Monkey Love Tulip

Monkey love tulip. Spring. Soon. Really.

The monkey also has a baby. The baby is its own kind of wonderful. (Beware, I'm sure other photos will follow.) The attached antique shop price tag was highly entertaining: "Celluloid monkeys AS IS -- wind up not workin, hole in baby's face." You can't wait to see that baby, now can you?

The photograph was taken this afternoon at my house. Thanks, Cindy S-J for the fabulous birthday monkey and baby. You knew I could no way, no how live without them. Simian bliss.

Simply click on photo to enlarge image.

Inside the Tulip

For all of you, hungry for color, this rainy Sunday morning:

Inside the tulip:
six matches and a burst of yellow flame.
The eye's own solar flare unfurls,
burning away distance,
reaching into red.

This is not the way my mind usually works, turning an image directly into words. But the poem arrived in its own unbidden fashion, just this moment. I'm not going to question it. Here, it's yours.

The photo was taken in my kitchen last week. No "real" tulips yet. Click on image to enlarge.

Tulip, Feather, Woodgrain

One line of poetry casts its shadow into the next, patterns repeat, contrasts in sound underscore meaning. Key words and images pop, leaping to the eye like glossy magenta against rough deep gray. The tendrils of each line extend into the next -- encircling, clinging, claiming -- until the poem is woven into a living whole, each word inextricable.

In this photo, I tried to capture the way repeating patterns, shapes, and shadows rippled through the tulip, feather, and woodgrain, uniting them in a still life.

Photo taken 5/13/08. Click on image to enlarge. For more about repeating patterns and contrast (and metaphor), scroll down to the 6/12/08 post.

Sinister Tulip

The tulip bends under the weight of its red-black thoughts, its dark head heavy as a tarnished bell. In sympathy, the chair casts ominous de Chirico shadows.

Tricking Gravity

When the breeze first lifted me, I felt dangerously buoyant. I trembled like a baffled nestling. But then I relaxed into the air, let the sky embrace me. For the first time, sunrise painted me on all sides – pink, everywhere. I was weightless. Disguised as inconsequential, like a dust mote, I tricked gravity into ignoring me. I inhaled the fragrance rising from the world. I began to hear the silence that precedes blossoming, that blank space before the almost inaudible velvet-slip of petals unfurling. I held my future, all possibilities, locked safe inside me. I was a speck of pollen floating in the rosy throat of a tulip. Suspended above its secret black pinwheel, I waited for a gust of wind.

Excerpt from "Tricking Gravity" a prose poem from Stirring the Mirror, first published in The Bitter Oleander.