25 June 2016
Encountered a little slow down on the road yesterday 🙂 Three calves had broken out and were gleefully chasing around, having a high old time 🙂
Make art about unexpected obstacles. 🙂 Or about unexpected freedom 🙂
24 June 2016
Brexit.
Make art about choosing to leave, even when the choice leaves the future completely uncertain.
united kingdom exit from europe relative image
23 June 2016
Wrote a poem this morning 🙂 Haven’t done that in a while 🙂 Called “The Girl Lightning Loved” 🙂
The Girl Lightning Loved
didn’t know how deeply she burned, was burned, her bones wicked through lifetime after lifetime….~Mary Carroll-Hackett
Make art about what lightning, about what lightning desires.
6/21/2016
I was raised Catholic, and in cultures that are very comfortable with the dead.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
Amen.
Make art celebrating the dead. Or write a prayer for the dead.
6/22/2016
Hold on, to me as we go
As we roll down this unfamiliar road
And although this wave is stringing us along
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
Settle down, it’ll all be clear
Don’t pay no mind to the demons
They fill you with fear
The trouble it might drag you down
If you get lost, you can always be found
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
~written by Greg Holden and Drew Pearson, performed by Phillip Phillips
Make art about remembering you’re not alone.
_________________________________________________________________
❤ ❤ ❤
20 June 2016
Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂
This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤
____________________________________________________________
Remembering the Body as Grace
We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams
1
I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.
2
I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.
3
Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.
4
Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.
5
Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.
_________________________________________________
Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
19 June 2016
“I buried my father/in the sky./Since then, the birds/clean and comb him every morning”~Li-Young Lee
Make art about fathers.
18 June 2016
This week I keep going back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, about grief, about sheer physicality of grief and loss. About feeling helpless. About how loss, no matter what, belongs to all of us.
________________________________________
I Want to Bring the Birds
inside, hold them in my hands, tuck them inside my shirt, claws and all, feel the sharp tic of each frightened beak, surround them with my fingers, cradle them against the cage of my ribs, whisper shh shh shh—until they each find and linger in their place: the titmice tatting nests into my hair, crested sparrows and juncos perched and singing from my feet, the jays who see me as so much meat, supplier of suet and otherwise foolish and useless, each take a shoulder, their alarm squawk sudden and hard as a couple of crows stand sentry on my back. The chickadees, those flying golf balls with their punk rock eyes and ebony mohawks, bossy and brazen, take my ears, letting me know just how they see this whole thing going, while the shy nuthatch hides, its cinnamon shadow disappearing under my shirt as it hops up my ribs and nuzzles in like a newborn near my heart. A pair of doves, and then another, their wings ash gray and spotted with apricot, nestle in on the soft give of my belly; I touch them with just the tips of my fingers, hoping, praying, they’ll teach me the tender songs only possible in the dark. One by one, they all settle in, on my limbs, my skin, feathering, resting, and maybe, so will I, settle for real, for the first time in years, as I hear and feel their heartbeats steady, slow, ease finally, into a companion rhythm with my own. Or mine to theirs? In my dreams, it doesn’t matter. In my dreams,we are the same.
___________________________________________________________
This poem is included in my collection The Night I Heard Everything from FutureCycle Press.
17 June 2016
“They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying.”~Neil Gaiman
Make art about what you wish you had said before they died.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
Recent Comments