Shirley

Sunday morning very bright came in and I made pictures Made pretty window pictures Made pretty pretty pictures While in the streets, while in the streets Still jagged ice and soldier boots Still icy icy clutching fear Still salted shards, still tears like sleet Still blue-cold songs, still fall-down-slick hope-crusted trampled streets. Still pretty pretty light came in, still I made pretty pictures.   (From Hymn by Peter, Paul & Mar y . My church has those same  windows   but Sunday I stayed home. )  

Maybe it’s just too much of a burden—running your eyes across the 900s, in town at the library—snagging on one and another one and maybe one more yet. The chance of hitting on the kind to get a person through the night is fairly high, but it’s not guaranteed, there’s still a risk, and if your mother goes sometimes herself, doesn’t mind the hunting part, why not make her do it? So that’s what my daughter does. Jul26 Her: I need a book to read!!! Me: Boy do I ever have one. But you’re not getting it yet.   Her: ❤️ Her: The orange kill book is kinda a dud.   Nov2 Her: Got any books for me? ?? Me: Only 2 Time magazines and a New Yorker. Her: Ok. You’d think, my little pile of picks, surely we’d both calm down for a while. But nothing in life is for sure. Nov3 Me: When Paulson stops in this afternoon can you please give him that library book? My turn now. Her: Which book? Me: The one you just read. I forget the title. Memoir. Her: I haven’t finished it yet. Are you des...

The first time it happened—late in the evening, in the living room—I yelled. The second time, too. I couldn’t just sit up from lying on the sofa (or was it the other way around?) without my brain suddenly spinning inside my skull, circling violently. But almost right away, it righted. The loopiness cleared. Then I figured out I didn’t have to yell. It didn’t hurt. It was just weird and awful. The next couple of days, I knew not to lie down or tilt my head too far. If I went dizzy erasing the whiteboard after class, from overreaching, I could drop into a chair until I steadied. If the room momentarily veered when I perambulated past my students at their desks, I could flail my arm around, try to stabilize. In case my brain was bleeding out from the head bang two weeks previous , we decided to take me to the ER. Now that was a trip. Because I said vertigo , when I checked in, because I said maybe a concussion , they told me to seat myself in the fast-track waiting area. Soon I go...

We think and we think. What would make any difference? Light fires on the runways, says my husband. The landing strips in Greenland, he means. Then the planes couldn’t land. No, I say, they could just bomb. Minneapolis, too. Somebody’s blurry footage got me going—that skinhead pastor up front, in a daze, and then his skinhead henchmen—bodyguards?—coming up and whispering. Never mind that we’ve got two skinhead sons, ourselves. (I’m speaking loosely, of course. Our boys are bald, and then they just buzz the rest off. Those church men I saw weren’t all skin, either. They all had hair on top. Their look merely lended to the ominous air.) People storming in, rowdily scattering the congregation—did that help any? What if those protesters had just gone down the aisle singing, like Jesus was just joining in the service? If they’d sung like these Christians here , We are marching we are marching we are marching o h ohhh we are marching in the light of God , their chirpy goodness spilling...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 17     Now how, you wonder, did I get him ? That duck? I needed animals, you see, for this one wall in the house, and my sister’s duck just struck me as right. Orange feet, orange bill, the stuck-out barrel chest like all the other ducks’ in the world. I don’t think I asked my sister for the duck and she said no. This has happened—I’ll want this or that small masterpiece of hers and she’ll act all possessive, harden her heart. No, she’ll say, she wants it. But here, I just took the picture. This was some months ago. Amid the cats on her Instagram, the sheep, the women’s legs and other body parts, the seashores, the fields, the flowers, there before me stood the duck. I maybe already had the mat—I’m not sure. I taped my photo to the back, and that easy, I had me a piece of fine art. The one thing I did wrong, terribly wrong, was not think to slide the cursor on my screen out of view. Dumb dumb. Now it sits unchased off the duck’s chest feathers, ...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 16 The Fall of Icarus, Peter Brueghel The Elder, Mus é e  de Bruxelles, Belgium. Gift & Thrift acquisition. It looks, almost, like he’s playing his violin, fiddling while Rome burns. Like he’s clutching the bow, sliding it across the strings, the neck of the instrument tucked neatly near his chin. He’s only turning the earth, drudging on behind his plow. Plough. Same as the fellow with his dog and sheep, same as the fisherman, he totally missed the splash. All we get, ourselves, is a hint: the legs in the water, there on the right. A boy flew too close to the sun. His wings melted, the wings his father made him out of feathers and wax. One can only imagine the father’s pain, Daedalus’s terrible regret. I’ve moved the picture here and there, from wall to wall. I’ve even hung a poem alongside. Mus é e des Beaux Arts W. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how ...