i see them on the most pedestrian

Errand–

Cartoon clouds!

So different than their fancy-assed Latinate cousins

Cartoon clouds loft 

And float

Resembling nothing so much as cotton candy..or bunnies

I do my best to capture them in my memory

I cast my gaze about the sky

For the Inevitable Cartoonist

Who would squander such casual splendor

On us.

dear one

My email is elegylea@gmail.com

In case you need me

We love you RT, RT, and HT.  
Happy 18th birthday

the year I lost you

I made rules

No pride

Do anything…legal

(So running to Canada was out)

Believe God is big enough.
I found your mother through the ghost of a house burned to the ground

I remember how normal 

Her bathroom was–soap, shampoo, hairbrush…

No signs of the cosmic upheaval they want us all to believe 

Your beautiful mother
Sat on the futon next to you as I memorized how right you looked together

With your baby pink phone repeating may I help you?

In her metallic voice Asian?

There is a picture somewhere in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Of a man you once knew

Ultimate grief

Is a synonym for all the lies they told us

… 17 years to say, I love you

Rapunzel girls, women now.

Know your true names

Your true history has always been

Beloved, Little Ones

Happy birthday.  I love you
Sept. 6 1997

First, let me say this: I doubt I will read Go Set A Watchman. I have loved the Finch family for my whole life and I don’t want to muck it up now with a rough draft, avarice, and reality. That being said, if Calpurnia and Mrs. Robinson want to meet up to kick Atticus in his newly updated racist rear end, I am in.

I grew up in a racist white milieu on my father’s side. He was not racist himself–at all. My grandparents were. When my father was young he was puzzled by the cultural inequities carefully meted out to African-Americans in his hometown outside Houston. My father had his share of human weakness, but prejudice wasn’t one of them.

And up until a couple days ago, I thought Atticus shared this equanimity. To find that he might have evolved into a racist old coot is a shock indeed. So much so that I am opting to not to read about this new guy. I know enough about foolish old white men afraid of an evolving culture. Now that I am an adult I have already reconciled the “real Atticus” to my childhood need for heroes.

The real Atticus wasn’t always a great listener.

The real Atticus had no road map for incest survivors.

Over the years of my adulthood I have puzzled over the characters and symbols of TKAM. Tom Robinson had to be both ultimately blameless and crippled? Mayella had to be a lying incest survivor? Even great works of fiction can be flawed by our desire for good guys, bad guys, and easy resolutions. We love to have our moral compass clearly delineated. But most men, like Atticus Finch, have moral failures as well as triumphs.

Meanwhile we all know the real truth–Calpurnia is the real hero. Always has been.

They say light
Restores memory
I see
Through this hoarder’s house–

Old newspapers
Moldy books
And the lovely curves
Of antique chests and bed frames
Buried in the dust

At the end she lived only in the kitchen, bathroom, cluttered dining room
Still the afternoon light
Tunnels through

Somehow

All old women
(Now bent trees) were once
Young and lovely

….children
If you could tip the hour glass back
Shake the sand down to make time go
Upward

I would still be
thin and hopeful
Standing beneath borrowed shelter in a
Temporary wedding dress

Know now this–
Only the true king
Can make a single seamless garment
Into shelter

The moon is a smudge of light
On the forehead of darkness
Ash Wednesday penitent
In negative relief

I reach for you
Child, arms outstretched
Love scooped up

But cannot touch the mark my sin has left
On you, matchless Love
God with his arms thrown wide
For this insignificant girl
Smaller than the lesser
Light to govern the night

Who governs the night of this cage
I rattle
And percuss these wrought
Iron bars strung together
Cupped hands, carved-out bones
Ribs around a single
Beating heart

I am not a fan of the breastarant, underclad cheerleaders, or Victoria’s Secrets ads. Also, let’s face it–bikini contests. It seems to me that the exploitation of women’s bodies is a sign of our reduction to cardboard parodies of self. We become less-than-human and objects.

So it is odd that this entire discussion was precipitated by IKEA’s (brilliant) idea to provide inexpensive temporary shelter to people in displaced situations.

I commented that this makes up for when they erased women in their catalogs…almost makes up for….

Erasing women. Hm…

IKEA had decided to market in Saudi Arabia. They digitally removed the women in their catalogs. Presumably because male customers would be offended?

My son challenged my outrage over this by asking what I would do about Victoria’s Secret models in a similar situation. I admit that I thought he was being snarky and that the image of disembodied lingerie floating in space does seem preferable to the VS ads I find so offensive.

Normal women in lingerie–no airbrushing or anorexia? I think real would be a good start.

Years ago I worked in an art gallery. Each year they hosted a show devoted to the human form. Self-portraits, cubist depictions, stylized nudes–you saw it all. My co-workers quipped that men always blurred their own groin region in naked self-portraits. I remember my favorite ever entry in this show was a self-portrait of a woman in her fifties or early sixties. She wore only cotton briefs and an unflinching honesty.

I loved that painting. She gave me someone to strive to become.

Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, Frieda Kahlo, Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Curie, heck, Elizabeth the First, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc…Boudicca all give me someones to strive to become. Many of these women paved the road for me. Gave me dignity, suffrage, a moral, legal, and intellectual foundation.

You can make a woman an object by erasing her entirely or you can make her an object by making her into a sexual cartoon. Either way it seems to me we are complicit in the process of devaluing and commodifying women if we do either. If we accept either. And this comes with a simple test–would a man do this? Would he get erased from the picture? Strut around in his speedo? Wear his high heels and short shorts in a breastarant?

And what would we call it if he did? Are there gonadaurants? Should there be?

Years ago I thought I could
Teach you
Despite my sloven self

But what could I?

Teaching is what poor men do
And I am no man

Like the one on the cross
The one in the doorway
The one who

The
One
Who…makes us clean

It is His voice I hear in the obscure words of bards and oracles
Who will
Remember either Nero or Vespasian

I lift my eyes to You, oh Rock my salvation

I fear all my edges are
Yet incompletely stained.