creative ramblings & reverie

Friday, June 22, 2012

Writing Spaces


The notebook or novel-in-progress has only momentarily been put down; a brief pause in which to consider the world anew . . .






image:  Seven Arts Friends

Belonging



Funny how it comes together here
the afternoon of the pow-wow
in Waimea, Hawaii—
the upcountry town with chickens
always grilling on a spit beyond
the row of twelve or thirteen churches—

as if something in me has healed,
after the years of longing
for things I can’t have or be.
Or grafted, maybe, like the pear trees
our landlord has married
(Seckel to Bartlett, Comice to Bosq)
back in our California yard. 

In a real sense
I am of these people, all of them—
the Indian dancers
         with fine feathered wings
Hawaiians
mainland tribes
earth dwellers,

Theirs are my ways:  the old ways
I have come to this island to learn;
the way the Tao is said to be;
the way I feel here, longing
and belonging, welcomed home.


—Christie

Friday, June 1, 2012

Writing Spaces


It looks to me as if the demoiselle sitting in Bonnard's lovely garden could be working on an iPad or laptop . . .  Knowing that I might well be if I were there!





image:  Pierre Bonnard, Terrasse a Vernon

Class Exercise, with Dachsund


I haven’t found my way clear
to being an artist.
Everyone can tell
my glasses are always too clean,
no unexpected dabs
of burnt umber or crimson lake,
my hair never askew,
nothing you could call artistic, really.
I watch my dachsund running
in ear-flying loops
around my uninspired garden
that is not the garden of an artist
though he thinks it paradise enow,
and finding an alluring sea
of broken blue Italian tiles
beside a patch of neglected oregano,
precipitates himself
into the deepest wave,
then dries himself by rolling on
the bath towel I’ve left out on the step,
with gentlemanly courtesy.
All of this stirs up my urge
to pick a #2 boar’s bristle brush
out of the brushes in the coffee can
in what is not a studio, to run it
in a wriggling line of sassy color
along the quellingly white wall
of the plain room where I’ve spent
too much of my life
teaching myself to get used to it.


—Christie