping to bed,
kissing me even while rubbing your head–
Sweetness of words and sweetness of skies
(the ones that our skins stretch over our sighs)
but also the great one that holds us intact
beneath its bright blues and its sterling black,
that arcs high above us though we will look down
as we try each to keep one shod foot above ground.
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Here’s a kind of silly poem for the prompt by the wonderful Kerry O’Connor on With Real Toads about resolutions. (Sorry for the old drawing, if you’ve seen before.)
Resolutions For Old/New Year
December 31, 2013
I had a sense that my new year’s resolutions were doomed when I looked down at the page on which I was starting to write them and saw I’d titled it “List for 2013.”
There’s a part of me that viewed that as one more sign of my decay, but then a good old defensive part kicked in. Ah, I told myself–maybe a mini-review of what held me back in 2013 would be a far more useful exercise than taking random stabs at that great but as yet unwedged pie in the sky of the upcoming year.
So what would I change in my personal 2013, if I had it to do over?
It came down surprising quickly to two words–”resistance” (as in having less) and “quiet” (as in being more.)
Resistance is a shorthand for the concerns of the Serenity Prayer–you know, the one about having the courage to change what one can, the strength to accept what one can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.
By resistance, I basically mean all those acts of non-acceptance and also all those non-acts of change that took up so much of my last year. These are activities like moping, kvetching, carping, procrastinating–these may lead some people (eventually) to a burst of either reformation or resignation, but they are more likely, in my case, to lead to (i) a waste of time and energy that might otherwise be spent purposefully; or (ii) a bungling of the contentment that might otherwise be attained.
Half the time I find myself complaining about circumstances to which I am actually fully committed, but which are–surprise surprise–just like me–imperfect. (By “circumstances,” I also mean people.)
But my resistance typically only accentuates the imperfect–for example, I make my free time shorter by a henpecking focus on its shortness; I make the rocky parts of relationships rockier by grinding at them in a way that only sharpens them; I make all those chores and tasks and duties we all face more burdensome by stretching them out through procrastination (i.e. websurfing.)
So enough already. Here’s the resolution–to stop adding to the inherent entropy of life–to let go, in other words, of some of the friction.
And the ‘being more quiet’ part–that speaks for itself.
Happy New Year to all of you! I really do not know where this blog will go in 2014, but I am so grateful to you for your kindness and support for the last few years.
Bamboo
December 29, 2013
Bamboo
Sometime in the second half of the twentieth century,
a little before the U.S. involvement
in Vietnam, at an age when I still ran away
from suspense
to a sofa just out of sight of the TV
to bounce till I
could bear it,
bamboo meant World War II,
someplace steamed
in the South Pacific,
Alec Guinness limping upright
from a blistered three-foot
box, surrounded by sunspots
and jointed jungle.
How strong, by comparison, were the timbers used
by his troops to span the River Kwai–
even the Allied whistle carrying
no reedy wheedle–
How we thrilled at the buttoned brittleness
of the Brit, awed by the nobility of that
conspicuous backbone, all those eon-
forged vowels–my brother wired
to the one comfy chair, me caught
upon the carpet (unable even
to flee to far sofa safety), as we stared
through the flicker of that
yellow-green wood, a genus grown only
in the land of Holly–
Of course, poor Alec was nearly bamboozled–it was our
compatriot, the surly Yank,
William Holden, engulfed in brown wade
and incipient love handles, who knew the true score–
that war was not about building bridges
or character, but about detonators, destruction, lots
of bang, boom, shrapnel.
“Madness,” says the doctor character through
the smoke, but “greatness,”
is what we thought.
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Here’s a draft poem for Hannah Gosselin’s prompt on With Real Toads about bamboo. Sorry for the length. I call it a draft because the poem has gone through a million iterations and I still am not getting what I want! I’m also afraid it may be incomprehensible to anyone who has not seen The Bridge On the River Kwai, a movie made in 1957, directed by David Lean, and starring Alec Guiness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa.
The movie takes place in a WWII prison camp in Burma in which the Japanese overguards force the Allied soldiers to build a bridge for a supply route. Guinness plays a British Colonel focused on maintaining standards (and morale). The pic is a frame from the move, all copyrights belong to the owner (and no infringement intended.)
ManicDDaily 
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