TAXTIME

I know
taxes are due
three days after Easter.
I borrowed
at those sub-prime
heart rates
loaned me by unprincipled lenders
forged in fairytale
in now this lifelong Lent.
I gave up the idea of understanding
interest income and 1099s--
but if you find me
some invested return
I'll come back.

Last of Wyeth-inspired blog posts

This one an exercise in cold-sweat:
__
nosebleed sheets, pink-smeared pillowcase.
I swallowed wasps in my sleep all night.
I got those
twitchy fingertips that crack at the quick
like Lavinia's twiggy snagged sinews
or Wyeth's Christina as a deaf amputee.
an IV needle won't fit
in burnt-hair tree branch veins
heavy with bruised harvest fruit fall
soaking incarnadine tar stains from larval groggs.
I tried
to unveil my hands, scrowl wreathing, mute
any of the "-cides", get taste of salty skel in
compassed, (im)paled mares, aft
or fore. Who knows?

I wake, bloody linen.
"Shit." Hemorrhaged again.

More on Wyeth's Creepy

I think the elements that I find disturbing about Christina's World hinge on the posture of the subject, and her impossible (or unnatural) thinness. She looks as if she's just woken up, her hair a-mess, her body twisted, and while her legs seem limp, there's an eerily desperate (sinister?) reach of that left arm. Like she's clawing to whoever passed her on the way (toward? away from? the buildings) and left those tracks. What seems to be so nightmarish is that distance to that familiar structure (presumably a farmhouse, but too grayed out to be welcoming), made immeasurable by the distorted perspective of the painting, and the bleach-white sky, like bone.

This moves me:

Courtesy of Google: His underwater sculptures, designed to create artificial reefs for marine life to colonise and inhabit, embrace the transformations wrought by ecological processes. The works engage with a vision of the possibilities of a sustainable future, portraying human intervention as positive and affirmative. Drawing on the tradition of figurative imagery, the aim of Jason de Caires Taylor’s work is to address a wide-ranging audience crucial for highlighting environmental issues beyond the confines of the art world. However, fundamental to understanding his work is that it embodies the hope and optimism of a regenerative, transformative Nature.

Snapshot

into what really creeps me out:

I LOVE Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" now. It frightens me in some very fundamental, skin-crawling way. When I first saw it as a poster tacked up on Ms. LaFont's 11th-grade British Literature classroom wall, I nearly shat my pants. Or at least, I had nightmares about it. More to come soon, for now, enjoy the creepiness.

-

Esau

It wasn't my birthright
but I'd've liked to've known
if I was the first.
His tulip-tight lips
his skinny-stemmed limbs,
drunk, or ashamed, he was tongue-tied at least
and even after Mardi Gras--
silence.
Maybe he gave me up
for Lent.

Winter Beach

John and I spent part of the day Saturday at the beach. In Chicago. Yes, that is ice. Floes of ice on a warm (43 degree) day at the beach. Yes, that spray is ice, not liquid water. And yes, it was glorious.

My "Ubi Sunt" motif

What follows is one of my favorite Seamus Heaney poems, not least because it catches the feel of a place and how it affects us in a more profound way. Having recently moved (again), I've been experiencing some of that wistful nostalgia for what's gone, what's passed and not coming back, and I feel like I've gathered up all those "ubi sunt" motifs old epics and sprinkled them across my memory. (Which may or may not be healthy. Probably not.) But I don't want to pine for the past, so I'll just enjoy rereading the Seamus Heaney poem, right?

Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

.....

Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains. Like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow.

Among other reasons

Last night John and I stayed out quite late, partly by accident. Starting out the evening at the Drake Hotel's period(1930s)-swing party, we afterward hit up a small faux Irish bar in River North. Garrett Ripley? The patron who "founded" the bar? Yeah, we asked about him too. Turns out, he's totally fictional.

After time with some good company (John's Northwestern-prof-friends) and conversation, John and I headed out the door to go home. We got sidetracked once with buying a "homeless" man a gyro (hey, buy one get one free, and it'd been a long time since I'd had drunken late-night take away) and delayed once when we were informed that the blueline out to our Logan Square stop would be delayed because a person had fallen on the tracks and needed to be removed (I noticed they didn't use the word "body"...). At this point, it was late late, and by 3am we were finally home.

I very guiltily canceled my breakfast plans (they were to be at 9.30am, about 45 minutes away eating with my sister at The Bourgeois Pig), and slept in. And woke up, more or less, to this:

And that is why I live with John. And why I love him, among other reasons.

(That's a pancake. Anne-cake. Annie-cake. Whatever. Also that tray is sitting on my lap, in bed. *sigh*)

Ruminations

Holidays in the City

Flannel fishnets, trendy flak jacket
she wore upturned lips
steady fingers between his
thighs (no subtle
pressure). Geez they're just kids
in this February cold, but Christ
-mas day: ipods and
legwarmers together in the back
seats, train to Union Station.

Billboard and street-snow lights
flick pale chalk razor lines, rolling
shadows that regular intermittent:
like a dealer's draw with the house odds,
a pair of jacks railroading toward each
other. The boy, he squirms some,
his army pants have those
cargo pockets for a reason,
apparently, while across the aisle
the girl's smirking up at me
as if she knows
I saw.

Our morning, yours and mine,
had been cinnamon and hospitality,
gift giving and wine-dosed family laughter
on maple floors woven over with wool
before we caught the 6:40 Metra
home into the city. While we, we had this no
-tion of "close" we'd wagered on,
but then (same train) there were
these two vacant seats between us
unflirted space, brittle like
our frozen eyelashes after mass.

New Perspective

This week I started my new job here, as the "Linkage Specialist": which basically means that I "link" people to housing, employment and/or income, and medical care, among other acute and emergent needs.

After only one week, I have been thrown into what's generally assumed to be "a full caseload" and am loving it. The most refreshing part? Issues or circumstances that I've previously considered difficult or confusing now seem manageable, and that my skills that I've received through training or commonsense life experience, I can utilize to assist others whom we serve that are much less equipped to confront the challenges.

This isn't to say that I didn't need approximately 13 hours of sleep last night to recuperate from a little bit of the exhaustion I'd felt this week from being launched into never-before-encountered situations, which I may or may not have been expected to navigate more or less solo. But all the support from my family this week, and some sleep, and I'm ready for a new work week tomorrow. Ready, and kind of excited. And that has never happened to me before.

(Save when my "work" was attending classes like "19th Century Romantic Literature" and "Feminist Theory," which actually go the other way when money's involved, so it's quite a deal I've got here).

May others also find sustaining and invigorating employment.