--MY HEART IS OPEN WIDE AND I AM ON YOUR SIDE

 

…This weekend I read a lot of poetry and finished a few volumes, including “On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths” by Lucia Perillo, which was one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 as deemed so by The New York Times Book Review.

I had no idea what she was trying to convey in almost every one of her poems.  It was a smarter book than me, or else she was just being clever to fool her readers.
I dislike poetry that is so obscure, although hers wasn’t necessarily.  It was very specific most times, but the larger points she was making always left me lost and confused.
My one big take away is that art is truly subjective, or that I don’t know how to decipher cryptic language, let alone enjoy it.

…Pete the eagle has flown by a few times already.  It’s hard to tell if he’s a happy bird.  He’s pretty serious-looking.  I just hope he’s not too hungry.  Being hungry sucks.

…Geese are a paradox.  I love watching them fly in a V.  I love watching a group of them on land, because they really are picturesque.  However, I do not love them on my lawn destroying it.  Whenever I see them on the grass, I scamper from my desk downstairs to shoo them away.  Somehow, cute Lucy knows exactly what’s going on, or else she just senses my ire, because she’ll charge after me barking (she almost never barks) and will run out on the deck with me barking away (she’s pretty fierce for a six pound Shorkie.  actually she’s anything but fierce.)  The other bad part about geese is they are mean animals.  Inevitably the group will gang up on a lone goose, snapping at his wings.  I guess bullies exist everywhere.  I guess lots of people (and geese) think they’re hella tougher than everyone else and need to prove it.

…Anne Elizabeth did a little review of a story I wrote, four paragraphs down:

http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/lively-interchange-between-words-and-images
 

…One day a few years ago I saw this elderly couple at Safeway.  I just pulled my cart to the side and watched them for a while.  They were arthritic and hunched over, but still looked very much in love and dependent on each other.  Back at home that night, I looked across the lake and wrote this story, which I’ve performed at a few readings:

 

Center and Fringe

         
            I want you to lie to me. 

I want you to pull my hair and threaten to leave me again, tell me every soiled thing you loathe about me but, later, do a paint-by-numbers watercolor on my chest, inserting a subliminal message between the stripes of a rainbow.

            I want to cuddle with you on this bed of pine needles so scratchy we’d never be able to sleep, the frosty air cold enough to make our noses bleed, dribbling down our chins like scarlet fondue. 

I want the taillights glowing rat-eyed across the lake to be your eyes, fascinated by me on this winter’s night.  I want the cones of light reflected on the wafting water to be a cloud that morphs in undulation so that we can find new characters and objects in its wake, its center and fringe. 

I want you to see what I see, the people who own that light and the house where that light glows, the ones that have been together since before the war against Germany.  I saw them at Safeway yesterday.  She was testing a melon with her gnarled thumb while the brittle little guy manned the cart, hunched, grinning like a very happy gnome.

I want our skins to spot and sag together.  I want us to molt and refute what happened last weekend.  I want magical powers, the ability to make you stay put, to cause that car to miss you, take a different corner, let you live.     

I want to take it all back.