Winter Solstice is the Poet’s Holiday–
Maximum darkness
With flat gray skies
During a short, sunless day.
The chasm, at night,
Between dark and light,
Grows bottomless.
Accustomed to their night vision,
The Poets peek
Through the veil
At their glimpse of despair
(for Despair is the finest of poetic feelings)
And bear witness to
The false promise
Of the returning light’s respite.
Tomorrow is new.
We count the days.
My Christmas card list is growing! And I printed some special edition cards for friends who asked. And I framed one for each kid and for the wife and me. Total? 93 made and sent! (I still have 3 for anyone I forgot.) It was a big project. Kept me busy and out of trouble for a couple of weeks.
Brings my total for the year to 385! I promised myself about one year ago today or so that I would make 365 individual pieces of art this year and I did it! I’m very happy about that. Wishing all who read this a safe, healthy, productive holiday season and New Year!
[385]
After all the diuretics and tears,
When I die
Throw me away
Like an old
Wrung out kitchen sponge.
[292]
Finished the third of the primitives. Each is carved on an 8″ x 10″ plywood panel and painted. If I hinged them together, I guess it would be a triptych. As it is they are three of a kind. The hands, of course, are modeled after ancient cave drawings in Argentina. So between the three we have Africa, Europe and South America represented. Do you want to know the hardest part of these pieces? Hanging them straight and equi-distance apart.
I don’t know if I’ll do more of these or not. They are fussy and slow to make. But I have more plywood panels if I change my mind.
[291]
I am 73 years old on this writing. No person of this age ignores the prospect of diminishing cognitive abilities. If it is inevitable, I have written this song and addressed my care-givers. If you laugh, it’s ok. If you cry, it’s ok. I’ve done both in writing this. What I haven’t done is have a miraculous recovery of my singing voice. The video will attest.
Here are the lyrics if you want to sing along:
The No Memory Song
Sung to tune of Ripple by Grateful Dead
If I lose my mind, will you still love me?
When my mem’ries fade, like the morning dawn,
If I see your face and I call the wrong name,
Would you still hold me? Is that fear forgone?
If I just forget to eat my breakfast.
Or worst of all, when I eat it at two,
Will you wave your hand and just forget it?
Because you know I’ll forget it too.
Silence speaks a language.
When there is no knowing thought,
Words do not flow.
If I call your phone when I get lost driving,
When I can’t make sense of the streets and roads?
Will you talk me through each turn and corner
And smile at my face when I get safely home?
If I get too sad but I can’t say why, Dear,
I feel there was something great before,
Will you hold my hand and sit beside me
Until the sun goes down and is no more?
Silence speaks a language.
When there is no knowing thought,
Words do not flow.
If I lose the words to sing this song, dear,
And I stumble and start and stop in pain,
Will you let me hum and call it singing
This song to you a few more times again,
This song to you over and over again,
This song to you again and again and again?
La da da da da La da da da da
La da da La da La da da da
La da da da da La da da da da
La da da da La da da da da
[290]
UPDATE: Friend, Joe Troyer, put this video together and I host it on my YouTube channel. Enjoy…he’s a much better singer than I.
I’ve completed my first commission and had my first disagreement with a client. “That’s not what I asked for,” was the comment. “Well, that’s what I could make today,” I answered. Eventually I found a way to make it acceptable to the client and harmony was restored to the marriage. Yeah, my wife was my first commission.
She liked “Jason’s Tiles” but didn’t think blue would work in her kitchen, so we produced 20 more imprints in this green-green (two colors, pale green and bright green) 4″ x 4″ on while paper arranged and assembled in a four tile panel on green card stock.
Two pictures. The pair and the installation.
[289]
The moment I woke today I said, “My heart is heavy,”
But I did not mean it.
Why do we say that?
The heart isn’t heavy, no matter how sad we may be.
A man’s heart weighs something like 10 or 11 ounces,
A woman’s is even less: 8 or 9.
If your heart is heavier than that,
It isn’t from sadness.
It has become enlarged from some medical condition and it may be treatable.
And even if you had a heavy heart,
Say five pounds or so,
It could sit in your lap with little difficulty,
Like a cat or a small dog.
A cow’s heart weighs about 5 pounds
And would not weigh me down much.
Even a horse’s heart is easily managed at 8 pounds.
I have had dogs in my lap bigger than a giraffe heart at 26 pounds.
An elephant heart is something like 60
But it would still fit in my lap.
It is not the heart that is heavy;
It is the world.
“The world is heavy,” is what we mean to say.
“I can no longer bear it in my lap.”
It is my heart’s job to weigh the world.
The weight of the world can crush a man’s heart to jelly
And his bones to powder.
That is what I meant to say this morning.
The world is heavy
And I am in danger of being crushed.
[269]
I am a poet.
I can hold two (or more) contradictions
in mind simultaneously.
Peace can be boring
until the cloud of war appears over the horizon,
when fear is confused with excitement.
Trust can last
beyond the first betrayal,
but less often the second.
I miss your embrace
but not the cold steel in my heart.
[267]
Marilee Mouser, Here’s a haiku for you:
cold steel engenders
an insulating callous
to protect the heart
[268]
The earlier piece, “The Hunters,” is on the right. The companion piece, “The Hunted,” is on the left. I know now there is at least one more piece (maybe called “the Village” or “The Tribe”) to be done. The new one is still drying and awaiting an opaque wash, then I’ll start carving and painting #3. These are initially taken from photographs of real cave drawings. I doubt these will last as long.
[266]
This summer, my son and his husband, Jason, went to Portugal to look around. One of the pictures Jason sent back was this lovely, Old World tile. I was so intrigued by it, I decided to duplicate it. Because I wanted to learn something about two-block technique that’s the way I set this experiment up. So far I have a run of 20 of these “tiles” but I’ve left the edition open to make different presentations and perhaps different colors in the future. Watch this space for assemblage pieces.
As seen here it is just under 4″ x 4″ (like real tiles). Printed in water-based inks, mounted on card stock.
[265]
