Floating into the morning..

Taking a cue from am unnamed personage that has stirred an alarming fondness in me I have decided to start rising very, very early. I remember Anne Rice's Louis taking particular note of the last sunrise he ever saw...he watched it as though it was his first. I have always been fond of watching the opening and closing of the day...
Sunrise was likened to coming closer and closer to God's kingdom in my mind as a youth. I thought I could see God's promise of eternal life in a paradise illustrated by the gilded purple clouds. There was always something magical about 5am.

After watching black and white television for hours in the middle of the night when I was 7 years old I noticed the blackness fade to a blanched blue through the window. I clutched my cat and felt a deep sense of relief. At last it was light out. At last fears disappeared. But as I grew a couple years older and the insomnia remained I grew to love the blackness. I could draw, write poems, being enthralled by the petticoats and bouffants of the 1950s television shows that ran all night. Something about black and white television always made me feel so safe...

The tea that was supposed to enable a peaceful repose only worked for a few hours. The next thing I knew it would be 1 in the morning and I was wide awake, eager to turn on the lights in the family room, let my cat sit on my lap and obsess over the world of black and white...the soft tones of endless shades of grey. Pencils skirts and petticoats, Dobie Gillis and Donna Reed... I would drift in and out a little bit through the night, sponge rollers in my hair to try and imitate Tuesday Weld at school the next day... and I would sleep a little bit...

And in my dreams I was in a poodle skirt sipping a malt with my steady...someone faceless held my hand as the saxophone played on the jukebox... and in my dreams I was black and white... and endless shades of grey...

The night-tide glow of electronics still fascinates me.. but now it is a computer screen or an ipod... It isn't a world of malt shops, do-wop, hand in hand going steady forever...on TV

older years enticed me with a couple centuries prior... organs filled my mind, masks in the catacombs and a voice that could never be forgotten. The Angel of Music coaxed me out of bed. I embraced the feeling of a ghost leading me down the gloomy hallway as the hem of my nightgown slid along the carpet underfoot... I'd stare at the moon and see an angel's face singing a melancholy song. I was enamored of the shadows. I was in love with the sound of the train running through town at 4 am...

There was a tear in the sleeve of my blue night  gown with the peach ribbons...it was never repaired...

I am going to get up early from now on...

poem from an insomniac mind

long travels





oh, you handsome demon
take your hands off the wheel and sit beside me for a while
your words are slick and foreboding
your notions disguise the stars
your notions disguise the sun

oh, you handsome demon
unbuckle you intuition and lean your chin
towards mine
the weight and sweat of indecision don't do me any justice
I'll make a sweep of starlight in my eyes
and disguise you from myself

oh, you handsome demon
travel incognito with me
in these modes of modern transportation
your unknown notions become mine


-Claudine Woodard

"My friend's flesh and blood.."

The song was sleeping in my mind as I woke up with watery eyes at 5 o'clock. It was still black in my room... and there was this watery echo in my half-dreaming mind. Bryan Ferry's voice calling me seductively... as if he were singing my song...

and I thought of his glittery tuxedo jackets as I lay in bed and his seductive blue eyes and black hair. I thought of how he dated tall blonde super-models and I wondered what it must be like to be so very British... whatever that means... world-weary? perhaps... But to be well into your 60s and still dating 20 something supermodels... the man must have something...

I thought of his voice,  and in a dreamy lull and I had to reach for my ipod. The black room was illuminated with an eerie bluish light as I switched the dial to Roxy Music. The light reminds me of a porcelain ghost... but I had to hear that song... and think of the album cover and the comely pair of women depicted therein, pouting and clutching spears. They must be golden haired Spartans and I wonder what outer world they come from. As if they come from the sea, sailing on a long journey in their billowy white gowns exposing toned sun-kissed arms and pushing the bottom lip out in a heroic pout.

Oh, to be so winsome, full-bodied and enigmatic. Why did it grow out of fashion to put heavenly looking women on the covers of albums... could it even be appreciated now?

I can imagine staring at this album cover for hours had I seen it in 1980. But my parents weren't cool enough to listen to Roxy Music. Cool enough for The Cars, yes, but not cool enough for Roxy Music...

 Bryan Ferry's voice inspires thoughts of rainbow colored mist rising from a silver pond as lilies float peacefully along in slow motion. I would say Flesh and Blood is the most eastern, ambient, fantasy oriented album by Roxy Music.

I saw the red numbers on my digital clock tell me I had a good half hour before I had to rise. The urge in the dark that precedes dawn was palpable and more than I could contend with. I had to hear this album. So the blackness would eventually evaporate to the misty grey of dawn. The spindly fingers of dawn creeping into the bedroom window so rudely interrupting the calm and carelessness of night.

I would have to say Roxy Music is the most romantic band in my catalogue. So glamorous, so enchanting... Bryan Ferry singing like a dark prince beckoning a lost nymph into the glass... It's only fitting that he sang the theme song for the film 'Legend'.

I can't exactly wax poetic... but I would like to let the words drip out of my fingers in liquid diamonds, relieving my sore mind...I miss my long-hand but I think I am wounded for writing in pen and ink for now. Should I write about the strange delights of masochism? Or the healing blood of Christ? It's far too late for thinking...

Lake Tahoe

I collected pine cones and it was the first two weeks of October. I didn't realize the summer was really gone. I tried to lay by the pool at the mountain time share but the wind just blew through my bones and I had nothing but this little pink book and a pen. The cover was growing grey from gripping it with a tear stained palm for night after night when sleep escaped me.

Staring at the ghostly mountains the wind created a loud swoosh though the pines. It reminded me of the hiss of the ocean.

I sat in the wooden sauna at the spa in the time share condo in the mountains in the woods

and my bones just felt so cold from too much crying and not enough sleep. Very little sleep never made anything right.

The views and the air, collecting the pine cones as if my name was Heidi and burning them in the fire place.

Cleaned the ashes...

It was time to go away.

The mountains haunted me with strange ideas of kidnappings, being carried upside down and seeing the city lights blurry through six year old tears, orange and red and green...

stop lights
yellow lights slowing down the thoughts and the cars and the temperament

but the temperament does not slow
the body is not claimed and I was still carried upside down
through tears
a tightened seat belt
a one horse town...

the rain came and turned to snow in October
and memory brought tears
memory brought a voice that said
"you better believe it"
when I asked...

Is there any way I could have really forgotten you?

...I felt an ache in my body and brain

An extra blanket...

I know I am beating the whole subject of summertime over and over in the head but it is a subject that fascinates me, charms me, enchants me with joy and carelessness. I have looked forward to it all year. So last night I watched 'Taxi' as Joel drank red wine and we laughed the way we did when we were children. Joel inherited the largest portion of our mom's paranoid neurosis so he anxiously asked me if red wine was OK to drink. "Is it really good for your heart? Well which kind of red wine should you drink? Does it make a difference? Calories? What? Deeni! Does it have more calories than beer?"

Fortunately after a few sips he was blushing and laughing and it felt like we were kids laughing all over again, cackling at Louie DePalma and James Ignatowsky.

Then I realized I couldn't really leave the window wide open anymore. Last night it was nearly three quarters of the way closed. And... I had to add an extra blanket; an afghan Becky Swan knitted for us in 1988. Blankets were a must in my house in the mid 80s to early 90s. Intent on saving every dime imaginable, my mom would forestall turning on the heater until mid-December. I remember one morning in December ambling down the hallway early in the morning, sleep-drunk and unwilling to get ready for the school day I saw a foggy, chilly mist was hovering two feet above the floor. I was 14 and had grown accustomed to being poor so I thought it was kind of romantic. It reminded me of the scene in Doctor Zchivago when Yuri and Lara break into the abandoned house in the snow, like a frozen fairy tale palace in white. I wondered, as I made my way to the kitchen, if I would one day have a dark haired poet like Yuri write me a love poem in December with shivering fingers in tattered gloves. Lara crept up behind him in her long white shift, golden hair tousled from sleep, and wept at his words. I wondered if her tears turned to ice in the cold. I have memorized that scene when I was 8 and it stays with me all the time.

But we needed the blankets, as many as we could have... in my frozen house...So last night realizing the weather has been telling me that the summer is nearing it's demise, I pulled on this old afghan Sister Becky Swan from our congregation had knitted in 1988. It was a gorgeous, dreamy peach color when she first presented it to us at the Kingdom Hall. It seemed so fancy. We never wanted to use it and it remained folded gently at the foot of mom's bed. I have it now. The yarn has faded from glowing peach to a pale beige...Faded, sturdy and very warm...sometimes it reminds me a lot of me...

CURSES!!! CURSES!!! CURSES!!!

Posted a long and self-expository blog... pressed the wrong key and it got erased...I shouldn't compose at work...

It's probably for the best. I don't want to expose myself to the online world anyway...

But yeah, digital composition is a catastrophe!

Tennessee Williams reflections

Well, the time is nigh for me to bid a heavy-hearted farewell to my summer school class. How sorely I will miss the dear, treasured experience. I stood outside the classroom for a long time and spoke with my teacher. The August breeze blew across my bare legs and I felt the tinge of coolness the signals, ever so slightly, the approach of fall. The sunset comes earlier, adorning the sky in it's glimmering tangerine gown. The clouds look like the scarlet innards of a Texas grapefruit against the paling sky, succumbing to a deeper navy shade of night. To steal the words of Tennessee Williams the moon was hardly a moon at all "only a small, sliver slipper of a moon."
Can the blaze of September compete with the embers of August? Summer gives one last blow of might and heat and force before it is vanquished by the brown hands of fall...
It is an awful feeling...
Yet it is a pleasure to know I can feel. So I will savor the silver slipper of melancholy, embrace the end and find inspiration in the ashes...

ahhhhhh....

Homework is cleared and now I can sail for the rest of the afternoon. Who keeps a diary in longhand these days? Why, I do! I truly believe I will never go completely digital. I am far too in love with my Victorian penmanship. Sometimes I just love to make curly-q's and spins and twists with my pen. I used to think my ultimate dream would be to live in a time when I might write with a quill and a bottle of ink by candlelight. I never wanted to be a part of this time as I was growing up. When I pretended to be sick to stay home from school I would lay in bed for long moments in fantasy. I dreamed and imagined that I would wake up one day and I would find my feet on a hardwood floor. There would be a wood burning stove and a light snow falling outside. It would be 1887 instead of 1987 and I was so content.

I wanted that dream to be real... so real, it haunted my mind. I woke up one morning ad thought I felt the Opera Ghost in my room. I felt this hard, pressing suffocation in my chest and I was certain the 100 years hence had come flying into my bedchamber.

Who keeps a diary in long-hand? Why, I do, of course! How else would the ghosts find me? If I could fascinate the spectre of a dashing, brilliant mind departed many years ago, the cool caress of a wicked disembodied rake would slim the fears I feel at the closeness of another earthly soul. Phantom lips, sepulchral love...