Artist of the Day: Don't Pet the Sweaty Things - Vivian Loulou

Don't Sweat the Petty Things Vivian Loulou joykeeper.etsy.com

This typography illstration is the perfect fit for my mood today. Pettiness is really, really hard not to sweat, especially when it's of the variety that hits that one nerve that's already frayed. Guess it's time to get a cool drink and moooove on!

I plan to spend my weekend painting. What are you going to do?

Check out the other pithy and whimsical illustrations at Loulou's etsy shop.

Artist bio:I am Vivian Loulou, the artist behind Joykeeper. All the items here are creation from my heart.I work in my own graphic studio, WhiteIsNotAColour Studio with my partners. (www.whiteisnotacolour.com )

I am specialize in paper goods, cards, miscellaneous fabric goods, children art prints and children book.

Joykeeper aims at producing unique, high quality art print with happy & positive quote.

Poem Therapy-September 22, 2011 at 7:21 P.M.: To be the thing - Dorothea Lasky

To be the thing
Dorothea Lasky

To be the name uttered, but not to have the burden to be
To be the name said, but not heard
To not breathe anymore, to be the thing
To be the thing being breathed
To not be about to die, to be already dead
To not have to disappoint
To not have the burden of being late
Or punctual
To not eat, to not have to eat
To not feel anything
To not be the one whose affect is criticized
To not pick up the fallen over boxes
To be everywhere but the boxes or plates
To not break the plates
To be beyond breaking
To have been broken
To not bear the burden of not being present
To not have to feel the pain of being hurt
To have transferred that pain over
So that hurt is only part of the imagination
And the imagination is everywhere, is every color
To not contain color, to be color
To not make sound, to be sound
To not have language, to echo, to plan language
To be the stream of words
To not be sad for
To not have those to be sad for
To not eat alone
To not fuck those who do not find your corpse attractive
To not fuck
Or stuff
To be ashes and non-placed
Not displaced, but to not be in any place
To enter the ocean on not a whim, but a physical force
Where there is no center
Where there is no safety
There never was
There was never any anger
There was never anything to look at
I never looked at anything
I just went and walked
I tried to love
But love is hopeless
And I have lost all hope, so bleak I am beyond
I am beyond what might be considered low
There is low nor high, space or time, I have
Gone away from that which is uttered
I have not burdened to be spoken of or spoken for
To croak everyday to the livelong bog
I do not speak a thing
I exist
No, no I don't
I never did
And you may have
But I never did
And you may have called out for me
But I was already gone
And I am already there
That which you speak of
I am already spoken for
In a world of light and ashes
They all call my name
They have waited for me
And now I know
I was always
Already there
With them


To just be, to be a being rather than a doing, feels me with an intensity of desire so vast the ocean, the universe, all the atoms and cells ever in existence, no, absolutely nothing is large enough to contain it.

Don't you ever just want to just be? If I were any part of this poem I would be either, "the stream of words" or "enter the ocean not on a whim, but a physical force" or perhaps "already there".

I've stopped asking people what they do. I don't care. No one does what they want, not really, in their working lives. The accountant really wanted to give his music a shot, but it wasn't practical, so he made numbers instead. The lawyer harbors a secret desire to paint botanical still-lifes, but argues for his client's right to this marital asset, and that marital asset, and that one too. The literature professor yearns to spend all her days guiding adventurous women through white water, yet fills her minutes lecturing about the ineluctable modality of...

You get the picture.

Thoreau said most "men live lives of quiet desperation". You know why? Because we're too afraid to just be who we are. Me included. It usually takes a major crisis to wake us up to a new possibility, and by then we have families, mortgages, bills, debt, etc. The stakes are always high, but feel so much higher than when we were younger, when so many doors of possibility were open, until we went about methodically slamming them and stepped through the door we allowed ourselves.

So how? How to get to where you want to be? And where is that?

I have no idea. Okay, actually, I have a glimmer of an idea.

Artist of the Day: Surrender - Pauline Stanley


Surrender Pauline Stanley raraavisstudio.blogspot.com

I don't know why I fight so hard, swim against the tide, soldier on, even when all I want to say is, I'm out, especially since I know that only when one surrenders, life flows in its truest course, like a river to the sea. Perhaps its because I like the struggle so much. Or maybe because I have a plan. Or that I think I know what's best for me, even if it goes against the little voice in my heart whispering otherwise. It's probably because I'm iron-steel-titanium stubborn. Once I've made a choice, I am sticking to it.

Well, so far, that hasn't worked out so well, so I've decided to do what much wiser people have done: surrender.

I found this photo by Pauline Stanely on etsy. Synchronicity at work! You'll have to click on page three to see it and other message photos since her shop features a variety of goods.

Artist bio:
My photography/design and hand crafted goods are inspired by color, shape, pattern, nature and just about everything vintage. All items are created from original designs or photographs and are handmade in Richmond, VA.

We use eco friendly water based ink for our screen prints and we try to use natural products as much as possible. All products are sweat shop free.

Custom orders maybe available upon request.
For wholesale questions, please contact me at paulinetstanley [!at] gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting my shop!

My blog: raraavisstudio.blogspot.com
My other shop: fashionhousevintage.etsy.com

From the Air: Salt Lake City, Utah to Oakland, California

I recently took a quick weekend trip to San Francisco, with an even quicker stop in Oakland, and on the flight over started taking photos with my Iphone. I love the picture of Lake Tahoe with its spiral cloud cover, and also The Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island.























This Moment: At Ten Thousand Feet September 19, 2011 - 11:03 A.M.

All water finds the surest course to the sea. Giant thalo blue snakes wend through a wildly stitched patch quilt of farm land. The river's greenish blue complements the black, green, rust, and bleached tan squares of earth. To the left of where we are flying over, an ant community humans build for themselves abuts another ant hill cluster of roads and dwellings that look like tunnels visible on the side of a child's glass-domed ant farm. Cars glint like glass as we pass overhead. And then suddenly there is a respite of undeveloped land, and then a scattering of cities interspersed with more arid land. Like the cars, water glints hotly from the surface. A stream, most likely a river is a molten finger tracing an outline through the ground. Homes cluster near roads and tentatively spread outwards. Acres of tree-laden mountains appear with their hidden cache of lakes. The silver reflection of the water hurts my eyes, and I turn and watch my husband sleep with his mouth open. A baby cries and is hushed. The flight attendant asks drink and snack preferences. I return to my small oval to the world. A large crater lake, the remains of some long ago volcano is a vibrant blue with a filmy cloud of silver swirled stitching, like a vintage Indian sari trimmed with turquoise at the edges. The Captain announces, "Lake Tahoe below" and for us to keep our seat belts secure. The mountains in the distance are misted in a haze of clouds, like mountains from ancient Chinese scroll paintings. Directly below where I am sitting, a lake is choking a slow death of dehydration. A stream as thin as a hair meanders through the length of its desolation. My thoughts quickly turn from the despair below to the wedding vows exchanged yesterday under the warm San Franciscan sun. The couple stood before a circle of hot pink and white flowers facing a windmill Queen Wilhelmina gifted to the City at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sound of the nearby ocean filled the silences. I wept from the moment the music sounded, even before I saw the bride, and again during the vows when the two promised the extraordinary: To love each other. Always.

This Moment: San Francisco, California - 8:25 A.M.

Eucalyptus trees stir in the cool breeze. The streets are perilously steep. I imagine snow on these streets, the car sliding backwards, plummeting, and my heart races. I open my eyes and am confronted with stark sunshine and a fuchsia blossomed tree contained in a large pot. The houses are abutted against each other like a large family in a too small bed. The light changes and we transition to a level winding road with terra-cotta roofs lining the road downward to the white city by it's bay. The blue water is speckled with sailboats. A giant green and blue tile caterpillar set in a yellow background covers a stairwell. A woman sits on a star themed mosaic blus bench, her old dog drooling beside her. She smiles a genuine greeting and for a moment the melancholia lifts. For a moment I think of the promise and hope this marriage offers. I return to my thoughts yesterday at ten thousand feet, flying through thin clouds: what gender is the heart? Today, we will stand witness as two hearts pledge to love each other for as long as they continue beating.

This Moment: Salt Lake International Airport, Utah 9:53

Waiting. White noise from all directions. It is easy to identify my fellow Utahans-we are dressed in shorts, capris, sandals, and heavy sweatshirts. Flight announcements. Time to board.

Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath: Philip Metres

In Philip Metres essay, Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath, published in poetryfoundation.org,he suggests through the excerpted vehicle of Ardorno's essay, "Commitment," that:

...by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them…. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice.

And also, "...that we cannot be silent."

I've posted poems I felt captured the tone of the day and the 9/11 Decade. I don't intend to comment them. You may, if you'd like.

The majority of poems posted today are from poets.org, poetryfoundation.org, and from the text of Philip Metres essay. Read it!

Poem Therapy at 8:24: October (section II) - Louis Gluck

October (section II)
Louis Gluck

II.
Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see: sun that could be
the August sun, returning
everything that was taken away—

You hear this voice? This is my mind's voice;
you can't touch my body now.
It has changed once, it has hardened,
don't ask it to respond again.

A day like a day in summer.
Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples
nearly mauve on the gravel paths.
And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

It does me no good; violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense it is being tested.

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;
bounty, balm after violence.
Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields
have been harvested and turned.

Tell me this is the future,
I won't believe you.
Tell me I'm living,
I won't believe you
.

Poem Therapy at 8:20: The Names - Billy Collins

The Names
Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Poem Therapy at 8:15: Full Flight - Bob Hicok

Full Flight
Bob Hicok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

Poem Therapy at 8:05: Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 - Martin Espada

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
Martin Espada

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.

Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Poem Therapy at 3:47 P.M: Going to Work - Nancy Mercado

Going To Work
Nancy Mercado

On their daily trips
Commuters shed tears now
Use American flags
Like veiled women
To hide their sorrows
Rush to buy throwaway cameras
To capture your twin ghosts
Frantically I too
Purchase your memory
On post cards & coffee mugs
In New York City souvenir shops
Afraid I’ll forget your façade
Forget my hallowed Sunday
Morning Path Train rides
My subway travels through
The center of your belly
Afraid I’ll forget your power
To transform helicopters
Into ladybugs gliding in the air
To turn New York City
Into a breathing map
To display the curvature
Of our world


For the Ironworkers
The ironworkers came
Stacked with tools
In the naked night
A night devoid of grace
Devoid of warmth
They arrived
Weighed down with
Giant surgical instruments
Hauling them through rubble
Like cattle climbing canyons
The ironworkers toiled
For nights and days
Sunken in a mass of debris
In a sweltering heat
In the smell of death
They worked to dismember
What remained of the tallest towers
On the earth
They labored to burry
What they had given birth to.


Toward The Towers
Seagulls fly slowly in the haze
Build friendships with Staten Island Ferry riders
Making us laugh at their kooky grins
At their little plump bodies airborne by the boat
They seem motionless, dangling
A muggy cool breeze clings to my skin
Clings to the icy metal of the John F. Kennedy Ferry
Leisurely we glide toward Manhattan
The clearing fog reveals your absence.


A Perfect Day In Progress
Looking Up
On this day clouds were on vacation
Leaving our skies opened
Glory was everywhere
The sun generously embraced us
Even inside gloom-ridden city crevices
Its light rested


Frantic
Voices pierced through
The car radio
Gnarled human racket
Sirens bending in the wind
Crashing glass bellowed
Before incomprehension lifts
To reveal the many bloodied voices
I must phone Puerto Rico


Stunned
My descent into the student lounge
Is like a sluggish desert crossing
I see the mystified
Cringing in the sitting room
Looking to hide the day
Eyes relentlessly collect around
Television monitors that throb


Shock
On the tube
His slender body slowly caves
I run out of the lounge
Into the open sky
Dragging my jaw behind


Disbelief
Witnesses are called
To confirm the bright sun
The blue firmament
The warm September day
What just happened
The question bobs in
Street puddles of tears


Silence
One tower stands alone
Everyone
Waits


Desperation
We all searched the sprawling heavens
Investigated our neighbor’s face
Hope made tracks
Off to some hidden place
We want to follow
To travel through that hole
To arrive at yesterday


Grief
I cannot control the airplanes
The bombs
The guns
The poison


Comprehension
The Twenty-first Century
War engine revs-up
Humanity obsesses in its
Shortsighted lunacy for Now
We trash the natural world
For shopping sprees
For control over veiled grandmothers
For imaginary star rank
Become obese with consumer jingles
Binge on religious claptrap
Trick ourselves into buying
The delusion that we are better
Than the next poor bastard

This Moment: September 11, 2011 7:17 A.M.

I woke from a dream of Ancient Persia. I can't remember specifics, but now I am visualizing the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent city Alexander the Great reduced to rubble as retribution. Blood lust, I remember feeling this. The Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament's eye for an eye.I am lying on new sheets, softer than any in recent memory. A small luxury. It is silent save for the white noise of a plane overhead. I opened the French doors to let in the season's crisp air, and the quiet static of the trees which sound like ocean waves advancing and retreating the shore. Now that I am fully awake it is impossible to stay in this moment. I remember the eerie silence after the unimaginable roar of the collapse, the city covered in ash, the sky littered with paper. And later, the streets lined with people holding images of the missing, their faces a collective Greek mask of anguish, their eyes so desperate and hopeful I couldn't hold their gaze and turned away, knowing full well they were on television. The small dog scratches his chin with his hind leg, then stands and stretches, dragging his hind quarters for one, two, three steps. He pads out of my bedroom into the living room and I hear his nails on the hardwood and then the kitchen tile. He returns to join the older dog on the rug and commences grooming. I watch the occasional cars pass and wonder about the drivers and their thoughts. A train signals it's arrival with a loud blast, and now is a comforting sound of business as usual heading down the tracks to some impossible future.

Remembering 9/11

History is personal. All of us place ourselves, our stories, at the center. No matter how small, how obliquely relative. This is my story.

I didn't listen to the news on the way to work that morning. I was well into the work morning when the calls came. Because of the nature of my work, I ignored the first call, but answered the second. It was my sister, asking if I was watching television. Of course I wasn't, I was working. She told me to turn on the television, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I couldn't understand what she was telling me.

It had been exactly one month and a day to the day that my mother had had an aneurysm and subsequent stroke, coincidentally on my wedding day, and I had been functioning under a thick sheet of ice ever since, so my sister's phone call, the hour of her call, the tone of her voice, didn't set off an alarm. I remember after hanging up I went immediately to my computer to MSNBC, which was down due to overload, then a handful of news sites, which were also inundated, so I went to a colleague's office, packed with other coworkers, and we watched the unimaginable.

I didn't feel like it was a movie or a dream or unreality. It didn't feel like anything I could place in any context at all. It didn't occur to me that anyone I knew, intimately or generally could be involved in any of this. Of course I was wrong. Their stories are theirs to tell.

The first call I placed was to the only person in my family that could possibly be in the towers or the city. My brother. So I called him. He was in California. The second call was to my sister who was at the hospital with our mother to tell her to tell the nurses not to say anything, to keep the television off. My daughter was in Phoenix staying with her best friend at her uncle's home. He called and left a message that the girls were okay and that my daughter was making crayon drawings. The three drawings she made during this time are among my favorite, especially the large-headed girl with a crow flying in the distance flanked by a large plane. The mother of my daughter's friend drove to Phoenix and brought the girls home.

I don't know if I checked the Onion News Network site that day, or during the days following the attacks, but I know reading their articles, I smiled. And laughed. The interview with Muhammed Atta in Hell was especially stress-relieving. And inexplicably an image of America with a giant red bullseye covering the entirety with the caption, Holy F...ing Shit! Humor is a curious and revealing thing in terrible times.

For many years I met with a writing group at the Sugar House Barnes and Noble. I called the group to see if we were still meeting and everyone decided to go ahead. When we all arrived, the bookstore was closed, so we headed to a local sports bar. Of course we didn't talk about our writing. We hugged and held onto each other's hands. Instead of sporting events, the burning towers and the people jumping from them was on the large screens. I couldn't watch. One particular woman from our group, a petite blond with light blue eyes, watched with a type of fascination, squinting her eyes. I remember thinking what an icy bitch. I still can't watch the people falling.

Later that night, sitting on the couch watching television with my sister at my parent's home, my father sleeping upstairs, a plane flew low over the house, enough to shake the living room chandelier. We raced outside to watch it. Hill Air Force Base is to the north of my bedroom town, and what I learned later was that the plane was flying reconnaissance to California and back.

For the next few months, my fear was that the local base would be a target. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of something my father told me of a childhood waking dream. He's a tangible man, he must touch something to believe it, so after all these years he is still trying to make sense of what he and his brother saw. He and his brother were on top of the chicken coop when they saw a bright light break and catch fire to the north. He said they saw fences and metal posts melt like wax, trees burst like struck matches. And then they saw the scorched remains. Both swear they saw this, although at the time the base was nothing more than farmland.

I've spent the weekend watchting the memorials, from Paul McCartney's tribute to Time Magazine's. I am filled with hope for a better world.

This Moment - September 10, 2011

A train sounds as if it is drunk and staggering along the rails this morning. My ankle's small twinges announce a coming storm. Suddenly, the dogs are up and in battle mode, barking warnings at a passing truck. The small dog perches on my lower legs, his hind leg kicking the comforter. From the side windows I see the peach tree bowed under the weight of it's fruit. Roses and geraniums hold the last blooms on their stems, and yet the tomatoes still are green-hued. The small dog smells like a dog. Even so, I bring my face to his and allow him his morning ritual. Soon, he will bring me his pink bear to throw and once he has tired of the game he will whine to be let out to chase doves off the lawn and into the trees. The older dog's rituals are hers and from what I can decipher, involve discovering the nature of trespassers that crossed territory during the night. She only asks I open the door, then returns when she is finished to nose my calves as we walk back into the house. Both wait for me to complete my waking rituals, and for me to grab their leashes and head for the door again. For now I am back on the bed. Cars roll by. Leaves are just beginning to fall. Very soon the lawn will be covered. But not yet. My eyes are turned backwards, holding to what was, what might have been. I know that very soon I will have to let it all go, and like the trees, wait for new growth.

Artist of the Day: National September 11 Memorial - Michael Arad

Reflecting Pool (one of two which sit in the footprints of the original World Trade Center Towers)


9/11 Memorial Rendering of Plaza Michael Arad, Handel Architects

Search here for more images and information, and here for a tour and Studio 360 interview with Michael Arad.

Poem Therapy September 9, 2011, 2:24 P.M. : Photograph from September 11 - Wislawa Szymborska

September 11, 2001.

Photograph from September 11
Wislawa Szymborska

They jumped from the burning floors--
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There's enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They're still within the air's reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them--
describe this flight
and not add a last line.


A colleague used the German word weltschmerz when the the anniversary of September 11 came up over lunch. She said it means world grief or world sorrow. Answers.com defined weltschmerz as sadness over the evils of the world, especially as an expression of romantic pessimism.

I can't say I have the words to express the terror and outrage and grief of the day, the aftershock, the new reality, nor the consequences thereof for the last decade.

I have my own small memories.

And, I am grateful the poet did not add a last line.