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

vacant mind

Interview with Agnes Martin (1997)

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.

merry merry & all that jazz

Some shots while food shopping

in the Bronx

on Christmas Eve

ice pane

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.

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.