Heart Swollen with Secrets

Happy Valentine's Day. For you, a prose poem, "Heart Swollen with Secrets," from the new manuscript I'm working on:

HEART SWOLLEN WITH SECRETS

The heart, swollen with secrets, learns to disguise its voice.

It mimics the reedy peep of a schoolgirl reading, nail-bitten thumb prodding each perplexing word.

It pleads in the cracked baritone of a prisoner begging for water, pressing the pattern of bars into his glistening forehead.

It complains about the heat wave with the bitter whisper of a ballerina in a body cast.

In a teenage voice, it wheedles with the speed of an auctioneer, needing car keys for cruising.

Sometimes, grinning, it charms even you with the oily tones of a politician. Yes, even you, standing there with the empty leash in your hand, blinking and scratching your chin. Too many false voices. Where oh where did your real heart go?

Lately the heart pretends to have no voice at all. Stone-lipped and sulking, it glares out at the world through its gray-green mask of lichens and moss, silent as a boulder.

This evening, in the steamy dusk, you think you hear – at last! – the beautiful, watery song of the wood thrush deep in the oaks. But it is only the heart, that brassy little mockingbird, stealing another song. It practices throwing its own voice, its true and dark and sparkling voice, as far away as it can.

-- CBK

For your holiday entertainment, do a search of the blog, entering the word "heart."

"Heart Swollen with Secrets" was originally published in The Bitter Oleander. The photo is of a tree's heart, up my road near the pond. Click on photo to enlarge image.

Salt Art

During snowstorms, I cringe when the flashing lights of town trucks blink past on my steep hill. The trucks hurl arcs of huge salt crystals in their wake. Sigh. (No, I do not drink my well water.) However, in the aftermath, the sun reveals an ironic beauty: these crackled mosaics of salt-encrusted pavement.

Thank you for the poetic words of William Blake, which always hold strange truths:

Improvement makes straight roads; but the
crooked roads without improvement are
roads of genius.

William Blake, 1757-1827

I'm all for the meander.

The photo was taken yesterday afternoon, 2/12/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Hungry for Color

The snow continues to fall, drifty flakes spiraling down. All sounds are muted into a muffled silence; the pace of the day thickens and stalls. Yes, the view from my window is beautiful, but I'm so hungry for color. Although I'll likely take some wintry photos later when I venture out for a walk, right now I want to see something vivid and alive. Scrolling through last spring and summer's photos on my quest, I came across this glorious, opening rose, captured at the cusp of fullness. Just looking again into its face thaws the spirit.

John Keats wrote these stunning lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes":

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Those three words instill spangled commotion in your mind, don't they? "Made purple riot"! And inside the "pained heart." Perfect. Wandering through Keats' writing, I came across these additional powerful and unsettling lines from "The Living Hand," a fragment. I wasn't expecting this haunted feeling, this visitation, to overcome me. See what happens to you after reading these eight lines:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Shiver. This makes you want to leap fully into your skin, fill your lungs, and take off running to live your life in the deepest way you can. Do you remember what you needed -- with your whole heart -- to do?

The photograph was taken at White Flower Farms in Litchfield, Connecticut on 6/7/09. Click on the image to enlarge.

Windshield Feathers

This so-called "arctic blast" has us hibernating. On soul-chilling Saturdays like this, I welcome the morning mug of coffee with both hands. This has been another season of spectacular ice formations -- fantastic, fleeting patterns only the camera can hold on to. These swirling ice-plumes surprised me on December 14th, as I hurried to my car on the way to work. I had never seen such an intricate windshield bas relief. I found my camera and took this photo from the driver's seat. I love the way the bare black trees loom like giants beyond the glass. Hard to stop looking; harder yet to scrape away the art and head toward my other reality.

To enlarge the photo, click on the image.

Disobey the Current

Drawn by the curled wave of snow and ice against black water, I stood as close as I dared, not knowing where the ground ended and the stream began beneath the snow.

Thoughts jotted down while revisiting the image this silent Sunday morning:

Thinking of all the forces that rush past – unstoppable -- that freeze and melt our edges, that swirl our thoughts into beauty and darkness, that form patterns of poetic clarity, that ripple cold and warm past the heart, as boundaries thaw then re-form, then give way again, as -- quivering -- we inhabit shape after shape. Yet, how still and immutable, how solid: that place at our core that disobeys the current.

The photo was taken 1/9/10. Click on image to enlarge.

Cosmic Piglet

Up way too early this morning, I was playing around with my camera, a Christmas marzipan pig from my younger daughter, an old etched copper plate from printmaking days, and some bubbled glass. Oh, and the muted morning light coming in through the sliders. I don't know what there is about this photo, but it makes me laugh. The floating pig seems to be looking down on Earth with goofy wonder. Just something silly to start the day, a little effervescence for you.

Does anyone actually eat marzipan? To enlarge the image, just click on the picture.

The Real Sky Was Better

Tonight's sunset: the inky trees were crosshatched over the blue and rosy stripes of clouds. I like the tangled nest of lines gathered at the lower right, with the last pastel light peeping through. It was well worth braving the icy air to go for a walk earlier in the day. Later on, coming home with groceries, I drove beneath these gorgeous colors. I grabbed my camera to try to capture the fading sunset from my neighbor's driveway. The real sky was so much better, unwilling to live inside my camera.

I wish you all a creative and colorful 2010!

To enlarge the image, click on the photo.