I think it is in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Henry at this moment is learning whether to trust or not to trust. He looks into my eyes and his eyes are so wide and hold my gaze for the longest time. Like in that movie, City of Angels, angels don’t blink.
He looks up at me with complete openness. He has no reason to think he can’t trust me. And for that wide gaze, I would do anything. My job is both to keep him safe and to assure him that he is safe. I look right back at him with a look of kindness and love, and then he smiles. The dogs bark and his head snaps quickly over to face me and he looks at me, reading my eyes, and I smile kindly and he smiles back. It is the most beautiful thing. I could never have known until I was here: it is the most beautiful thing to have a child look into you with trust and peace in his countenance.
I’m learning from him. I feel what it’s like to be trusted, and I find myself trusting the world and its people. I know not everyone is to be trusted, I know this, but along the way I’ve lost too much trust overall. I don’t want to live like that. I can feel it in how I look at Steve. I feel so old-fashioned: I look at him when I’m afraid and try to feel complete trust. I look inside myself and try to feel the same: the world is okay, it’s okay, it just is.
June 7th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
June 7th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
1. Three white teardrops with a translucent shield
2. Yellow and greens
3. Steve’s irises
4. and a lemon
June 2nd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
June 2nd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Steve’s glow-in-the-dark trees.
Yee-haw.
Suck it, monkeys.
(Steve took this photo with a tripod. In real life it looks much more tame, more like two white orb-lines glowing, haunting, in the very dark. Both ways are beautiful. It’s amazing what the camera can see. See three more of his photos on his website.)
May 31st, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
that boy looks like my baby.
everybody have kids! you feel cuteness in your gut.
these clothes and dolls (and the images of them) from luckyboysunday.
i must not have been satiated with soft dolls as a child because i want them all now. One blabla is never enough.
May 29th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)
I haven’t known how to picture the oil until these pictures:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html
I can’t bear to look at many of them.
May 28th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Steve turned 37 this past weekend.
When I met him he had just turned 30.
He really does get better and better.
I made him a book about his garden.
In Anne Carson’s book Nox, there is a page where you see a specific but abstract pencil-drawn shape at the bottom of the page. Then you turn the page and you see a photograph and realize that the previous shape is a tracing of a piece of a photograph — the shadow of the photographer in the snow. It was infinitely more haunting than the shape or the photograph alone, or even if the photograph had been presented first and then the shape.
I made a small book for Steve based on that idea. I photographed the garden, then I would draw a piece of the photograph that I was drawn to. I presented the drawing first, then the photograph, again and again throughout the book. I used Blurb to print it. (I love that site! Why don’t I make books all the time?) Steve looked at the book with Jack, and it became a guessing game — try to guess based on the drawing what part of the garden I’m looking at.
May 28th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
May 28th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
The dog isn’t sorry again, isn’t very sorry
for eating the cat food one more time.
Palm Sunday. The reed pokes through my pocket:
fading hieroglyphs on my thigh.
This is a poem with a horse in it:
A poem with a dog torso, horse-like at least.
He is statue-still, my pieta.
(Someone else get the crying baby.)
The dog’s sadness: dog sorrow collects.
Someone else take the baby just once.
I force dog tears and fold on the twin bed.
Dogs, a whole poem of them.
Of sleeping in my skin. Hurting about nothing.
The fur generating. The fur generating what.
My fur machine that forgives.
There are moments I can’t go back to
that no one else would care to remember:
the ham sandwich I didn’t accept,
the dog in the hot car when I didn’t know.
If I had any second thoughts on grief
then this would be an illustration.
I like the fluorescent under-painting
because it looks like us, neon inside
if you peel our skin off, see.
This dog body all apology.
Don’t be so afraid. There is no tiger.
There is no tiger.
Mothers in their houses shush their babies at last.
Sometimes I stop because it’s time to stop
but usually I stop because I’m afraid.
May 26th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
