The paper is from an outdated Atlas that an elder in my community gave me. She was a schoolteacher during her working life and the wife of a prominent Bay Area artist. She called regularly and asked me to visit her. While going through things she would pull out paper ephemera she thought I could use in my art. Despite my being a real estate agent and Notary Public, she regarded me as an artist.
She remained independent until her passing just this past week. I planned on visiting and showing her this picture. Then her son texted saying she passed peacefully.
As far as using the pages of an Atlas as origami paper, these thoughts were sparked:
It’s interesting to cut the squares out of large pages of an Atlas and then fold them.…
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“Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me.” – Diane Seuss
I am like Roethke’s bulb in a florist’s root cellar
rotting and extending sprout simultaneously,
searching for light with only a few minutes in my pocket.
They say Susan Boulet’s painting, Playing with the North Wind,
is her goodbye to the world—death and beauty laced together
in a blue bundle as though they are not different from each other.
This countdown nonsense is maddening, little indicators
flashing on as the body wears down—walking slower
to the mailbox to retrieve advertisements for things
I don’t need—where’s enlightenment—where’s the euphoria
of climax—that warm endorphin wave—rush of hush
and open-mouth kisses—all gone now—even memories
abandon me—wave goodbye as they lift above the frozen horizon
in Boulet’s painting—a fine faded star in the west.…
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“Their pallid, subterranean ways,”
the chapter in the botany book begins,
“make them incomprehensible.”
It continues, though, by expounding
on the contrary, the common
sensibleness of their jobs – to anchor
the plant in soil, absorb water
and minerals, store food. The narrative
continues with more technical matters,
never to follow up on the enigmatic
opening line. Or maybe the author,
a many-degreed botanist, was suggesting
an alternate realm of meaning, or lack
thereof, divorced from roots’ habitual work.
But it struck a chord with me, for how
can we but be in the dark about roots
in the earth, burrowing, spreading?
Deep or shallow, they are too deep for us
to follow where they lead. There is no sense
seeking full disclosure, for what replies
they grudgingly may offer would bear little
resemblance, at bottom, to the unrevealable
truth, no matter our bootless digging.…
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In the narrow space between the side edge
of the granite bathroom vanity and the wall,
a speck of a red spider built a tight web
that trapped no more, it seemed to me,
than puffs of talc, soap bubbles, moustache
hair. Catching sense of my looming shadow,
it would tuck itself into the gap. We co-existed
thus, for days, and eviction never crossed
my mind. The morning after a weekend away,
I saw, in its place, a web vaster and more flaccid,
hosting a gray spider, many times the size
of my unobtrusive and likely digested friend.
Catching wind of me, the new squatter tried
to wedge itself in the corner by the back wall
away from the conspicuous web but its rear
rear abdomen and trailing legs stuck up, flailed
and wouldn’t fit. …
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after years with an iphone I got an android
I knew there would be challenges but now
I can’t even like a text message–
a nuance of correspondence gone
however
I am learning a new language
– you realize that’s what operating systems are, right?
they’re the way the brain of the device communicates
so
I’m learning a new language
and I am learning how to translate the actions of my fingers
and consequently my thoughts
so I can continue to communicate with the outside world…
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Mystery: Toothpaste smear on lower right of t-shirt, always the same location.
I mean I know how it gets there but, even to save my life, I can’t figure
out how to prevent it
*
I love Frisch’s Homo Faber. Bob the Builder (can’t stop), whether for need
or out of boredom. Perhaps giving up on one dream or another, but never giving up
on the “drawing board,” whose surface area is infinite (or so it seems). Multiplying
words (can’t stop), as though inching toward some ultimate “reality” or “truth.”
You’ll need the ultimate word when you get there
*
After giving in to the junk mail from Classpals (I paid for 3 months) and getting
Laura (real or bot) to straighten out my old account (they had me in Reading
SH PA instead of Reading HS MI), I looked at all the “hellos” (from people
I never knew) and uploaded some pics from our trip to St Ives
As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives …
*
I took my nephew Armand to Taco Hell to celebrate something, I don’t know what.…
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In the hay-heavy summer, the boys tossed rocks
under the horses’ legs to ease their uphill climbs,
nearby: three sisters, land-weary.
I came rarely, a visitor, crossing the river dense
with silt and passing through the wild-strawberried woods.
We were careless girls.
For a snack we ate bread and butter, white sugar
granulating the surface. We cracked eggs into the sawdust
under the cool air of the barn.
When K. began her parabolic descent — a kerchief
over her fragmenting strands of hair: I was, no longer,
the same visitor. How difficult
to learn of emergencies.
– Alicja Zapalska
Author’s Note: This poem is a distillation of many years’ worth of visits to the countryside of Poland as a child. As someone removed from the toil that comes from a livelihood dependent on the land, this poem splits between the back-breaking work required of children and the frivolity we allowed ourselves in brief moments.…
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