Writing Spaces

Linger as long as possible in the writing spaces of dreams.

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream."—Vincent van Gogh

Similarly, I dream my writing and I write my dream.  In sleep and its blue smoky spooky silky (silkspinning, silkworm transforming into butterfly) realms are the beginnings of creation, the place words and their conjuring drift and meet up to form new languages telling new worlds—or the most ancient of them all.

image:  She Who Is

By 9 a.m.

the daily fight with gravity
has already been lost.
I wake so buoyed by possibilities
and the remnants of dreams

I am entirely weightless, I float
above my stonebound self
a dancing particle of light, one of
the silvered ripples wreathing out and out
from where a stone was thrown,

the fugitive quickness of minnows
in a mountain pool, dipped up
one morning moment only
by the thirst of seven-year-old hands.

But by the time I put my foot
into slipper I’ve taken on the load
of everything that’s lain in wait all night
(the way I hung out waiting for my father
to have finished his coffee and cards
and come out of his morning funk
himself again, ready to lift me).

The same old words, thick crusted gray
and slow, massing like barnacles
on a beached ship, the wrack
of all those others’ final storms
calm now because utterly spent.

Instead, let me leaven and rise
knowing quite nothing from before.
Beginner’s mind, the teishos say, open
again to every lovely loopy possibility.


—Christie

Writing Spaces

In faded jeans and favorite oversized sweater, with pain au chocolat and three pens in your canvas satchel, taking notes on the ending of summer . . .

Benches in autumn The path across the head of the tiltyard in Dartington Hall gardens.  Derek Harper

Stumps

Two stumps, couchant

and grandly gnarled

as oriental lions

in a den of autumn oaks.

Shade imminent

and closing in,

like year and years.

The far west campus

readying again

for its more serious purpose,

the pause of summer

done, ephemeral as summers past;

these great truncated beasts,

creatures of time itself, laying

a heavy paw over

the paper-lightness of its bones.

—Christie

Blue Iris

My best friend is married
my grandmother dead

a glass pitcher

of blue irises that will not open

sits on my bedroom floor

and I realize autumn

has surprised me again.

—Christie

Fall 1978, San Francisco

Writing Spaces

Beach reading, beach writing . . .





image:  My French Country Home