Visitor to Jerusalem

What is that man
doing, among the
somber, swinging cranes

The ones arranging
the rough yellow blocks
all over Jerusalem;

Clay pots and fires
tumble from his
mouth, words the Lord had

Put there, clattering
and burning in the
dark spaces between buildings—

Words are His tools,
the bird and its flight
mizze helu, maleke

Coming Together...

And into the...

Ecstasy affords/ the occasion and expediency determines the form. Marianne Moore


I have seen the fish
leap out of the water

and through the fisher’s
wide-meshed net, the one

he knitted himself
in faith with his mind’s

habits, his steadi-
ness of hand, which, like

Peter’s rock, have had
a church built on them.

from A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

I didn't see myself spending the rest of my days at that bend in the river, like Mahesh and the others. In my own mind I separated myself from them. I still thought of myself as a man just passing through. But where was the good place? I couldn't say. I never thought constructively about it. I was just waiting for some illumination to come to me, to guide me to the good place and the "life" I was still waiting for.

walking without mirrors

Visiting sand dunes along the North Coast. Sedge, lupine, coyote bush. We walked with pure motion, forward, until we saw the waves. All echo. Neither of us said much. The sounds were open, in flight. Words hadn't been there for a while.

When I look at photographs, I try to see myself in every face. It makes them into mirrors. Otherwise they would be free to speak their own mind, or might even catch up a tune carried on in another room. Soliloquy, harmony, echo. Often, I want something from them. I want to know how it is to be seen.

It's an old-fashioned word. Photo-graph. Something mechanical we hammered together with zest and a sense of providing for the future of the lexicon. So we will remember how it was when it has inevitably passed.

A bird in a branch, its wing flashes the same color as his jacket. We kept moving.

paper friends and sisters

This post and the preceding two posts are portraits of my grandmother's paper dolls. Shirley Temples. And her sisters. Many of the outfits are hand-drawn, colored with pencil or paint, and meticulously cut out. The store-bought versions are splendid, double-sided, with tiny tabs to fasten the 360 degree fashion plates onto the dolls. I am moved by the missing limbs, the duplicate outfits, and indeed, their survival in a cardboard shirt box. They are haunting, irresistible.

my girl friday

hearts and boxes.

This Christmas my mom brought out my grandmother's paper doll collection from the 1930's, which my mother had also played with. In an old white shirt box were several grown-up women with stylish clothes for every occasion, brunette versions of Ginger Rogers. A miniature set of the sisters from National Velvet, the most important of course being the young Elizabeth Taylor. Also, about 30 newspaper cut-outs of various sizes, ages and styles of Shirley Temple. My grandmother was really making a study of this particular fashion. She saved newspaper clippings from columns describing the fashions of her films and social events. The tall, angular brunettes were much less loved and weather-worn than the seven Shirley Temple paper dolls: four identical, one large-bodied (this seemed to be her favorite), with a traced, white shadow duplicate, and another smaller with slightly complicated and sillier outfits, always including something like a basket of kittens. For the smallest quadruplets and the large-bodied twins, my grandmother had painstakingly traced dozens of silhouettes, and drawn dresses to fit the outlined shapes. Little single shoes, baby dolls with striped socks. Pink ruffled party dresses, sailor pants, and those little pastel shorts. Even more exciting were the dresses she hadn't finished yet, drawn on opaque, yellowed paper, with notes to herself about the color, fabric, and occasion for each garment. My grandmother dreamed of becoming a dress designer, all those years ago.