sketch for a new poem.

I once knew a boy whose beauty was rooted in his youth. He was blonde and sincere, with rosy pink cheeks, newly shed of his baby fat. Dewy and fresh in appearance and demeanor.

He grew of course, into a man with an angular face and a stern expression.

When I look at his pictures I see the passage of time. I see, very clearly, the movement from youth and wonder to age and - perhaps wisdom or perhaps a kind of guarded skepticism a way of walking through the world that carries with it the scars of a sudden awakening.

I don't know what any of it means - don't even understand the feelings he provokes, I only know that when I see the face of the man, in this case, I see no trace of the boy and I wonder how that can possibly be.

He has darkened. His bones have hardened,
into ways and shapes, frames and structures
I never thought possible.

Old men sometimes spring, fully formed from the cowlicked foreheads of handsome blonde boys
barely out of puberty,
they leap into being
with no previous experience
no memory at all
of what might have been.

an attempt to post a video

This won't work on Facebook so let's see if it will work here.

more rain and mj

I am drawing close to the end of my time in Boston and the rain just keeps falling. Last week there were two and a half sunnyish days that got my hopes up but today the sky has returned to its customary june bunting - steel grey, dirty white and smudged.

I hate the rain and it is hard to keep up the slightest positive veneer as it continues to pour and puddle all around me. Very hard.

Also hard to keep from saying that I think Michael Jackson was a sneaky, utterly corrupt, contemptible little child abuser who should have gone to jail a long time ago and whose pop-pop easy-happy pompous, silly music cannot in any way make up for the display of deception that was his daily life or his public self-mutilation.

Even if you accept the assertion that he was innocent of any charges of child molestation, there is the fact that he made it publicly acceptable for middle aged men to have sleepovers with young boys. And if you don't think that gave an army of pedophiles the very in they craved with countless young boys who will now be scarred for life - then you deserve to listen to his sugary, self-aggrandized pablum for the rest of your life.

That's enough from me today - today, I am one bitter, rain sodden woman - tired of the pretense that everything is OK by me, it's not. The never-ending rain is not OK and middle aged pedophiles in full blown denial supported by the public - that's not OK either.

Light

Have you ever sat at a campfire and looked into the forest around you? Try it sometime and you will see just how dark a forest can really look.

An overabundance of light, especially artificial light, concentrated in one spot, blinds a person to everything that is not directly under the beam of that light. Even within the sphere of influence of the campfire, spotlight, desklamp or overhead fixture, unnatural shadows are cast. Things appear not as they are but as they might be under an artificially produced scrutiny. Vision is more obscured than assisted.

I have been in Boston for some time now and the family I am staying with, most especially my friend's ex-husband, are dependent on artificial light twenty-four hours a day.

This month has been gloomy. The sun has not shone more than three times since June began, so people make the argument that it is necessary. Still, I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and find dining room and living room lights blazing and more often than not, two or three different light fixtures turned on at once in the bathroom itself.

It is hurting my vision both in physical and metaphorical terms.

At home, I use artificial light only when it is necessary and as time goes on I find it to be less and less necessary. With the exception of reading and cooking, there really is nothing that requires a focused artificial light source, nothing you cannot do or see better by natural light, even when that is only moonlight, than you could with a lamp or fire of any kind.

Things show you what they really are by natural light. Not what they might be under incandescent's yellow cast or flourescent's shuddering white aura.

God please spare me from thinking the light I cast on things, the perspective I see when I look with that focus, is the real light. Let me remember the shadows and the clarity provided by sun and moon, time and movement - life lived under an honest source of illumination.

Grant me clarity and grant me just a few more days of compassion for this man who does not seem to deserve it because I know, in the long run, nobody does and so we all do.

Get me through this overlit, blinded, dark time.

Essential

Yesterday I saw one of Frank Gehry's projects up close - I'll post pictures here after this entry.
I know people see him as a major visionary in architecture and doubtless he has made great strides in helping people see that a building does not have to be a box but the whole time all I could think of was Sam Mockbee's Rural Studio project and how these two ideas need to be joined.

As a society we seem to accept the idea that art does not or need not serve a purpose. We choose up sides, those of us who believe art is important are forced into defending the indefensible while those who think the survival and care of humanity is more important than anything else feel forced to condemn "high art" as frivolous.

Your soul is not frivolous and art does not need to be useless.

I come back to the central idea, over and over again - art that is not created in the spirit of compassionate communication is weak. Art can soar, it can restore us all, art is the backbone of architecture, the impetus behind the great gardens of the world, the fuel that keeps the writer writing, the carpenter building and the rest of us tending to our daily chores.

Where would we be without music, without color? We need art but more than that - we need to stop thinking that a housing project, a school, an employment center, a farm, a social program and any of a million other things have to exist outside of art in order to be useful.

I suppose today I am praying and I suppose the substance of my prayer is that we learn to recognize that beauty does not cost us one cent extra and that everyone deserves to live in beauty.

Rich or poor, conservative or liberal, male or female, scientist, accountant, plumber, poet or artist - you deserve compassion, you deserve dignity, you deserve beauty.

We all do.

This is an article about the Rural Studio, pass it on.
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2008/ruralstudio/mockbee_ruralstudio.shtml

Summer

I remember when June meant that the skies would clear and the sun would shine from 6 a.m. until 9 at night. I remember the freedom of playing outside in shorts and a top or a sundress and never having to think about staying dry or deal with the glowering clouds hanging right overhead.

I remember hating Victoria for the lack of sunshine and wanting more than anything to be back in a place where I could rely on a series of sunny days, not just one or half of one every two weeks.

I am a person who requires sunlight.

The East no longer recieves it.

I have been in Boston for a month - we have had maybe 5 sunny days the whole time. For the most part I have managed to maintain a pleasant demeanor. I stay busy, make jokes, cook and clean and help pack out the house - when it dries up for a few hours I explore the city.

I have explored the city three times - no more than that.

Many of my friends say they are quite happy in the rain. I want to say emphatically, I am not.
I hate the rain. Hate it. It makes me want to slap somebody and if it doesn't bloody well stop soon I might just do that.

Grocery Addendum

I have asked the people at the grocery store what happened to that woman every time we've gone since we saw her accident.

Nobody knows.

One of the big problems with how we live right now and maybe one of the strengths in some ways, is that we have such strangely truncated communities.

That woman and her deadly accident are part of this Boston community, I know she will never be wiped from my memory. I hope she recovered or that her family was able to get to the hospital (more likely, I think) but I will never know for sure.

Part of what makes the idea of people I love travelling or taking any risk at all is that fact. The idea that someone I cherish might become an anonymous wounded person, dependant on the mercy of strangers, frightens me and makes me feel helpless and lost.

The man I love is travelling today. Very far. I am trying to have faith that he will be fine. After all, more often than not, people do travel safely.

But I am still praying and still just a little on edge.

How do we ever learn to let anyone we love do a single thing alone?

The risks are so enormous.

pray pray pray.