Tag Archives: photography

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tent flounce

This tent looks like it has a flounce along the upper edge. I spent the weekend at the Nowhereelse Festival, camping in Ohio. The music is fabulous, hosted by Over the Rhine, and the Ohio rain was very impressive. I took the lightest camping gear I could, since I arrived by plane and rental car. My tent and sleeping bag stayed dry inside. Outside everything was sopping. I went barefoot for most of the three days except in the pokey field bits, and then I wore water slippers. None of my shoes would have stayed dry. I bought the slippers for indoors, but they are great in heavy rain and easy to take off when I was back on the grass.

Here is the tent in the evening, with clouds piling up.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: flounce.

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A lovely irony

it’s a lovely irony
in losing you I’m finding me
in grief I am at last set free

you may call or not any day
ask me to the beach to play
it doesn’t matter anyway

you’ve lost me, you know it must be good
things happen as we know they should
lost the beaches lost the woods

I’ve found the lover I’ve sought so long
you don’t believe me and you are wrong
the Beloved’s love is deep and strong

I say a loving goodbye my friend
I am sad to lose you, sad hearts mend
but you have chosen to make an end

it’s a lovely irony
in losing you I’m finding me
in grief I am at last set free

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Agatize

A long time ago, at least by a child’s time, he starts turning. He blocks things out. He locks his heart. He decides to be happy and do what he wants. His heart slowly turns to stone.

The blood roars through, pushed by each beat, how can a stone heart beat? Not normally, that is for sure. His brain controls it, cold, logical, no emotion, except happiness, that is what he says. He says it over and over, I am happy all the time, until he thinks he believes it. And then he believes it and his heart is stone.

But the blood flows and the body feels and emotions come anyhow. He refuse them, all but happiness, and blood lays down a wall of emotion inside his heart. Chalcedony, lining the chambers, coating the valves, coating the arteries that feed the heart. The heart doesn’t need the arteries open because it is not beating. It is stone. His brain is beating. Beating the emotions away, away, away, refusing the body and the heart.

The heart is hollow. Slowly it is lined with clear agate. At last his heart is full: no more chamber. Agatized, all the way through. When he is cracked open, far in the future, a chalcedony nodule will show the perfect interior of a stone heart.

And where does the blood go now? we wonder. Laying down the lining of agate, clear, colored lines of emotions rejected, all the colors of the rainbow, what he thinks of as impurities. That is how he thinks of his emotions: impurities, to be rejected.

What will be agatized next? His liver? His lungs? He says strokes are the end for his family. He calls it then, his brain is agatized. The part that controls the pumping, overriding his heart over and over, when that part turns to agate, he will be correct. A stroke. How long will it take, we wonder? One year, five years, ten? He says he won’t go past 80. That will be 13 years. How apropos.

Can nothing stop this? Chalcedony is hard, not hard as diamonds, but very very hard. Agates are common and we search for the clear ones, the lit ones on the beach. Almost nothing can wear them down: high pressure would kill him, high heat would kill him, what is left? Water. Water wears down rock.

Enter the sea. The sea of love, the sea of dreams, the sea of the unconscious. Seek help, before you turn yourself to full stone. Agatized and dead.

Maybe there are other treatments, I don’t know.

A stone shaped heart is rare, I hope. See how it catches the light. Beautiful and sad.

August 30, 2022

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hope molting and growing new feathers

A friend away a friend some day
a friend can’t stay all the day
a friend won’t pray a friend can’t play
not today is what they say
a friend they say a friend always
a friend who may return some day

in a way you might say
hope molts and regrows feathers today

I think my inner four year old wrote today’s poem. I am thinking about the song my mother taught me, very young, for when I was frustrated.

My sister and I loved this song and others, Samuel Hall and “I don’t want to play in your back yard, I don’t like you any more. You’ll be sorry when you see me, sliding down my cellar door.”

I gave a young friend a book of rhymes. He looked at me with some horror. “These are nursery rhymes.” I grin at him. “Look again. It’s a book of insulting playground rhymes, suitable for all occasions.” He looked at the book again and held on to it.

The photograph is from the National Museum of Women in the Arts again. Another fabulous painting that seems to fit my theme.