Gleanings

You all know what gleanings are. The food left in the field after the big harvest. Here are random bits from my past weeks of painting and writing. All of the painting was done in the class under the spell of Robert Burridge. All of the writing was done under the spell of my very own self.

I task myself to perfecting living in the moment that I might enjoy this dumb and endless comedy.

The Lord said, “I go before you always” but sometimes I need someone to have my back. I can usually avoid the devil before me, it’s the one sneaking up behind that I worry over.

This piece of writing was soooo prompted by Mary Ann at Dispatch from LA. If you don't read that blog your life is not as rich as it could be.

I dream of going to Merida. It seems so lovely, so comfortingly shabby and relaxed. The locals drive their horse drawn vehicles through the narrow winding streets as one with private cars and rickety buses. They have ballroom dancing on a roughly constructed wooden platform right in the middle of the square, and most afternoons you can watch the men and women, their bodies viejo, their hearts reciente , lost in punctuated executions of waltz, samba, tango. The markets flourish beneath beautifully ragged awnings that shade all manner of exotic produce and tempting trinkets. The fragrance of paper wrapped bouquets mingled with the spicy scent of street food calls to me, demands my presence. The magical pyramids of the Mayans, all of the hypnotic Yucatan, are but a short taxi ride away. Merida means “I can’t understand you”, as the Mayans answered Cortez when he asked, “Where am I.”

Life, it seems, comes in slices and I am sure to feel fragmented, incomplete, lacking, until the last slice reveals all.

A quiet yet urgent voice, calls softly through the phone,
Please, can you talk me off the ledge?
From my own precarious perch
I throw my rope of words
which she catches and ties around her waist.
I test the knot around mine
and together, once again
we cheat the abyss.

No one wants me until I want myself.
I see a ball tossed into the air,
climbing into the sky,
struggling out of the clutching arms of earth,
then, just before the inevitable descent,
a sacred moment.
The ball hesitates,
unencumbered in a state of bliss,
free of time and space.
It is that moment that
contains the hope of
me longing for me.

Her eyes tell me she is in a universe far away,
a place in a constant state of creation.
She nods in false assent,
directed by the shrieking phantoms
who whisper instructions,
whose commands protect
the gates of her mind
allowing no visitors, no thoughts
that might corrupt the hellish paradise
they have made there for themselves.

The porcelain hen lies shattered to powder and bits on the kitchen floor. The very last of my resolve as broken as she as I step into the shower to hide my tears.

My heart has turned to stone yet beautiful flowers still burst into bloom in it’s barren nooks and crannies.

all work by lm/2010