January 2009
13 posts
For the Ashes...
Urns for the ashes of tired hearts. Disappointed hopes.
I write because I can’t live otherwise.
I draw the sponge lengthwise over the countertop and watch as it inflates, one crater-like receptacle at a time, filling with the wetness I left when I washed that lettuce. Red leaf. Dirty. Outside a choir of birds are singing down the sun, one shade of orange at a time until it blends into the dark...
Writing Excercise~Describe a lake as seen by a...
It must have been morning by the time he reached the lake. It was still dark though, and quiet, and cold, and the water stretched out unmoving before him. Stretched away from where he stood at the lip of its begining.
There were three stars out. Just three. He counted them. One, two, three, scanning the night for more with his neck craned back and his face to the sky. To the cold air. To the feel...
Writing Excercise~write a dramatic fragment using...
The restaurant was empty save for them.
They sat by the window, Josh facing it and Andrea with her back to it.
“This is weird,” Josh said, craning his neck to look behind him at their empty surroundings.
“Yeah,” said Andrea.
The restaurant was a Thai place but the music was full of the twangs and chimes that usually go along with cheap Chinese food.
The waiter emerged...
Nostos
About a week ago, someone asked if I knew that the word nostalgia means painful return.
Yes, thanks to Gallatin and two consecutive semesters of Greek mythology, I knew. Nostalgia comes from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain) and recalls to my mind the poetry of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus takes on his own nostos and attempts to return home to Ithaca, despite the twenty years...
“She comes to me on a regular basis, and otherness mingles with familiarity. She...”
– From Eva Figes’ Tales of Innocence and Experience. Figes is turning out to be one of my favorite female writers. She has a cadence to her style that manages to make shapes of words without losing their meaning in the beautiful forms she crafts. This, I think, is the great challenge to...
Writing Excercise ~ Describe a woman seeing a...
The crocuses are blooming. Shooting up in a display of yellow and green, brighter this year than ever before. She notices them in the morning, sees them out the kitchen window while she fills the kettle.
It’s a morning unlike any before.It’s a morning that sends her out the kitchen door to stand on her back porch. To pull tight her bathrobe when she meets the air, still twinged with...
In India
Marigold, Saffron, Triangles, Shapes repeated, India, I am twelve, An American child
My parents, together, although in years to come my mother will tell me that it was on that trip that she knew it was over.
Daddy wears a red turban, Everybody laughs, I live each day inside each minute, Coca cola and signs for Thumbs UP soda pop
Cow patties with palm pressed imprints stuck up on stucco walls,...
Writing Excercise~Describe in detail a single,...
Peeling a Tangerine: It fits, round and cold, perfectly in the palm of her hand. Perfectly and perfect, a tangerine. She is standing at the counter, holding out the fruit before her, as if offering it to another person. But there is no one and she is simply admiring, feeling the way the tangerine skin, peppered with little pot holes, sits against the tight pink flesh of her palm. She...
Writing Excercise~In a run-on sentence, explore an...
Angry Me:
It’s vibrating beneath my skin, this thing, foreign and hot, unfamiliar and anxious - a spinning top, a boiling kettle set to whistle, and ever-building, not releasing, not letting go the way I wish it would, wish it could, explode, all over you, you when you look at me so concerned, so suspect, saying you smell something and would I go check the burner, would I get up and...
1 tag
Carole Maso says it all. Speaks to some concept of self that is either universal, albeit not obviously so, or extremely relevent to the experiences of a certain type of art-filled, complicated and odd person like myself. Either way, her words simplify and say what I struggle to put my pencil on. Simplifies it all with grace. Perhaps such is why I repeat her everywhere, perhaps I do so out of some...
“The desire of the novel to be a poem. The desire of the girl be a horse. The...”