Saturday, August 28, 2010

Hoarding wonderful things.

Too much things fill my house 
just like my House Dreams, 
just like old memories
filled with people, 
antique toys
and dusty 

furniture. 

Still, there is something 
about each thing 
in my house 
I love. 

Whimsy
Color
Aesthetics
Nature
Odd uses
Childlike
Memories
Beauty
Education

Too many things to contemplate as much as I'd like. In an ancient apple orchard estate lies a fallen gray branchlet on new sandy white dirt just uncovered by a clearing machine, wrapped with attached lichen: two kinds, near dry crinkly rattlesnake rattling-grass.


A handed down whale tooth sketched with marine scrimshaw, an enormous tooth from a mouth so big as to be unimaginable; whether old or new, I don't know; keeping me wondering in who it had resided.


Old lady relations' laced and tatted bed spreads, perhaps homemade, and huge starched linen sheets, whiter than the full moon, made when mattresses were wrapped with only flat sheets, lie folded in the closet for 30 years.


Chopped off whiffs of white, red and blond tresses, dear to me as those upon who's heads they grew, a each wave of hair tied with a ribbon, in a small monogrammed, glass box. these stay.


How can a person yearn for minimalism with these treasures, piled and packed away, saved for best but never be used or touched, or even found? 


And today I brought home a thin, slightly warped, faded old biography of Stradivarius with a cover of now-gold-red; fifty cents of clutter. Fifty cents bringing times of contemplation and information. A treasured heirloom it becomes, call it disorder or not, how do I let it all go?

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Crashing the Party without Me

I remember you crashing the party without me.

How absurd to have a party for only the adults, the children are not invited, when the children are twenty to thirty. It's for their father. This prejudice is locked away in brains raised that way. Careful seating to keep Society balanced. No intellectual curiosity, no leaving the generational presence. I thought we had rebelled, sick of the veneer.

Irritated, drunken welcomes for the interlopers, slurring words, wobbling hugs, breath in their face. Would they remember, "I just love you!" because they would mainly love in stupor?

Then I felt left out with doubt and anguish of do they love me. Now I would stride home and close the front door and head out the back to garden in the cold rain, my fresh breath in puffs.