January 18, 2011 Day Twelve

Her arms arc gracefully, symetrically overhead:  two swans' necks or two cobras.  Where hands would be, small loops of pewter.  Her head erect, no features are carved into the face or neck.  Two perfect breasts on a slim torso widen into luscious hips.  Instead of legs a dagger-like blade, rounded at its tip, soft, too soft to kill but fit to plunge into earth, marred by the teeth of my sister's curious dog  (The chewed-up goddess necklace.)

January 13, 2011 Day Eleven

A glass, round base, clear stem, goblet reflecting a journal of home-made paper, a white laptop, this notebook.  Deep ruby wine trembles as subtle movements of my hand across the page disturb the equilibruim, a small earthquake of words.  The earth does not split open, wine-colored lava does not flow, but minute shifts in fluid, small readjustments visible until my hand pauses, my breath, my eyes.  I am still.  The wine quiets and settles, praises the stillness, begs to be tasted.

January 12, 2011 Day Ten

The mirror is about a foot wide, about two-and-a-half feet high, or about two-and-a-half feet wide and a foot hight, depending of course on how you position it.  The border is wood, a thin golden frame inside, next the climbing roses painted in a repeating pattern of arced vines, one pink-red bud, then one bursting full pink bloom.  The pattern faces inward on three sides but on the fourth, one of the longer sides, it is reversed.  Here the vines move away from the mirror and the bud is invisible.  Only a hint of the full flower is there, trailing off the edge into the thin gold frame.

Why the asymmetry?

Why not the asymmetry,  answers back.

When I look into the mirror itself, I am there, of course.  I am head, neck, Unicef-logo t-shirt filling the space.  Or I am smiling face off to one side and I see the room behind me, my coffee cup, my hand moving a red and white pen. Depending, of course.

January 10 Day Nine

It's about time for this old toothbrush to be replaced.  The bristles no longer line up in neat erect rows.   They fall outward along the edges, curling and bent like ice-laden tree branches.  The neck of the brush, once clear, has a dull white glaze of old toothpaste and spit.

The body still youthful, a pink arced torso, the center transparent except for seven pink ribs across the area where my thumb rests when I brush my teeth.  These ribs still my hand, allow me to guide her.  Further down the brush is as new, the unused handle, a bridge, a rise on the horizon of the day.

January 9 Day Eight

The mixing bowl is large enough to hold a basketball.  The rim is unglazed, the color of sand.  A few black specks look like stones on the beach, but one of those is a small hole in the ceramic, a piper's footprint or the burrowing of a sand crab.

The outer surface of the bowl is a shiny gray-brown tone.  There is a rim along the top about an inch-and-a-half wide, perfect for holding the bowl, steadying or carrying it.  There are chips along the lower part of the rim and around the base of the bowl, too.  It is a bowl for a brave cook:  it can take a few chips and remain a bowl. 

Inside, the surface is smooth save one area with three smll indentations that must be the thumbprints of the potter as she lifted it off the wheel.  There is no other sign of the origin of the bowl, no brand or stamp on it's base.

When I hold the bowl in my own hands and feel its smoothness, its weight, its imperfections,  I see her handing me the bowl across time and space.  Here is my work, the potter says, here is my hand, here is your bowl.

January 8 Day Seven

The girl in the photo has soft brown curls that are worn short.  Even with her chin tilted slightly upward her hair does not reach her collar.  Her long neck, her downcast wideset eyes as she looks straight ahead, her arched eyebrows all give the impression she antipates something even beyond the flash of the camera.  She isn't exactly smiling but her lips are parted and she has one tooth that is smaller than the rest:  still a baby tooth.  Her shoulders are narrow, a little girl in a pink t-shirt, so slight yet her expression suggests a strength larger than her frame, a patience greater than her years, an infinite capacity for wonder.

January 7 Day Six

A shiny penny, perfectly round, perfectly smooth edges.  (How few things are so carefully made these days!)  In profile Abe's nose beams and wings of fire seem to flicker slowly behind him in the reflected lamplight.  His hair and protruding beard are neat but not short.  His shirt sleeve is rumpled.  Perhaps he fell asleep in it.  His bow tie so small as to require a second and third look:  did I see that?

He gazes forward, never flinching.  In metal no eye-blinking is possible, for surely in life he must have closed his eyes and covered them with large hands and massaged his own worried temples.  His cheek bones bridge his face from ear to mouth, his eye rests upon the truss.

Words float above him:  In God We Trust.  Behind him, Liberty, and set upon his breast bone, 2006 D.  I wonder what the coins of his day declared.  Whose face graced the pennies he held in his pocket or gave to his children?

January 6 Day Five

The coffee mug was something I bought at a garage sale for a dime.  I had planned to let the kids have it because it is big like my ceramic coffee mug that fascinates them.  This one is a lightweight plastic.  Instead I kept it for myself and today I am drinking my morning coffee from it.

It's so light and the warmth of the coffee seeps through to warm my hand when I rest it along the side.  It's the color of lima beans, adorned with multicolored asterisks:  squash-yellow, tangerine, blue, pale red, mottled grey.  There are two small chips in the rim, like bite marks from a puppy who tasted the coffee and then bit the cup in protest of the bitter flavor.

Inside, the coffee is nearly gone.  Small bubbles look upward and in the largest one I can see my reflection moving left to right as I shift my point of view.  When I sip I see myself again briefly in the bottom of the cup while it is moist and exposed, then I'm gone and a brown cream-streaked pool covers me as it looks up.  It's bubbles show me to myself:   mother-daughter-Holy Spirit-virgin-wife-crone.

January 5 Day Four

A cell phone I have with me 24 hours a day, unless I've misplaced it of course.  It's scuffed on the top, the blue is worn where I've held it so many hours.  The silver trim below the small screen scratched.  Even the screen is marred with lines where the phone has slipped from my grasp and fallen to concrete as well as to carpet or pillow.  A single eye, the camera, gives it a cyclops-like appearance.  A sleeping cyclops with that one eye always closed, dreaming of faraway voices.

Holes, a speaker, in 3 rows of 2-4-2 if you look top to bottom, or 4 columns of 1-3-3-1 side to side, in the lower right corner.  Small ports, buttons, plastic coverings along the side, below the chipped paint where black peeks through the blue.  The dark night winter sky blue, with black holes in the distance.

LG says the label, the brand:  Life is Good.  Indeed, little phone, it is.

January 4 Day Three

A white plastic bottle of school glue, its tip an orange rocket ship nose cone, slightly damaged at the top.  Below, the cap with vertical ridges.  A clockwise arrow points to CLOSE on the top.  An arrow in the oppostie direction, to OPEN.

The bottle has shoulders, a long straight torso.  On the label, ELMER'S in white letter on a blue banner, just below the orange-tangerine triangle with the smug, smiling head of a bull.  His short horns curve upward, just below them his ears sag downward.  Arched eyebrow, smirking smile, he is all opposing lines except nothing is there to balance his goofy double chin.

This school glue declares itself to be Washable.  To be Safe.  To be Non-toxic.

The fine print on a round stamped endorsement at the bottom of the label is so small I have to move to better light to read it. Around the letters AP it says ACMI.  Art and Crafts Materials Institute Certified.  There are four fluid ounces when this certified glue bottle is full.  Mine has the pink 50 cents garage sale sticker still on it and that must be why my glue bottle is only half full.  No worry, Elmer's smile remains smug.

January 3 Day Two

The empty box-bottom lies upside down, nestled in the upside-down lid.  Plum outside, a shade to make one salivate at the thought of summer fruit yet to come.  The inside white, unblemished like fresh snow.  But the shadows across that white field are what draw my eye.  A roof line, straight and firm on the left -- but wait, on the far edge a slight smudging of shade.  On the right, two triangles, one opaque, one more translucent, then below a circle of shadow protecting a small fetus of white light.  As our dark sides, our shadows, protect our light, our love, our better selves.

As I stand my ground to protect what I truly am inside and never ever let it be taken away, I draw my own shadows around to watch over me.

Outside the box, thin lines of dark across smooth, smooth blond wood grain of the table top.  Above, shadows of another object; to the side a thin line and below a heavy shadow base on which to rest.  Rest.  Rest.  Rest on solid ground.

January 2 Day One

The used tea bag, pomegranite-cranberry deep regal violet red blotches, against stainless-steel sink edge, looking like what the word bleeding was written to show.  Blood sacrifice I think as I gaze into the color.  A toe tag that says 'Lipton.  Green Tea. 100% Natural.'  The tea bag born to give abundant life.  The tea, the pomegranite, take and drink in remembrance.  In attention.  In love.

The weight of so much love, clotting and sinking to the bottom.  Dark and heavy, giving shape and ballast to the bag.  "Naturally protective antioxidants" reads the back of the tag.  Bloody tea stains on half the string, then before the tag, suddenly, pure white line, gravity pulls along the side of the sink.  As it pulls everywhere equally at this altitude.

Up, up to higher ground, to air and light.  Finally the tag, resurrected, can lift above the weight of all that blood fruit.  Can save us from thirst and too much knowledge.  From emptiness, the stained bottom of the empty cup.