Thursday, December 31, 2009

resolute

My thinking is the same--my three Rs: Reading,
Writing, Running. And a vacancy of mind.

When you look in your mind you find it covered
with a lot of rubbishy thoughts.
You have to penetrate these and hear
what your mind is telling you to do.
Such work is original work. Agnes Martin




Seed syllable of manjusri/manjughosa 'dhih', the perfection of wisdom, in the Tibetan Uchen script

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Sunday, December 27, 2009

walk

For Christmas I got a camera and the other day
was brilliant so we drove to Coney Island
and the wind was there and
sea smells and a clarity everywhere I looked.
Sometimes there aren't words. I've run out of words
just now. Or maybe it's that I'm brimming
with them and don't know how to use them here.
Well, the light was cold like the water. It blew
away the holiday blues and swept
me clean.
Every one/thing to see along the boarded up
board walk was out and about for a stroll
So I'll show you some thoughts.
































A vigilance though the ferris
wheel, carnival games
and freak show are closed
for the season, still my sense
that things are open for business
just not when we people folk are around.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

bake-off

So it's time for spice cake, a family recipe, from grandmother
to my mother to me. When I was young I hated it.
Raisins, nutmeg, pecans weren't my food groups.
Now I actually don't mind it. It's eggless, butterless- dense!
Not too sweet. Maybe a good kind of cake
for the darkening days. I'm listening to lots
of medieval Christmas tunes.
You can feel the cold seep into the castle.
The dark skies fold down around the village fires.
Why they sing and tell stories- to push back the winter.

Here's the spice cake - from my old spiral notebook
where I keep odd scraps of this-and-that recipes.


Friday, December 11, 2009

Tangled













Sometimes getting into the Xmas
spirit isn't so holly/ivy, this year especially.
But there are little road maps to lead one
through the hardened forest of the heart.
Like time in the city. Looking, first
at some art in the painter's studio
for an exhibition I'm co-curating on words
and pictures. Then at MoMa where I saw

















and wandered into the water lilies, which now
have their own room and it wasn't too crowded,
though as usual people pose in front of the paintings
as if they're at the Grand Canyon, and maybe looking
at his paint and colors and light is kind of like staring
at the expanse of that place.
I walked a lot and of course the city is packed
with tourists, but NYC is not all glittering lights
there's always an edge, a con gone wrong
thus the cop with machine gun.








A good day...I'm ready for the tree.