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Dreams for Sale
Thursday June 7, 2007
You wanted to know the process
and I believe it exists
that every artist pours and tangles between a sponge
or a damp cloth of redemption
when the editor is silenced, little miracles happen
that is where the process begins
before it is quickly transformed into something else
it is crawling on all fours to stand upright
that every artist’s journey is a series of scribbles
navigating towards cursive
for some it is the single word that refuses to sit still
for others it is the reflection of life
against a paintbrush or a camera
we stage the elements
like a prop or a moment tattooed
we let the process glide down our fingers
to wet every object in our surroundings
we have no idea where streams live
we merely create them.
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Tuesday June 5, 2007
My mother ran into your father last week.
She mentioned he had the same gimp leg
and continues to part his hair on the side
opposite his wife’s.
Does your father still talk to you like a little girl.
When we were sixteen we stole a canoe
and pushed ourselves to the middle of Lake Jackson.
You thought this was the most efficient way for us to get attention
I thought of another while I was helping you flip the boat.
The cops were called in November
and your childhood sweetheart was taken to jail.
Windows were bolted shut at your house and mine.
My family never knew that your mother fell through the back porch
or that your room was so disgusting I gagged myself to sleep.
I slept with the cockroaches on your floor when I did not want to go home
and I did not want to go home often.
When we were fourteen we toilet papered Natalie’s house
and I smoked my first cigarette in your backyard.
No one ever found out but my lungs
but your father still suspects something.
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After eleven hours of sleep my body woke up at nine am this morning with no alarm. I rolled over in bed and contemplated what I wanted to do with the day extended before me like a cobweb stretched from the sun to the moon or the keys to any door in every house.
Did I want to wash the four corners of a room, read a book, fly a kite, or make a single phone call without interruption? I could paint, or feed my kitten, or write letters to old friends, or stare at the ceiling and ponder what I wanted to do for another twelve hours, or for the rest of my life. I could begin and complete any project, stroll up and down my street with a cup of coffee in tow, or peel a blade of grass with my teeth.
These luxuries are reserved for the unemployed, an organization that I am now a proud member of. Even those who take vacations do not achieve this level of relaxation or freedom. We have nothing to return to and they do.
Out of sheer guilt and the satisfaction I feel when contemplating computer screens, the gray cubicle of death, and the rolling chair I once sat in, I commit to making the most of this time. I will start my journey by chewing on apple core. I will peer out the window and at a quarter past three ask Billy Collins, “What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one?”
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Monday June 4, 2007
I seemed to have misplaced everything I wanted
to say. It’s probably time for
housecleaning. In the meantime please
enjoy someone else’s words while I’m searching for my own…….
Numbers
Mary Cornish
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.
There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.
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