Some of you have heard me speak about Mindy, the girl in my second grade classroom in Glassboro NJ. I don’t remember everything yet but I kind of remember the first day of second grade and Mindy sitting in the front row with her long brown hair. I was in the back of course and I noticed her and when she turned around I was gone. No not physically out the door, but my imagination was hers.

I was a year older because I had every single childhood illness in first grade and I missed about half the school year. Because of that my parents and teachers thought it best for me to repeat 1^st grade. That first day of 1^st grade the second time around was difficult. The first and second grade classes were all on the 3^rd floor and the east side was first grade and the west second. All of my friends disappeared down the hall to the west end while I lingered in the middle half way in between the west side and the east side. When the halls cleared my teacher poked her head out of the classroom door and asked me if I belonged in her class. I kind of shook my head and followed her in an outsider. But I digress and now that year is over.

I don’t know how Mindy knew I liked her for I could barely talk when I was near enough for her to hear me. My stomach would churn and my mouth would get so dry my tongue would stick to the roof of my mouth. Mindy would notice me on the playground at lunch and one day her friend Janet told me in Mindy’s presence, that Mindy liked me. Of course Mindy tried to stop Janet from talking and went running after Janet. On other days Mindy would sneak up and kick me in the shin to get me to chase her. She didn’t run very fast so I would have to slow down so as not to overtake her too quickly. Mindy took ballet and so ran like a dancer, gracefully but slow.

So all through grade school I thought of Mindy, would look forward to orchestra practice where she played viola and I played violin. Occasionally Mindy would be at a friend’s house in my neighborhood and I would cut through the lawns past her friend’s house just to see her playing. And then I would disappear into the woods to go sit on a tree in my hidden spot.

After grade school I quit playing the violin and I started going to the 8th grade make out parties where a long term relationship lasted the whole two weeks over the winter holiday. Mindy kind of dissipated from my imagination. She was still around, still in the same school, but I didn’t see her any more as she has become invisible. By high school we lived in entirely different universes and then after a drug bust at our apartment in Glassboro, where my younger brother was having a pot party, we were forced to move out of the area.

So here I am many years latter trying to find Mindy. It seems so impossible, so crazy even but I feel stirred and I have a sense that this is important so I have to do this even if it is crazy and impossible. The first hurdle is in me, to find that shy boy who liked Mindy so much. Just what was it about her that did me in, that had my imagination so gone for so long?

I want to feel that again completely and write that all in a letter to Mindy.

The second challenge is logistical. Just how do I get the letter to Mindy?

I think I have found her profile on Classmates.com but since both of us have free accounts I can not use that website to make contact. Plus it’s too easy and leads into the third challenge. Can Mindy find the girl that I fell for in second grade or is she forever lost, buried beneath a lifetime and the accumulated fragments of adulthood?

As far as the logistics, the whole idea for this was sparked by Emma’s blog about finding a love letter in a book of poems and so I want to honor that birthplace by intending this unwritten letter to make its way to Mindy in a book of poetry. Hmm, maybe it’ll be my own?

I’m going to need your help though. I need ideas on how to handle the logistical part in a way that will help with the third challenge?

Do I just google for Mindy or should I broadcast my search across Gaia and perhaps craigslist, perhaps leaving the letter in a poetry book in California and asking people across this country to hand the letter from one library to another heading east until someone who knows Mindy brings it to her?

Meanwhile Mindy hears of the letter that someone named Doug from California is looking for a Mindy who lived in Glassboro New Jersey in the 1960’s and she begins to remember….

You always seemed so confident
waving me in from the field

Of dry grass

Behind your house

Where I watched you

Thinking I was hidden enough

 

I sat next to you

On the white swing

So curious about

Your being.

Wordless.

But you talked

I listened

 

For a moment

I let my leg

Rest against yours

Stillness

I never felt anything like that before

 

There are concrete barriers

Between now

And the safety

Of what is known

And the path into the woods

I wonder what it would be like

To let myself

Fall into those woods again?

Seven down and the hardest 14 yet to go!

Will I survive is the question?

 

OMG our mini dachshund Ruthie is in heat now for the very first time and we are in the thick of it this week, week two. Ruthie is a serious male dog magnet this week which wouldn’t be too challenging except for the fact that we also have Tuff, our other mini, unfixed male and Ruthie’s father.

 

Ever see the scene in Lion King Can you Feel the Love Tonight?

 

Yeah, it’s just like that but what Disney doesn’t film is what happens when you don’t want it to happen. Well aside from the inbreeding issue Ruthie is too young. It’s best to wait until they are about 2 before getting pregnant, besides my wife and I were hoping for a white wedding Lol!

 

So the logistics are simple; Ruthie and Tuff can not be alone together, in fact this week they can’t even be in the same room together. One will go to work with Debby and one stays home to whine and the night time arrangement is choice! It’s Tuff and me on the futon in the guest room and Ruthie and Debby in the master bedroom. Throughout the night Tuff jumps down to go whine and scratch, sniff, howl at the door and before that Tuff hangs in the studio with me and whines with my drumming, my painting, my writing! K, Tuff I think its time for a glass of red, what da ya say boy?

 

 Maybe we should line you up in front of Nurse Ratched’s station to get some of those pills they handed out in One Flew over the Cockoo’s nest and Tuff is having an inner dialog like he is McMurphy himself :

 

“But Doc, she was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and, uh, she told me she was eighteen and she was, uh, very willing, you know what I mean...I practically had to take to sewin' my pants shut. But, uh between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of ya, I don't think it's crazy at all now and I don't think you do either...No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what's bein' crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it.”

 

So I’m checking off the days on the wall in the guest room, the days left of this fervor, of this vigilance and crazy single minded sleeplessness.

 

So if you’re wondering why you don’t see me at night, you now know why.

Indian Ink, Bee’s Wax and Pigment on folded Paper

19X25"

 

I heard you speak in

Deep tones of

Shadows

Blue across the edge

Of the field

All the while

The sound of chatter

From the poolside

Children

Playing

And you softly swirling

Sublime silver leaves above me

 

Or was that you

Roaring

With the dead dry leaves

Through the

City alleys

That night

After the lights went out?

 

I stood in a seedy doorway

While dark clouds

Covered the moon

Remembering

The kindness

Of the summer you

 

The still

Midnight

White marble

cold

Sand drift dunes

Of our

Soft animal bodies

Sleep

To dream dawn again

"In Your Eyes"

love I get so lost, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
when I want to run away
I drive off in my car
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
the heat I see in your eyes

love, I don't like to see so much pain
so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
the heat I see in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes

That it is way bigger then anything I have ever imagined. It sometimes seems small when I think I know but when I let go, let the breath out, empty...
like a home you are just moving from and all the furniture is removed, packed away and that final look when you see what was there all along, but you couldn't see for all the stuff. And yes there are the ghosts remaining, the ghost of a couch, the ghost of a bed, the ghost of a kitchen table, the echos of years ago conversations through the bare white hallways..
expiration-inspiration

Wow, it’s been a full moon cycle since I stated that I was feeling a need to release this role of romantic artist I have carried after I had a dream about a funky building with walls painted in Van Gogh swirling color. In the dream a group of people stood on the balcony and all of a sudden the building just crumbled into the earth. I knew that it had to do with this image of myself as the romantic artist. Lately I have had this fear that perhaps I did harm with my way of being that perhaps I was too full of myself to see the vulnerability of the people I interacted with. Well I want something more, something fuller, something inclusive, a “we” not a “me”.  And it’s not like I dislike this role, oh god I am so grateful and I have loved loving in this way but I feel like it’s in the way now, like there is something bigger waiting for me to allow it, to except a death in the hopes of a birth of something larger.

 

Without really knowing it I have been through this before because I risked my role as husband and father when I walked into this role of romantic artist once again after years of being in survival mode. And the funny thing is I am more fully present in those roles now. After the darkness of letting go I now find that I no longer need to be these things, I now choose them, until I’m no longer needed. So I suspect the Back Yard Artist might be back but I’ll no longer need to be that image. “it is like the skeleton of a burnt rope–though it has a form, it is of no use to tie anything with”.

 

So I’m planning a funeral on November 1^st Day of the Dead for a sky/fire burial for the backyard artist. I’ll carve an image of this self in bread that evening and carry that image to the edge of the sea here to break into pieces and scatter on the beach for the gulls to sail off with. Later that evening I will melt the image of the painting “self portrait salted slug”. Like a solar eclipse where the moon hovers over the sun, revealing solar flares, like a fire in the rain.

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride to amazement

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

If I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

Or full of argument.

 

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

--Mary Oliver

 

Know that I love you.

Random poem in 9 parts

22X30 Indian ink , Bee's Wax and pigment on folded Paper

 

#1

wish you were here

yeah me too, wish I was there

but here is good

looking at my right big toe

wiggling,

feeling the strap

of the Oneil flip-flops rub between

the big toe and the next one over

wondering if

that second toe was

ever used to flip

someone a toe,

you know?

 

Looking across

The room, my studio,

My garage, my laundry room,

Storage area

Lights on above the

Easel, paint splatters

White, green, pink

Across the edge where

The last painting

Rests, one side still

Taped up on a board

The other side fallen

Because the tape

No longer holds it

Now in the lopsided

Posture, old already

One week after it

First looked at the world

 

#2

so I contemplated

silence today the

whole trip from

the moment my son

got on the bus

at 8:15 a full

half an hour after

I held her face in

my hands for that

morning kiss, coffee

in hand, bag, the other

coffee for later.

I stick my foot

There in the doorway

So the dogs don’t

Run, thinking perhaps

It’s a playday

And now the house is

Empty as I close

The door

Ready for my

Silent retreat

Up 92 to 280

Silver BMW

Blonde, sunglasses

Obviously on the phone

Not observing my

Silence.

 

#3

Sunday I wake

With my mouth open,

Late

Judging from the angle

Of the sun through

The bedroom window

And I know

My mouth was

Open

Because of that

Dryness now.

I wish I had

A glass of water

Here

To get my tongue

Unstuck from the roof

And I remember

There was something

About the roof

In that house

No, it was

A mansion

A white one

It was mine

I lived there

It was clean

And airy

With tall windows

Looking out

To the sand dunes

And I watched

As she removed

 

A weathered gray

Piece of wood

And the ceiling

Sagged

So a dark opening

Appeared

 

I guess I should

Get up for coffee

And start

The laundry?

 

#4

I always park

Around the corner

And down the block

From the house

Where my drum

Circles are held

I don’t want them

To know I smoke

And I’ll want

To smoke when

I leave.

 

Hugs at the door

And it’s 11

I get to my car

Fetch a cigarette

Light it,

Close the door

And walk in

The dark down

The street

Contemplating

The tears.

 

#5

I haven’t done yoga

Since July

My thighs feel tight

My right hip hurts

At the end of the day

Of sitting in a

Third floor office

Bare white walls

Tall windows

Shades always up

To let in that

Northern light

Like maybe

It would be

Vermeer, like

Some woman

With a pearl earring

A scarlet turban,

Soft skin,

Moist full lips

Sitting here

In this northern

Light

While I watch

Wondering how

In the hell

To paint that

Moment.

 

Instead my

Mind sails

From the wire

Outside

To

The top of

PG&E where

A raven shrieks

 

#6

I don’t feel like

Painting tonight

There, the last one still

Sits looking old

And I have one

Blank canvas, some

Paper

All white waiting

To graduate

To intimidate

Me,

To dare me

To touch them

With color!

They tease me

Saying

“you know you’ll

fuck up. You always

do.”

And another voice

Says

“well yeah, but

fucking up is

part of love.

Trust your fucking

Up and find

What is beautiful

In it.”

Yes, but I still

Don’t feel like

Painting tonight

And I take another

Sip of red

And I put down

The green pen

In the white

Pages in my

Journal

Right between

The pages where

Some one had

Written an address,

Someone I don’t

 Know,

Someone who passed

Through my studio

One day named

Tracy Bryant

On Clay Street

San Francisco.

She was probably

Younger then?

 

#7

I read a man’s blog today

Something I rarely do

But today there was

So much controversy

And I had been feeling

It for days

A feeling like something

Was coming to an end

I think I read all

93 comments and

at the end I had

nothing to add

felt like maybe

I would just be grandstanding

Wanting to be

Seen in the

Popular room

And I really

Didn’t know

Which side to take

The rabbit

Or the wolf?

Funny now that I

Think about it

I wondered about

His devastation

Wondered about

His feeling now,

Being accused of

Being unfeeling?

But then I realized

I was projecting.

Just seemed utterly

 lost , lost to that

fact

of being lost

even, lost because

of the devastation

that killed feeling.

 

#8

I wonder about her

I haven’t heard from

Her since that night

In Texas

Me standing outside

Of a restaurant waiting,

By the fountain

She was moving

Again and I never

Gave her that

Painting

And she asked

Me to call back

Later

And later I walked

Outside in the

Warm September

Night, but somehow

I just fumbled

With the phone in

My pocket

Listening to

Cicadas singing in the trees

 

#9

There are two

Green pieces of

Foam rubber on the floor

Something the dogs

Chewed

The woodglue is

Over by the space heater

With the cord

Cut in two

Yes, by dogs

Chewing again

There is a single

Splat of black

Paint running

Sideways across

The edge of a

2X2

one I will

saw in pieces

to brace a white

piece of

a future painting

someday.