Familiar - On Knowing Your Muse

Familiar

who are you,

this creature with my face and eyes,

small and fleet running rampant on my soul?

what quest brings you here again

to devour my joy and chase away my peace

ever laughing as you go, flinging scorn and disdain?

come, troubler of spirits

rest here on my lap and tell me what fuels your frenzy

how comes your recent troubled flight into my thoughts?

sit with me

let us wait together for the rain

waterfalls often bring sprites in drops of tears and sweet dew.

for i know you like them so

abide here with me then - my familiar.

A Man's Poem - I Need

I need

I know I am able to stand alone
I know I can work hours and days
To build our home

When feelings rise that would weaken me
I know I will stride through them
Fearlessly

But tonight my love I need your hand
I need your touch
A heart to understand

I need to be weak and broken through
I need your passion
I need you

I know how to be decisively stern
I know I can remain
Standing firm

Lose or win I speak honestly
Clasped on to the task
I will believe

But tonight my love I need your hand
I need your touch
Your heart to understand

I need to be weak, helpless and lost
I need your passion
No matter the cost

I need to be weak and broken through
I need your passion
I need you

Oprah's No Phone Zone - Expanded

So, Oprah has proclaimed a "No Phone Zone" for texting, talking and such while driving to work.

This is good. However, I've been thinking lately about having a "No Phone Zone" in my personal space - i.e. what if we all said, if you are talking to me don't check your phone, write/read text messages, or email. Take the few minutes or hour of our conversation as a No Phone Zone. Let's remember how to focus, listen and be with each other.

I may just start by observing it myself. What say you?

Top Things I Need to Do But Haven't - Yet.

1. Back up my iTunes library - I know. I should. I just can't stand the idea of burning it to all of those CDs. Why doesn't Apple allow me to save it to an external drive?

2. Get a physical - Another thing I should do, but every time I think about it I keep remembering one particular aspect of the exam. Hey, it's only been two years.

3. Clean out my top dresser drawer - Don't even pretend yours is neat.

4. Finish my Novel - it's only 10 years in the making.

5. Decide what I want to be when I grow up - I keep changing my mind.

Blogger Inspiration 101

Sometimes I run across a post floating around in blog land that just hits me the right way and I feel compelled to write in respond. Recently this happened while I was over at Monica's Place. I began a comment and it turned into a poem. Thought I would share it here.


Monica Unwrapped

layers and layers folded upon you
thin, airy fabrics of almost unnoticeable existence
one is nothing, an inconvenience

another layer merely a moment of discomfort
laced together slowly, one by one
wrapping themselves around you

one day the weight is unbearable
one day the discomfort binds you
one day you feel cocooned

time
time passes
time passes slowly
time passes slowly and you grow

too big for the encasement
too substantial for the drapes of bondage
too complete for holding back

...

emerge in your time
some of us already see your beauty
and believe

believe in yourself, delicate butterfly
believe, feel the sun
flutter on the breeze and fly…

Brookgreen Gardens Series - Chapter 2, Love Poem

I believe part of the magic, the power of Brookgreen Gardens is the remenants of the intense and intricate love between two creative souls:Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington.

We get a brief and beautiful glimpse into the love they has for each other in one of Archer's poems, "Dedication." Written to and about Anna Hyatt Huntington it is now repserved in marble in the wall of Oak Allee'.

Dedication

To those whose joyous smile across the haze

Of weariness would flood with light these days

And fold the valley of our journeying

Even in the silvery dawn of spring

To you my heart as might a sunlit sea

Welcomes your soul, ship of my destiny!

With you in splendor past all dreams desire

I found a world lighted by love's true fire.

-Archer M Huntington

Brookgreen Gardens Series - Chapter 1

One of the best kept secrets in South Carolina is Brookgreen Gardens. This antebellum estate setting, now the home of outdoor statuary, towering live oaks and pristine gardens has a history dating back to 1931. Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, founded Brookgreen Gardens, a non-profit 501(c) (3) garden museum, to preserve the native flora and fauna and display objects of art within that natural setting.
Brookgreen Gardens is a National Historic Landmark with the most significant collection of figurative sculpture, in an outdoor setting, by American artists in the world. Brookgreen has the only zoo accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums on the coast of the Carolinas.

I grew up less than 20 miles from Brookgreen Gardens. In the mid 1960's, my mother would retreat to this quiet setting to reflect and heal spiritually following the untimely death of my father. Finding a special place of both natural and artistic beauty she later made this place a regular destination for her family - my sister, brother and me. The statues towered above us and the trees stretched out above us, offering us inspiration and shelter for all of the maladies of the often noisy and mundane chores of life. I grew up in the embrace of these gardens and there is no place I know that captures such a rich resource of art (poetry, sculpture, architecture, landscape), nature (200 year old oaks, giant azalea plants with palm size flowers, Spanish moss, native flora and fauna) and history (tales of the developing South, rice plantations, early trade, the beginning of ethnic diversity).

One of Anna Hyatt's pieces that resides in my mind is "Jaguar." One of a pair of sculptures in bronze, this depiction of a life size beast, poised to jump always captured my attention as a child. It still does.

All This Talk About Change

Change

Another second ticks past

Another moment that won’t last

Time again yields to nothing new

Leaves behind victories and youth

Those who thought one life could change

Our world from scandal and pain

Belief that hope and desire

Would cast water upon the fire

Yet failures and callused minds

Bind with broken promises finding

Brilliant victories heralding

Vanquished limits and proclaiming

Without giving merit to those

Whose lives already tried and lost

Upon the battlefields

Of soil and polices

Note: image courtesy of Free Digital Photos

Relief - A Tale from the Seaside

Before the lightning flashes, clouds roll in bringing with them a promise of relief from the incessant heat and the potential of a light show over the sea. There is nothing so comforting as a summer evening thunder storm at the coast.

Their regular appearance with their own assembly of sound, light (amazing light) and a palpable embrace. It's the drop in barometric pressure, so they tell me, that creates the change in the air. the air seems to at once feel lighter and more dense with moisture as it brushes against you: an ascending wave of breeze upon breeze. The air smells of salt and sea just before the storm.

Perhaps the sensations are so powerful because of all bare skin; the taut, tanned skin of youthfulness, proclaiming would be eternal beauty and undaunted vigor, feeling every ray of sun, every grain of sand, every coming drop of rain.

Memory tells the story now... Here I felt the world, alive and full. I felt the storms. Here I would grab you by the hand and rush to the beach as the clouds darkened the sky and the breeze began to chase us. Sunbathers scattered for shelter and we would run against the current of people to the beach and scurry like sand fiddlers into the large wooden float box positioned with it's one open side facing the ocean. There we would settle in, giggling and shuffling into our place among the sandy floats, into each other's arms and wait for the show to begin.

Drops would fall, making small dimples in the sand and then give way to sheets of rain, blown sideways by the wind folding them like sheets - waving to us. The light would fade and burst in flashes. Then the moment would come when, framed by the window of our shelter we would see a jagged bolt of lightning descend in to the sea. We would shut our eyes and capture the image of that bolt now cut into the fabric of our souls as we felt the thunder - thunder into us. We would hold each other tightly as we shared the storm between us. I remember your bare back hot beneath my hands, the texture of your lips, and the taste of you.

Lightning flashes. Clouds roll in, bringing with them the promise of relief...

Note: image courtesy of Free Digital Photos

Beat the Reaper - A Killer of a Book

My son loaned me a innocent little yellow covered paperback book, "Beat The Reaper, " by Josh Bazell.

Turning to the opening chapter, I was smitten - in love I tell you - by the first line: "So, I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me!"

The great news is the read gets even better. Carol Memmott, USA Today, is quoted on the cover "It's just what the doctor ordered...think House meets The Sopranos." She couldn't be more right!

Bazell wields wonderfully strong verbiage and a bouncing story line that darts between a clearly depicted real-world hospital environment and a fantastical realm of underworld brutality.

I'm finding the book disturbing (I even have nightmarish dreams). I find it engaging. I find the work mesmerizing.