Pictured: Original Blue Wall, Wall As an Addition and in Purple, Catalpa Pods, Yellow-headed Sewing Pins, Red clay used as a chalking device, a bit of twine, and, oh, a set of foot coverings.

Ten hours without light in the kitchen. A day like none other, beginning with concrete, kudzu, and our gardenitos. The picture still clear beneath ‘sky blue,’ not a pantone version painted on the wall, or even one noun wrapped around another, but real. the real thing, you see… the bed most desired… morning shade… okra and cucumbers fast growing toward the sun.
a heat designated. mantis religiosa.
and able admirers are we, who find her in between rows, resembling more than herself…an eater of other invertebrates, but also of small frogs, lizards, mice and hummingbirds… an “assistant to farmers and gardeners.” It is from the other bed, having been dried so easily in the full sun, that we pull the lost plants and ponder the parameters of our experiment. A day happens and we go inside, wandering through the standards of time and place with contemplation. With practicality we decorate our mountains and would-be mantras with standard home building materials, like drywall, and/or a toxic Olympic brand paint, plus a joint compound that we have bought at Lowe’s. The great experiment, it seems, is more than can be consumed by and back into the earth in just one night. And yet, as the sun begins to set we are still pretty joyful. It storms- again- and we begin our first hour without electricity- all toy fires extinguished.

We write fourth of July, we sing the pavement, and we dash diligently, a turn signal employed, across the yellow line. It is quiet tonight, quiet enough for you and me. Perhaps. Perhaps with blue/. and splatt..

She spent a summer contemplating Alaska, pigments, and chlorophyll. Counted her very sparse change, fallen spiders gathered up in paper towels, and the minutes spent not being contemplative. Like gathered change stacked according to size and value she imagined gathering up the value of a room with wood and dry-wall, plaster and paint, electric outlets and molding. Rain came as an event for a repeated song; half the sky darkened, the other half still somewhat bright with enough sunlight to whiten one’s third story version of the cloud. Soon all dark. And again the train. Looking through the macro lense of an old 8mm camera to see the image of trees bending, to hear them settling on a film whose mechanical advance through such motion brought in bellowing branches bruising the line of rain with loose, floppy greens she continued to spend a summer contemplating. Spartanburg. Its red clay, its fallen sweet gum tree, its light, and its heat. She contemplated writing for real. Beyond what she saw and more about how she was feeling. And yet to feel is to fear and to mention love and death and growth and tidy little glass vases and the directions we are given so as not to break them.

Many people wonder why certain things have ensued the way they have.  Some of these things include, but are not limited to, ways of working under pressure, loose foundations in poorly built homes in neighborhoods that are expanding to the edge cul-de-sacs (das right- cul dash de dash sacs), and how to go about getting rid of old phone books that are now basically useless in households without land lines.  Some wonder why sentences get misshapen when someone went to such efforts as to develop them in the first place.  When things start to ensue the way they do, some wonder, while others guess.  For example: There was a lid once affixed atop a container containing contents of the bubble-gum pink boiled egg variety. Someone (and no names will be afixed to this blog) guessed that the lid had been stolen.  For a week someone else wondered silently, while another, silently perched upon the weak steps above yet another week foundation, knew exactly what had ensued.  And so it so that the contents of this blog will remain partly hibben, oops, ipps, hidden, I mean. Forever.

The train gets louder, though not any closer as a mind gets sleepier and slower than a pace that can dare be chosen whilst accounting for a day, thought by thought for each step to sleep. What does remain at the end of a day, aside from the dirtied, more tangerine than orange colored rain jacket and your tired legs and shoulders, but the mind’s jostled memories and the ever-rounding theater of concocted stories? “The wind blew, we looked up, saw clouds, took our clothes from the line, and went in to see what ingredients we might combine for dinner.” While spending the day’s moments quartered by tasks and our ceaseless tallying of them, there is always a poem, a scene, a love, a character, a monologue, a dialogue, and an encasement … greater than we can possibly comprehend in which this dialogue and these contained disillusions aren’t looking for words as flavor for our fodder, nor garnish for our daily sustenance… . Yes, a stone crumbles and a yellow fades from golden to lemon, turning to powder between fingertips not our own.

Instrument, etc. 

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                                 Summer’s winter (or sunburn)

The blinds are now drawn and though it is clearly summertime- what with a day spent at the lake and the air conditioning system having now cooled the apartment to a desired seventy-seven degrees- I am hidden by imagination from the culprit of the wind outside my windows. This imaginative curtain is so much so, in fact, that I am thankful, that I am grateful, that I am comfortable, that I am warm- protected as I am from the freez-all, the gust-all, the wintery white-all. There is a tunnel, you know, that passes nearly through the center of town in a nearly center of town bend in the road just past the bus station. It is there we will break our pace, bend forward, and bare almost immediately as the headlights click on, our almost indifferent attitude toward the outcome of the journey. We are not bound for a saucer ride down the whitened Kennedy Lane, nor are we called to pack the snow into balls as we are sent down fresh for a fight just west of the tracks that run behind the old mill. No, it is daylight that is now behind us, with its un-known purple flowers and its low lying upside down cloud-billowed sky skirting a low lying upside down shirred edge of neon pink vinyl. Yes, it was daylight that spun colors like strands in webs in trees across and down the puffed through- though nearly content-less horizon, grazing our shoulders all the while.