LONLINESS VISITS

You may not understand why,
but you must let him in
no matter what he looks like:
your infant daughter,
a fresh winter snow,
or even your first fuck.
You must treat him with kindness,
like a strayed member of the family.
Give him your favorite clean shirt,
a place in your dreams, the final glass
of Australian Chardonnay.

His last lover most likely massaged
his feet, but gave him traveling money.
None of this is his fault.
This is the way it has always been,
a thing being set down
inside us all.

He loves the dark, the way it surrounds
and sits down with us for the long wait.
And when the morning comes
and first light makes him bleed, he’s still there
in the corner, watching the neighbor lady sleep
in front of a droning TV, although even
his softest whispered breath would burn her
like the forgotten pan on her stove.
But no one can help. Even when he convinces her
to follow him out to the edge of the woods,
even when he tells her to lie down
in the snow to rest and wait
for her long dead husband.

HEART SHAPED STONE

All the neighbors were unknown, constant mud
& rusted skeletons in the yellow yards,
the long two years I lived in the river house.

Seasonal fields of corn bunched against washboard
roads with signs of deer & men stalking them.
I wondered briefly about the killing.

All the light fell east across the fertile bottoms
flashing locked windows into plasma screens.
My 12 year old daughter tied tight in a Texas trap.

You came along after I bought my new bed
& dressed the bedroom like a prom date, purple
flowers pinned to various walls with old paste.

Every morning the phone wires sang with frost,
translucent killdeer & dove wings rising like sap.
Skull & ribs all that remained of the wounded deer.

The heart shaped stone sat without notice on my dresser
until I gave it to you one new year night, a surprise
revelation of my life, inside the burled wooden box.

MAGIC GIRL

The girl with the lump on her head was magic for me when I found her standing on the dock of the Bostwick Lake Inn two summers ago. My age, but looking ten years younger, she had been married twice, once to a man who had killed himself over her. She had two young children, and one in her belly, when she found him hanging from a rafter in the basement. Her eyes were clearly two different sizes, but a beautiful deep blue gray like a winter sky. Her laugh was a loud cackle and rose slowly from her belly like a V of geese flying in over the water. She had nightmares. When I kissed her for the first time, I felt the lump. I lanced it later that night and every day for ten days, I fed her raw garlic, cabbage soup, and quotations from the first book of Samuel. Later that fall a swatch of snow white hair began to grow out of the indentation in her scalp.

LOOKING IN

ARTifacts

This is a series of images I created just for the fun of it. I started by using images of deer bones, jaws with teeth, etc. It really began as an attempt to make art that was clean and simple. What appears here is the evolution of that beginning. I work with some young artists at The Screamer Company in Austin who are very talented. When I first began working with them they were submitting art to online art sites and shooting photography just because it is in them. One of my coworkers, Mason, really encouraged me to just create without fear. Just because. I'm grateful to him because it has opened up a new form of expression for me. Often I don’t consider myself an artist because I don’t draw or paint, but I’ve worked up the courage to submit some pieces to online sites. All of my work is created digitally. What I absolutely love about creating in Photoshop are the endless variations achievable and the surprises that happen when images are layered then multiplied or overlayed. It's complete play. It reminds me so much of college in the darkroom creating black and white prints. It’s much like the thrill of the image appearing on the paper when it’s dropped into the developer. It’s all about freedom and exploration for me, and magic of course.

Poem 7/11/07

LANDLOCKED

To be found you must sparkle
& shine, be well-rounded, colorful,
captivating, remarkable of face.
You’ll choose the soul
to transport you, but after you’re
put in your place near her heart,
ferried within a gritty
buttoned breast, there is no return.
Parched & harshly handled,
you’ll feel her fingerprints linger
in your porous skin.
Discarded in her landlocked garden,
you silently settle for a lesser home,
never to reveal what lonesome fossil
you have become.

Seton Annual Report

I'm an art director with The Screamer Company in Austin. Our largest client is The Seton Family of Hospitals. They offer so much to Central Texas, but most people living here don't understand this. Hence the concept for the 2006 annual report - I HAD NO IDEA.

The most moving moment while working on the report was a photo shoot with a young patient, Jacob Brouchtrup. In July of 2005, Jacob's leg was severed in a boating accident on Lake Austin. The limb was literally spun out of the hip socket by a swirling propeller. I love this photo near the 360 Bridge that shows Jacob's spirit. Meeting him and art directing the shoot was a great honor.

Photo by Marc Swendner.

Russet

A friend in Michigan wrote to me that her favorite fall color was russet, which made me start thinking about what the color russet actually is. Around the same time my mother, a lifelong gardener, was nearing the end of her life while suffering from dementia, so part of her is in the poem also. Then, quite recently I discovered the poetry of David St. John. His work inspired this work in progress.

AFTER ST. JOHN, RUTH & THERESA

All that fall she collected assorted hues
of russet – oak leaves, a terminally ill love
affair, onion peelings of sunburned skin

& bones dug from her last potato bed.
Every crooked finger bruised deep
with umber earth, an old mechanic’s hands.

Each twilight her eyes set down into black
imperfections just above the pinkish apples
of her face, her hair tangled with the day.

At the end of November she turned eight
again, preoccupied with collecting
fossils from her daddy’s Ohio creek bottom.

In the end, this seemed a detour she needed
& I learned to love it about her above all else,
even joining her one night to sort motley acorns

until first light cracked the shadows wide open,
the fresh fruit of another chance spilling
all over the kitchen chairs we had become.