Hawk

Hot weather days when I am queen of all I survey:

Outstretched wings touching eternity

the swells beneath me enough

to keep me floating

to keep me soaring

to keep me free of pesky laws like gravity

 

Sharp frigid days when I scream simply to let the world know I live:

days when I cavort

flip and play and fall to sweep back up

when I know every taste of the sun

and every ice-tongued lick of the wind

these are days when I smile

 

And then there are days when I stop

and dive and land on my mark

(Inward one-and-a-half pike, degree of difficulty 2.0)

and rip into the small frantic heart-beating beast

and the hot meat is enough

to keep me grounded

satisfied

viscerally and disgustingly alive

 

Down days when I eat roadkill

the play of engine oil and carrion stink

some magic perfume

 

I grow fat

and I do not remember how to fly

what it feels like to choose my prey

to stoop to play to scream

simply because I am

 

there are days when I forget the way the wind flirts

the way a heart breaks

what it is to fly

what it is to live

Struck by Lightning

Continuing to post drafts of things – need to start writing again. Inspired by the new dance form I’ve taken up, which is kicking my butt, the linked image, and as much Greek mythos as I could handle.

http://gorkafx.deviantart.com/art/Prothesic-makeup-7-11955204

There’s a photo I have seen –
depending on who you believe
it is a stellar make-up job
it is a man struck by lightning
But as both these things, it is a pattern
Of purple and sickly yellow and black
Skin-sketched by man or god
it looks like he may spring out of his skin
it is Athena, perhaps, full-formed from Zeus

Today I have more bruises than I know what to do with
Outer and inner thigh, shins front and back
the pooled blood flirts with the rainbow
mostly the heat of infrared, tender to touch
I cover these new-class battle-wounds
Struggle with balance, balance biting back

I have not been patterned in quite this way
Since I ignored Athena’s advice
Her gray eyes’ sad smile in the mirror
it is pity
it is compassion
Bitemarks of a different kind sprinkling me
I did not ask your questions, sister
Though I should have known the sisters of stories
(bitter and tender and sweet)
Known that my words stand me apart from Aphrodite
My actions from Artemis
My inadequacy from Hera

Athena, that I should give up my throne to you
I will tend the fire
Sit by the flame-spotted hearthrug
Contemplate burning
Your father’s light bolts springing from the sky
As Hestia, half scalding and half freezing
(as one always is, next to a fire)
Zeus hares off again (for pleasure or pain)
Hera turns her face away to ponder peacocks
It is a make-up job
Eyes all over your body
It is a man struck by lightning

And you, like I, cannot see
Athena, make us ask our questions
Unlock the heartfires, whether we feel
the dragon or the charred rug today
Embrace the patterns and weave our battle wounds
It is a tapestry

Yarns of rainbow-flirting colors,
infrared and ultraviolet
Athena’s smile springs out of her skin
Her knowledge in each warp and weft
Wraps me warm, enclosed, accepted
As the Fates snip each thread

Graduation II

he is a whirlwind laser pointer

question after question

when he is on

holograms and lightshows

tracing up and down the wall

as if to challenge a cat

to a battle of sanity

Mom, can I borrow the car

Mom, can I have a ride

Mom, I’m going over to Maddie’s

Mom, can I have $20

Mom, Maddie’s going to give me a ride home

Mom, I have to go to work

Mom, can you pick me up

he is a whirlwind laser pointer

bright, pointed, hitting the books

calculating the proper velocity to launch

a spaceship into Earth’s orbit

cobbling together a computer,

taking apart a television,

building a playground.

his laser-pointer dreams

soar like the eagle scout he is

hike up a mountain to stage a picnic

sit in the narrowest branches of the tree

(no longer in the backyard)

his laser-pointer precision hands

possibly putting laundry in the hamper

the red light traces the walls of his room

screens light up the dark

not a sound when lasers turn off

when the laser-pointer boy is gone

Mom, he will come home

Mom, he will sleep in his bed

and eat your home-cooked food

and fill the empty nest

with those same questions:

Mom, can I borrow the car

Mom, can I have $20

Mom, I have to go

Know that he means

Mom, I love you

Know that someday

he will fix his translator

Graduation I

she is the perfect polish of a silver ring

dedication stretching down to a split

starry eyed science fairs and failed nofailfudge

she is waffles and rock tumblers churning away

performing in delicate tulle and hooker red lipstick

breaking down over finals week, returning triumphant

every time

she is lithe and graceful

a grand jette

making multimedia and searching for seashells

the tiny ones, smaller than a glint in her eye

specifically when cracked open

to draw through a thread or wire

and hang on ears, on necks

she is tiny cranes and snobbery

“I could make that”

she receives all the compliments I get

“oh, my sister made it”

every time

returning triumphant after spazzing out through finals week

performing in tutus and pencilled-in brows

geodes full of opals and Vermont maple syrup

chili rice and wine served to guests and friends

dedication stretching down as a straddle

between patina and polish of a silver ring

Meeting

I’ve heard it say that

Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

But the very tangibility of life

the intangibility of electrons

speaks to me in a way that says

we are the ones in the universe who have found rest

and there may be others out there

there may be other electrons that have finally taken their last loop

around this world and vanished towards other shores

But life: that, we can touch

Reach out and taste it, juice dripping down our chins

Skinned knees and lathered hair

wrapped ourselves in it and allowed perspective to warp

down to a single pinprint of light

You may already know that

(on a per gram and per second basis)

you convert 10,000 times more energy than the sun

So that yellow ball in the sky

deity to our forefathers and the beach bums of today

speaks in many ways and says

we are the ones in our lifetimes who shine bright

and there may be others out there

other Shiners who are hidden away in the dark

with walls and a ceiling packed to bursting with the bright

glow of those inside

But light: that, we can touch

Feel on our temples, the bridges of our noses and the curve of your back

dapple ourselves with it, fingerpaint in the sunscreens

down to a million billion moments in time

I’m sure you know about E. coli

Disasters thrown at you about reasons to wash

your fruit, wash your hands, wash the world

For if E. coli had a limitless food source

it could divide so fast that in one day

one revolution of our planet around that bright yellow ball

that one organism could split so many times

that the pile of descendants would be over a thousand times larger

than the mass of the earth

E. coli shines its light the best it can

though few appreciate it

and most try to wash it down the drain

it speaks to me the best it can and says

we are the ones to leave something for those coming behind us

says here: take my genes

and here: see my light in the water

E. coli splits in two faster than it can copy its genome

and a copier which needs to make rapid-fire copies

it starts on the next before the first is washed away

Once, when we were younger, my little sister took time lapse photos of the stars

She set up a camera with a tripod and we looked for constellations

and when she looked at her images, the stars had become little lines

drawing their light across the sky like white Magic Markers on black paper

(that ineluctable combination that somehow never hit the shelves)

and the movement that we could not see

as we found Orion and the bears

stuck in space and time

the little lines on that photograph

spoke loudly, freeing the constellations to dance

We are the universe – at least a part of it

and we too know how to slow dance to the rhythm of the stars

streaking our lives out across time

brief Shiners, short shinings,

but we shine

we say here: take my genes. take my all

pass them along to someone who will use them even better than I

someone that I have not met yet

and may never meet

until this I becomes mountain air, wetland sludge, star stuff

until this I remembers that it was human for a little while

until this I is scattered to electrons

finally coming to rest

Makers

I’ve been working a little with the teachers who run the STEAM program at my school.  The acronym, as it’s used in all the literature, is Science Technology Engineering Art and Math.  The acronym, as it’s used in my school?  Well, we try to keep it amorphous (sometimes that works).  We’d love for the S to be Service. Though it’s a word corrupted by mandatory service days into something that just means showing up and doing what is asked of you — instead, we want service to be about solving problems.

 

Which leads me to the kids in this STEAM program, the Makers and the Computer Geeks, most of whom have spent a whole year tackling a big problem.  One group is creating a book that will read itself to a child when the child pushes buttons.  There’s an art-bot, now disassembled as its makers focus on code, that was to read the Iliad, parse it for meaning, assign colors to the meaning, and paint a spiralling image across a stretched canvas to show the story.  (The artbot may live on in another reincarnation next year, but for now, it’s a visual pathway only.)  There’s a group working to 3D model some typical campus furniture to be the props in a newsroom for a school news show, a found poetry group, a computer coder creating black holes and planets on screen.  These students impress me, a lot.

 

There’s one thing we see that they’re missing right now, though. Community.

Our school is really big on community – and the students are nice to each other, to themselves (usually), to their teachers (definitely).  We want to see the makers of STEAM linked together, using each other’s expertise and collaborating on ideas, ideating (you’re right, spellcheck, it doesn’t look like a real word to me either) and iterating and making.  It doesn’t matter if you’re the kid in the corner who passionately wants to do every bit of programming he can get his hands on or the girl in the the front who would really like to get to the point where they can lift the quadcopter off the ground.  We want to see mixing, making, happening.

 

Sometimes we see this — the past two years, there’s been an installation in the stairwell of our science building right before winter break.  It makes noise, it needs kids to help set it up, it’s amazing and annoying and beautiful and weird.  This year it was called LEO — Love Each Other.  By placing hands onto pads on the walls, you could connect a circuit with your body.  If you did it alone – you got a sad song about being lonely to play.  If you got a couple of friends to help you stretch to the next pad?  You got a love song about how great it is to be with people.  LEO was a team-effort. PAM — LEO’s predecessor — was also a team effort.  But the STEAM teachers (which I guess I can include myself in now) want to make the ideas that made LEO and PAM work happen all the time.

 

I guess we, as the teachers, are making as well – making something more subtle, though.  Sure, we have our own ideas, our own projects – more on mine below – but who these kids are, and become, when they collaborate and struggle together and try a bunch of ideas and the quadcopter still refuses to lift off – my making is their determination to see their project through.

 

(I went through an epic internet rampage today, just checking out all of the neat materials that are available and starting to play with ideas.  Particularly sparked by Catarina Mota’s TedTalk.  Nothing definite that I think I’ll be making right now, but -the excitement of finding PMC going through a 3D printer https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/minimetalmaker-a-small-3d-printer-that-fabricates-with-metal-clay#home led me to analogies and hands-on science things — and a detour towards squishy circuits https://learn.sparkfun.com/blog/1259 which led me to conductive ceramics in general http://www.google.com/patents/US4183830 &http://www.fabricatingideas.com/2008/07/25/electrically-conductive-glaze/ & http://global.kyocera.com/fcworld/charact/heat/thermalcond.html which started to blossom into an idea that looks very similar to a mug that heats itself  http://gizmodo.com/5537943/kug-is-a-mug-that-boils-water-like-a-kettle which led me to a possible DIY version http://www.amazon.com/Mokingtop-Travel-Heater-Element-Immersion/dp/B00H4T7E04/ref=pd_cp_hi_0 and other possibilities for heaters http://www.deepskywatch.com/Articles/newtonian-dew-heater.html and finally back to ceramics, in paper clay.  http://www.jerrybennett.net/paperclay.html.  Long story short — the internet is great, people are doing such awesome things, and I want to make all the things. Oh – also, yay for crowdsourcing! https://www.ted.com/talks/britta_riley_a_garden_in_my_apartment)

Michaelangelo (after the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

And then there are the times when I read Prufrock far too many times.  This is still in flux, and I may come back and edit it again here or elsewhere.  But I’m looking forward to going back to Italy, and there are moments where I’m sad that Michaelangelo gets all the Rome-love.

I am a woman who comes and goes

Speaking of Michaelangelos

 

I walk the crosswalks of overflowing streets

the sunshining retreats

of days of snow and ice and cold

and welcome the spring in pink and green

watching the just beginning scenes

spread out across the stage

of humans from another age

 

Let us go then, you and I

as the sun reaches high in a cloudless sky

like a lantern in an overwhelming room

bright and warm and a cheerful tune

the vaulted ceilings of a theater resound – 

Let us go to see paint and stone

Beauty and history overthrown

Oh, do not disparage my awe this moment

Let us go and make our visit

 

For I am a woman who comes and goes

Speaking of Michaelangelos

 

I have walked these streets before

walked them all

tripped over the cobblestones

bruised a knee

but felt the history sink in

as the bruise faded to greens and pinks

started to see the angels’ winks

no putti on the ceiling here

no naked buttocks flashing bare

pouffy clouds and stuck out tongues

speak of rebirth to barren nuns

I learn then what I knew before

 

Let us go then, you and I

stand in lines beneath the sun’s cloudless sky

two woman in this tideless flow

waiting to see Michaelangelo

Let us go and see the sturm und drang

Held in the esteem of the countless throng

 

I have walked these streets before

Walked them through the chapel, to the great outdoors

but felt history sinking in

as I hunt back through for a safety pin

a needle in a haystack

a pinprick, a drop of blood

fought my way through the guard’s disapproval

one name on my lips

 

Oh, do not ask what is it.

Let us go and make our visit.

 

For Michaelangelo stands and overshadows all

Chapel ceiling and facing wall

His giants tower and his prophets preach

Arms outreaching, pick a peach

His skin stripped sadly looking down

He hangs this trophy on the wall

Releasing himself to watch the fire

desperately reaching, searching, grasping

he will watch the sinners drown

 

I have walked these streets before

Walked them one and all

I have seen the reaching fingers

the awestruck reach for God

And tucked up in the walkways

Another face to art

Contemporaneous stillness

Contemporary peace

 

In the rooms the women come and go

Speaking of Michaelangelo

 

Yet as they walk through the Stanze

Four half-moon paintings bathe them in light

The sun is stronger down below

Where giants reign and sin bellows

And here the gaze of light brown eyes

Reaches, admonishes, bathes, and sighs

 

He will not drown you in heavy age

Or bulging muscles or giant face

But he will dip you in awestruck grace

and the step of his foot is a shepherd’s pace

 

We will not speak of him.

We will not speak of me.

We stomping, trample the test of time

contemporaries and those who came before

left behind as awful boors

 

I measure out my days in steps

Front or back or right or left

I dig deeper into history’s eyes

Coffee spoons of my own demise

For I measure out my life in drips and drams

In little works of these lesser hands

I do not dare to paint a peach

I do not dare to taste the beach

 

But will I dare, and when I dare

to speak the name of Michelangelo

what may I say that history will refute

a cleaner ceiling, a clearer past

his towering giants crouch at last

pushing through his painted roof

and all to establish the sculptors reproof

 

What must it be to be a pope

to set up the painter and send up the smoke

ask God to remember the works of your hand

or what you uncovered to make it more grand

Perugino, Botticelli, 

Ghirlandaio, Rossellini

frescoed the walls 

a ceiling of gold stars on blue over it all

 

We speak of Michaelangelo

We come and go and come and go

We may disparage

We may adore

We see the tromping hordes of time

Pause, and breathe, and ignore the alarms

Shrilling from watches

from technologies drawn

 

Open the doors to your enemies

Let the sunshine in

Til the angel’s voices wake us

Our eyes are found

Flying Home

Sometimes I am tired of being the mother

to these daughters who are not my own

Play nice. Say you’re sorry. Honey, you hurt her feelings.

I sit on the swings

One of those old swingsets that still contains swings for people over the age of six

Not brightly colored plastic: metal, a little rusted

As my feet lift off the ground

pump back and forth

the beat of the A-frame matches my heart but

The sigh of protest from the structure

Strains to help gravity pull me down

Sometimes I feel like a terrible leader

to these children who squabble and fuss

Honey, you hurt her feelings. Play nice. Say you’re sorry. 

I sit on the swings

Committees of grown-up babies linked together

trying to fly higher and higher

always pulled down to earth

Higher, mama, higher, Icarus calls

unable to match his sister

wanting to fly with his brother

And I push once more against gravity

Sometimes I wish we could fly

shoulder bones snapping out into wings but

Say you’re sorry. Honey, you hurt her feelings. Play nice. 

I sit on these swings

One of those old swingsets firmly bolted into the earth

A little rusted, but strong

We cannot resolve our differences on the ground

I hear the Canada geese flying overhead,

the sigh of protest from above

the sound melding into what I hear

If my feet lifted off the ground

Gravity collects us all, in the end

Drying time

I’m struggling with taking the right amount of time to let my pieces dry.  I can, of course, cover them from time to time I’m not in the studio, but I know that if I come in two days in a row, about 24 hrs apart, I can pinpoint the moment when they’ll be dry enough to trim pretty perfectly.   If I leave them out, sitting on my shelf with the light from the skylight beaming down, for more than a day, I end up with pieces nearly bone-dry.  If I fiddle with them too much when they’re wet, I know that I’ll end up with something that flops, the structural integrity of the clay unable to handle the stresses I’m putting it under.

This leads to the actual problem: I’m not making it to the studio everyday.

Not that I should, but I’m not showing up when I know I have things drying, even to cover them up so that I can trim them at my leisure.

The studio’s about 20 min from work, about 10 min from home.  Half an hour, if I want to walk it. And sometimes, that distance seems insurmountable, that tiny stretch of time feels like eternity.  Occasionally there’s a reason – the streets are covered in snow, and I’m wary of finding a parking spot near the apartment if I take the time to slip and slide my way to the studio; I’m afraid of freezing my fingers with glazes, I’m cold and don’t want to leave my room – and occasionally I’m just being a lazy bum.

So I fritter away time on the internet, maybe searching for knowledge but probably just watching endless covers of Frozen songs and catching up on crime dramas.

And I guess that’s what sparks my curiosity:  what sort of drying time do I need?  Why is my recharge time sometimes so long, and other times quick? What makes it difficult to leave the apartment and go play with clay?  Because I love the process of making.  I love the serenity of perfectly centered clay gliding by my fingers, I love the thrill of success when I throw a form that I thought was outside my abilities. 

As I sit here, my pieces are drying, asking to an empty studio — Are you sure? Is this what you want me to be? — and, getting no response — Ok. Alright. I guess no news means that I should keep this form forever.

I love the light soaking through the skylight. Let me be molded, formed, dried, but never lose the ability to be melted back down and remade.

Pandora

I teach science to high schoolers, and their questions are my dreams.  Why and how and huh flutter about my mind, sparking ideas with tiny bubbles of positivity. We talked of states of matter, as most science classes do, the slog through ‘this is a solid, look, you cannot shift its shape’ and ‘this is a liquid, it will fill its container’, and ‘this is a gas, it will fill whatever space you give it and bounce about like a middle school boy who has to pee’.

 

But their attention, and mine, caught on how the atoms that make us up never quite touch.  You can get them closer (gas condensing to a liquid, liquid freezing up to a solid) and you can get them to slow down from hyperactive gas to tiny vibrations, but the centers of those atoms will never quite touch, never quite still.

 

They may share electrons, little particles of negativity whizzing from one to the next.  They may all feel the same forces pulling on them – gravity of an overwhelmingly big earth, electrostatic pull of a charged balloon on a wall – still the forces never touch the heart of the atom.  Swayed, but never touched. 

 

And it’s not that I think the atoms are lonely, not that I’m lonely, not that the universe is lonely – it’s just that I see a space between the pieces.  I see the box, open.

 

There’s a moment when I’m throwing something tall, and I’ve done the work of opening my clay, raising the piece a little higher than the height I want it, and starting to play with the shape where the tiniest layer of slip slides between my fingers and the wall.  In that moment, there’s a gap.  Not a hole in the wall, not a weakness or a mistake, but a gap where the piece and I agree not to touch.

 

And yet, I have my hands on this piece and I am making.  I have direction, and action, and momentum and the sync between myself and the piece is the tornado following the drain in the sink of my craft.  But I do not touch the piece.  I touch the gap.

 

A gap that the moisture from my hands, on the clay, provides less friction, that the clay can slide by, that I just hint in the suggestion that I want it to go and it moves. 

 

It shapes to my will, with an action at a distance force. Invisible, intangible, my fingers on the edge of perception, the edge of slipping off, the edge of sliding off of center.  

 

The feeling of a force forcing action at a distance.  I know that we think of forces acting on the center of an object, and I draw my two charges, arrows pushing back and forth from the centers, as the like charges repel, center to center.  I draw my two charges, arrows pushing together further and further, as the centers long to touch.  I know that I can shape on the wheel so long as I keep the piece on center, but the feeling of the clay slipping by is almost the feel of skin on skin.  Barely touching, the frisson of knowing that something is there.

 

Touching and not touching at the same time. The conundrum of Schrodinger’s cat, stuck in a box.  In the dark, if it does not meow its intentions, I cannot tell if it breathes unless I reach into the box and feel the warm purr emanate up my arm.  

 

I feel the space between vibrations change into discontent.  

I agree not to touch.

 

Open the box.