Fragments, memories, photos, music, poetry, novel, cartoons, impressions...
Keep trying out different templates, but all of them seem to have some sort of column problem, I am guessing associated with the Hello uploading of photos...seems also when I refresh the page, I get a different layout. In a way, it's cool, but I don't like it when text of half of a photo is suddenly gone.
An excerpt below from a short story. The Falls, the Niagara river, and the two great lakes, Erie and Ontario, have influenced my writing and photography tremendously (how could they not?).
Last Saturday, ice had formed on every surface along the perimeter of the American Falls where Nyla decided she wanted to shoot some photos. Lee and Nyla slid cautiously along the path at the edge of the upper rapids, squinting against the glint of sunlight reflecting off frozen tree limbs, rails, benches, and blacktop. Green and white water tumbled over the brink throwing up a mist that instantly transformed into a coating of glass. I was happy listening to Nyla's chattering about her broken pinky fingernail, her vacation to Belize, her two Siamese cats. I remained silent, enjoying the splash of vibrancy that Nyla added to the grey slate of our lives. She provided most of our stimulation now that medication had practically extinguished Lee's dexterity and he could no longer play his cello. Nyla's monologue lulled us into what felt like a dream.
Slipping her SLR camera from it's padded case, Nyla focused the first shots on Lee, clicking and advancing the film as quick as an automatic camera might have. We watched her, mesmerized. Her wavy black braids shimmered with mist, and she shuddered as the howling of the rapids pounded our ears. Pivoting away, Nyla stepped closer to the rim of the Falls, her camera still poised in front of one eye. She twisted open the aperture, wider and wider, letting more light fall across the film, capturing crystal reflections that emanated from the encrusted surroundings. The sun split our view with it's blinding beams, as we gazed out at the water Nyla was immortalizing.
I wrote the poem below after my former boyfriend David's father died, suffering for a long time with Alzheimer's. It was particularly painful to watch his decline, as he had been a doctor, Harvard graduate, and quite possibly, one of the sweetest men alive (to me--David is so much like him as well). I wrote the poem after seeing a painting in the National Gallery, in which one of that men reminded me very much of Dr. Rock. It's not written in my voice, but it is in a way of course. Sometimes I do think I see him, especially after a concert when I come out into the lobby from the hall at Kleinhans, while the audience is mingling. He used to come to see the orchestra, and it's there, that I catch glimpses of his face most often. I usually call David and tell him, "I saw your Dad today".
Upon Your Face
I enter the colonial blue room
with grief, and find myself among
small French paintings, stunned,
disconsolate and disbelieving.
I come here to close myself off
from the world, no longer exposed
beneath the high glass ceiling
that dangles Calder’s iron birds.
No sunlight here, only artificial
light and representations of lives past,
appropriate to this sensation of grief;
a muffled and aimless existence.
For days following your death
I sit silent before The Beach at Villerville,
entranced after finding you there,
your long chin and dark rough hair,
yes I am sure it is you, painted
a century ago under an overcast sky,
the same face I see now between closing
doors or turning corners faster than I.
You are no hallucinatory ghost
and I almost do not recognize your face
after so many months of you gasping
beneath the cover of an oxygen mask.
But there you are, dressed in a black suit,
bow tie, a gray overcoat flapping open
under the peach sky, the wind billowing
the hoop skirts of your companions.
Who were you then? And who now?
Are you conscious, breathing, bloody,
in another life or time, or are you the blinding
light and joy some believe is the reward,
for being good, being saintly, as I must
think that you were, as we all do.
What life will you lead next time-
will I be your father then, and you my son?
I stare hard at the pale face of you
and your friends; they look half-toward
one another and half toward the sky,
what is before them, splits their vision.
I do not know how long I sit gazing
at this arc of overcast twilight sky
where the sun breaks through in thin bands
against clouds like iridescent curls of shell,
but there is a moment it seems
you turn your face to look back at me
from that scene on the beach
where a black top hat flits over wet sand,
a little black dog sits at your feet
and the sand is dotted here and there
with black, straight-backed chairs,
I smile at our meeting again,
believing this scene is as it should be,
a gentle time and light, for a kind
man, sweet father, now undone;
though your luminous face remains.
I rise to leave, knowing with certainty,
that I will always happen upon your face-
your eyes in a crowd, body in a doorway,
your voice in my dreams, an unexpected grace.
Posting the reflection photos, I am reminded that really, they are also self-portraits. Somehow, my digital camera made it possible for me to turn the camera away from a reflection, directly on me. Maybe because I could immediately delete and edit anything I wasn't comfortable with. No worry about the developers seeing the photos before I did. So my reflections remain, but I've moved into direct representation of myself.
...is going on with the posts here. It's as if they have a mind of their own. First they were laid out as the template I chose arranged them. Then the last day or so, they've been a long line of posts, with the archives and recent posts at the very bottom. Now, as I posted my novel fragment, they've re-arranged themselves again, into a two column configuration, with total disregard for the date, etc. Dammed defiant posts! Let's see what happens now when I publish this post. Actually, I like the way they are right now, sort of random.
The reflections have influenced my writing (as do the photos)...here's a fragment from my novel Vacancies:
There was a photo I could not stop dreaming about. It was a fleeting image of my parents, a reflection of them in an unidentifiable window. Momma and Daddy were standing next to one another and Momma has the camera in her hands, held up to her face, as she is the one taking the photograph. The metal body of the camera obscured the top half of her face, but her mouth was open in a laughing smile. Daddy pulled her tight into his grip, his right arm around her waist so that she was slightly off balance. He was turned to face her and in the second she snapped the shutter, Daddy must have kissed her cheek.
I can see his smile too, half his face turned away. I cannot resist this image. It is not a photo of my parents, but a photo of an image of them. Who they might have been, the perfect them. The essential moment of spontaneous sweetness and light. Here it was; the closest one could come to a perfect moment. A slice of white glare surrounds them. There is sun, their images are pale and they are happy. I wonder about the image of an image; how as soon as the shutter opened and closed, they walked on. How that image of a split second of their lives together moved on too. The photo brought me joy when I looked at it, and then in the same breathing out of that instant, I felt deep sadness for what might have been.
This was a picture I would not put back in to Daddy’s hidden stash. I slid it in to the wooden box Gabriel had given me for Christmas one year, beneath old greeting cards and ribbons from flowers long since dead. Downstairs I heard the door slam and my father’s heavy footsteps echoed in the front hall. He never took his boots off when he first came in and I knew I’d hear about it later from Vi. I laid down on my comforter and fell asleep, exhausted suddenly, wanting to stay wrapped in the image of my parents holding one another.
Reading this poem, made me think about my obsession with reflection photography. I'll post some of my favorites here. I think I started to take reflection photos when I was on vacation by myself, and I wanted simply to document that I had actually been in the places I was photographing. I remember seeing all these photos my grandfather (an award winning photographer, as is my father) had taken and waiting to see him in the photos. Of course, he was rarely in them, because he was shooting. Since he died before I was born, I felt cheated somehow, wishing he had given the camera to my father before he died (from a poem I wrote about the subject). That's how it started. Now it's changed to something else, which I can't quite pinpoint.
That last poem came from a performance of that Argento piece by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, during which, an elderly woman was carried out by paramedics. The audience saw the whole event, as did the orchestra members. The only person unaware of what was happening was the maestro. The musicians carried on, despite their stricken looks, and the piece ended beautifully. I found out after, that the women had actually died in her seat, and that she was the mother of one of my fellow singers in the philharmonic chorus. I've heard of one other time that this happened since that incident. What better place to die than in the arms of a symphony orchestra?
“Valentino’s romantic films were nearly eclipsed
by the strange worldwide hysteria which came after
his sudden and tragic demise…a wake of suicides
(followed) and even riots in the huge crowds which
flooded his lying in state.”
-Program Notes on Dominik Argento’s Suite for Orchestra
from “The Dream of Valentino” by Edward Yadzinski
Lights dim, audience settles, anticipating the Suite,
where bows descend into a sensuous tango,
fluttering the heart of a woman clothed in black silk.
Her flesh is infused with the filmy whiteness of loss,
as her body collapses into the cushion of her seat.
Perhaps she has remembered a love, lost,
who proclaimed beneath a downpour
that he and she were connected at the soul.
Was that the first flutter of her heart and now
this, a paramedic slipping into her row,
the audience remaining transfixed
despite her head’s unconscious bob.
The musicians’ bows sweep and rise
as they witness the drama from above the pit,
their faces move from distracted, to a silent grimness.
Valentino, that tragic actor of romance;
we are deceived, as perhaps he was, fooled
into happiness, to have it carried out on a stretcher
dying, while we, barely conscious, impervious
to the breath that is slipping away,
cling tight to the hope and lie of romance.
Sustained by this music, we deflect our gaze,
unwilling to see the black silk flutter past.
With the invisible wings of an angel,
the conductor gestures, and sweeps the music on.
I am a writer and I am a musician. As a child, I loved the piano and singing, and books. Even before I could read and write I pretended to read and I wrote (or scribbled, to my mother’s dismay) in between the type of old books, as though I was the author. At ten, binding my own book and filling it with short stories was entertainment for me. In junior high, I began writing poetry and continued throughout high school. When I was fourteen, I wrote a 300 page soap opera about my friends and me. I began a daily journal in high school and have kept a journal since that age. Books were important to me from the very beginning. I understood that books were worlds unto themselves, places of fantasy and doorways to unreachable lands and lives.
The title of the blog is from a poem I wrote about my favorite Matisse painting in the Albright Knox Art Gallery:
Matisse’s Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon
This lavender periwinkle
view from a window along
the Seine stops me
every time must sit stare
imagine being there
satiated by light, exhaust,
pain au chocolate
as though never left Left
Bank loved those months
of freedom exploration
loved those long walks,
cafés, resting a head
on his tall shoulder,
reflections in subway panes
of his gentle kiss along
my neck, smell of diesel,
urine, roses, all the rest,
painting reels in images
through the love painted here-
the only thing-
reminded as the shadow
of my writing hand runs on
before me, Notre Dame
a perfect block of purple.
Is it sun setting gives color
superimposed on others?
Like his flesh on mine?
What is there now but this
shadow running on past purple,
a figure in the foreground
unreachable like death,
until we are there.
It was suggested to me recently, that I start a blog soley for the purpose of posting my creative efforts and writing.
THIS IS ME: Writer, musician, poet, singer, thinker, over-sensitive, silly, sensual, serious, spiritual, creative, intense, funny, sarcastic, social butterfly (when out of cocoon), messy apartment, recent MLS graduate, cat, red liptsick, red toenails, red shoes, red skirt, liberal, single, seeking, book-loving, compassionate, perfectionist, drama queen, over-the-top, loud mouth, whispery asthmatic, tell it like it is, truth-seeking, loving, intuitive, psychic, open, dreamy, fantasizing, plump, nice ankles and legs, eyes turn green when I cry, crabby-happy, optimistic, hopeful, sad for the world, idealistic, dancer, rollerblader, sweaty, over-forgiving, nutty, theatrical, human being.
