Big Black Crow

Smooth its flight.
Rough its call.
Like sweet to sour.

About the painting and poem
I selected the painting because of the large black shape, and that it contains green and yellow, the colors of trees and sun.  The poem is short.  Sometimes poems are short and sometimes they are medium, and sometimes long.  I thought it would be good to change it up.

​Married Life 
 
My husband doesn’t want to move
from the front row at the tractor 
pulling contest in the community park. 
I feel like a picked dandelion 
drooping in a juice glass. 
I worry that my feet in sandals 
 
will burn without sun block.
My scalp sweats under my cotton hat.
My lips feel dry, my throat parched. 
I’m hotter than a desert rock in Death Valley. 
He says I don’t need to sit there.
So, I beat a retreat to the beer tent 
 
sit and relax at a table, comparing
notes with two old farmers about
how hot we are. Suddenly I am hit
by a rush of feelings about being married. 
I am inclined to like it. After a while, 
I buy chicken dinners, cold pops, 
 
give my husband his and return
to my spot in the tent. Eating
and drinking, I listen to the announcer
but I watch my husband, enjoying
our bond. Suddenly he stands up, comes
my way, saying we can leave anytime I want. 
 
We meander past the tractor pull, stop
to watch a John Deere slowly without 
drama pull the weight wagon all the way 
to the end of the track. That’s a winner, 
my husband says. Then we leave 
to go back home where I can be cool. 
 
 

About the painting and poem
The poem Married Life was a milestone poem for me.  I entered it into a poetry contest for Rosebud, a literary poetry magazine, and won the New Discovery Poet Award.  This was back in 2005.  The photo dates from about that time period as well.  My sweet husband Jerry was alive and well with no hint of what was to come.  Back then I was doing art shows and this is a picture of Jerry and me in our art gallery in the old hay barn that we created together when we participated in the Falling Leaves Art Tour. I miss Jerry who was the biggest supporter of my art life a woman could want.  I picked Married Life for this week's blog post because we've just spent one very hot summer weekend here in the Midwest.  I'm arrived back home today about noon, but I spent a long weekend in Minnesota.  I visited Red Wing, Northfield, and ended my weekend at my great niece Ellie's high school graduation party in Jordan, MN.  I stayed at a B&B in Jordan (Nicolin Mansion), spent the day at the home of my nephew Matt and his wife Tracy.  Many relatives attended the celebration for this smart young woman and I greatly enjoyed the day.  But the heat was brutal, to put it mildly, and as I sat under the shade of their trees visiting with old friends and new, I remembered this poem.  A good husband understands how important it is to keep his wife happy and my blue-eyed handsome husband tried to do that for me.   

Springtime Lover
 
In worked garden ground, 
I make long furrows  
between stakes tied with twine,
then drop seeds one by one
into pungent black soil.
Earth kisses my fingers. 
Sun smells my hair.
Sinking down, 
I lie in angel pose, 
spine bending slightly 
from the earth’s curve.
Holding my breath, 
my senses feel the slow 
turning of earth on axis 
as clouds race overhead.
Leaves ripple and snap, 
small flags in steady wind.
Earth hugs me tightly, 
grounding me with goodness,
whispering like a lover
words my skin can hear.

About this painting and poem
I've juxtaposed the abstract with the concrete:  a painting with shapes and colors, but no defined image and a word picture that describes in concrete detail what I experience when I garden.  Springtime Lover was published in 2005 in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar.  When I say I love nature, I really mean it, going so far as to equate earth with a lover.  When you work soil, you actually release into the air microbacterium which increase your happiness by releasing serotonin in your brain. Soil is so much more than just dirt.  It's microbes, fungi, bacteria and living organisms that process the nutrients of water, oxygen and sun so that plants can grow.  These things co-exist together and each gains from the other organisms.  Without sun, water, oxygen and soil we would not be able to live on this planet.  

Pine Lake
 
Pine Lake, once a cow pasture,
was flooded when I was two.
I remember peering down
at old fence posts and wire
as my father rowed the boat.
I remember an old stump 
where fish hung out--
a suspended sunfish mobile --
their fins and tails fanning
while they stayed in place.
I remember submerged trees 
that snagged our poles.
 
I am beginning to write 
poems about growing old.
 
Old impediments are dissolved.
If my father were alive,
we could skim the lake
by motorboat, untroubled. 
I don’t want to.  I want to go deep.  
I want to walk where 
cows made their paths.

About the painting and poem:
The painting is oil and cold wax and abstract, but reminds me of the cattails that lined the shore at our Pine Lake cottage.  My parents ran a Red and White Grocery in the small town of Holcombe, WI. when I was born.  Then Northern States Power built a dam and Holcombe boomed with workers.  My parents acquired the cottage land before the dam flooded the area and brought five rivers into what is now the Holcombe Flowage.  Pine Lake was created.  My father had an old shack towed to the property and our cottage was created.  We spent many summer days at the cottage, a plain wooden structure that was added on to but always remained primitive.  It was the primitiveness of the place that made it fun.  We pumped water; cooked sometimes on the wood stove that stood at one end; used an outhouse.  We swam, fished, and lazed around.  I devote a chapter in my book Cream from Butterflies to the pleasures we enjoyed when we were at the cottage. (See the  My Book Nook page on my website for a link to the book).  I have only happy memories of our family time at Pine Lake.  It was simple fun:  enjoy nature, eat a good meal, and relax.  We were all together, my parents and my three sisters and I.  That made it even more special, though at the time, we probably didn't appreciate it as much as we do today when we remember our childhood.

​Cleaning Up Winter

Pent up laundry spills from the house
onto clothes lines attached to the side of the garage
where bedding flaps and bounces 
like jitter bug notation freed from the score.
Load after load--pads and sheets,
blankets and comforters-- sag and bow the lines.
Next window screens are removed for a shower,
glass cleaned and shined, curtains and drapes
doing their dance in the wind and sun.

Spring is here and so is work,
an endless line of chores accumulated
like dust bunnies under winter’s bed.

About the paintings and poem:
I went into my archives to maintain a seasonal theme for the blog.  The paintings date from 2006 when I was painting more realistically in watercolors and reflect my minor obsession with clothes pins.  Clothes pins!  Old fashioned today, but formerly household necessities. Made from real wood!  So smooth to the touch! I still have a bag of them hanging around for when I need them.  The poem written about the same time seems a bit old fashioned to me today, but I truly cleaned that way when I was younger.  Now I do it in bits which gets the job done and is easier for me to accomplish.  I do air dry laundry still, not all of it of course, but I have a rack on my front porch and hang things that way.  One day I may get a proper clothes line.  I read something just yesterday in the New York Times about hanging laundry to dry, how it is done worldwide whether or not you have a yard and how it would save energy.  I don't disagree. 

Bird in the Bath
 
I should look away--
a bird bathing feels private--
but I am mesmerized. 
That she is avian changes nothing.
I am a voyeur, an observer, a spy.
 
This glimpse is a sip. 
Now I want a full draught
of life in feathers and beak.  
So much stays hidden,
sheathed by leaves and branches,
a shuttered window I cannot open.
 
Bird slaps its tail,
flaps its wings,
skitters about,
thrusts its breast
deep into the bowl.
 
The bird and I have something in common.
Living creatures both of us,
bathing, bond of water, necessity,
a private moment, pleasure.

About the photo and poem
One year on the farm we had a bluebird bonanza––multiple pairs who produced several batches of babies.  By the end of summer, we had twenty or more baby bluebirds.  I caught a group of them at just the right moment.  I took this photo through the window.  I conjectured that they were preparing for their flight south as is was nearing the end of October.  The next day all the bluebirds were gone.  Robins come early and many depart by the end of July or early August.  We had barn swallows in our barn.  A few nesting pairs arrived after the redwing blackbirds in the spring.  Then the numbers began to multiply as babies were conceived, hatched, and grew.  By the end of summer we had dozens and dozens.  Barn swallows left at the end of September.  A big wind would come up and the next morning, they were gone.  What remained were bluebirds.  I became enamored by the sweet sound, not a loud song, but a sweet chirp.  We had other birds:  nuthatches, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, crows, sandhill cranes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, brown thrashers, sparrows of several varieties, mourning doves, and hawks, to name some of them.  But it was the bluebirds I loved most.  

​I've put up nesting boxes here on the river, but so far, none have used them. But I've seen them in my yard in past summers, so I remain hopeful.  In any case, for all the birds I keep a bird bath.  I got that from my grandmother.  She always had a bath for the birds.  Though it's a bit of a chore to keep clean, it's well worth it.  Even though I am right by the river, I am surprised by the number of birds who use it.  It's another way for me to say, "Come.  You're welcome here."

Tree Created Chores
Growing up, elms ringed the yard,
giants relinquishing summer’s shade 
knee deep to my father who raked,
mulched, and burned for weeks 
in autumn’s gloaming.
I prefer my honey locusts, a pair,
that filter sunlight with pinnate compound leaves,
their small ovoid petals 
creating shade with pointillism.
Leaf fall from a locust is dainty--
golden confetti—like rain falling
when the sun is shining.
What needs raking are the pods,
long, brown ribbons that won’t come down
until icy north winds bring serious winter.
They hang on as long as they can,
rattling like skeletons on the bony branches,
then drop to snow like lost lines
in forgotten poems.  All winter I fantasize.
 
How fresh the air, how bright the sun,
how fun the task to rake!
I’m cooped up, hungry for fresh oxygen,
and movement outdoors,
forgetting spring brings weeks 
of westward gales, warm but hearty.  
Sometimes lifting a shovel full of pods, 
the load blows back to the ground
and I must build it up again.  
Indians harvested the pods for seeds
and ground them to flour I’m told
but I’m not so adventurous 
with gastronomical unknowns
so I haul them by wheelbarrows to the ditch.
After years of doing this, I’m still waiting 
for a volunteer seedling to shoot from the debris.
If I have to rake, though, I take spring.
All ahead seems idyllic, a dream unfolding.
Only new life awaits, not thousands of small deaths.

The Far Off Hills
I
In summer, the hills are every shade
of green.  Even in winter,
their contours are colored.
 
I wonder where are those hills?
How can I get there?
 
Once I drove towards them
but cars in back hurried me.
I turned into a driveway to let them pass.
 
I discovered a woods being clear-cut.
A tractor with a long trailer
loaded with logs was parked 
amidst the destruction.
I turned around in the cemetery driveway
and went home, thinking
better to stand on my farm and look.
 
I feel small when I study
the rise and fall of land,
reaching in waves towards the horizon,
sky that goes on 
past the edges of the earth,
past the earth’s atmosphere.
past that into a universe.
My questions remain the same.
 
II.
My eyes look to the hills
beyond my field past the neighbor’s woods.
They catch my eye whenever I look there.
Rising up like a western mountain range
but here in Wisconsin, they’re glacial remains.
 
Evergreens and oaks, maples and elms,
bare spots from far off farm fields,
undulating layers of color,
changing with the hour, the season.
So far away yet so close
with a sky rising to the edges 
of the earth’s atmosphere, 
drawing me away from my farm.
 
III.
This morning I saw snow patches
in the rise of the hills,
flat places where land rests
before climbing up some more.
Up and up the rise snakes
before meeting big blue sky
going on forever
into the unseen deep.
I stand, here, at the window, 
traveling with my eyes.
I am not ready
to set out on that journey.
Already I know
when the time is right
I will have to go.
 

About the painting and poem
I painted Light Falls on Trees in 2015. I was beginning to get a glimmer of how to capture what I loved abstractly.  I was hoping the painting would convey the feeling one has when lying on a hammock or sitting on the ground under a big shade tree in the summer.  The poem, The Far Off Hills, is much older.  I first wrote it in 2007.  I'd lived on my farm since 1993 and loved that life of being in the country surrounded by nothing but landscape.  A few years ago, I revised the poem slightly, turning it into three parts instead of one long poem.  I no longer live on my farm.  I sold the farm house in 2017, a few months after my husband's death.  I still own farm land but now that is an investment rather than a life style.  As I revisited both, I pictured in my mind's eye that sweep of hills up into the sky.  Writing and painting help you remember, and since everything I create is so very personal, I'm glad I have these to bring back that memory of something I loved so much.

About the Painting
The kind of art I want to make is non-objective abstract art, but as I have discovered in my journey to become that kind of artist, it is easier said than done.  I have moved from realism to abstraction to non-objective abstract art in the twenty plus years I have been painting.  This painting which is titled Light Falls on Trees was painted in 2015 or 2016.  I had begun working with Rebecca Crowell, and she was my guide as I began a deeper plunge into abstraction.  My husband had been recently diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and my work during that time period was gestural and forceful.  I look at it now and can see how it reflected my tension and despair as his prognosis became increasingly less hopeful.  Nonetheless, one of the things and artist has to come to terms with is how their work changes.  What I painted then is not how I paint now, but it is still my art and how I came to be where I now am as an artist.

Retreating to a Get-Away Place

Trees crowd the long driveway.
At the opening, the lawn is shaggy,
ragged and a fenced garden 
grows milkweed from one wire side
to the next.  But the little house 
crouched under trees
looks neat. Curtains cover
the blank stare of windows.
A gas grill sits at the edge
of a paved patio, lawn chairs nearby.

Inside the old formica counters gleam 
but the dish drainer is piled
with mismatched dishes.
The refrigerator is new, holding beer and pop,
ketchup, mustard, sweet pickle relish, butter,
peanut butter, salad dressings and
maple syrup and two flavors of ice cream.
Beds are taut and smooth.
Clean towels hang in the bathroom.
Nothing matches and the decor 
harkens back to the sixties.

The ambition carried in with me
is already napping on the screened 
front porch’s daybed, pillows flung down 
on the blue striped cover, waiting for me.
On the flowing river, a boats whines 
its way past. Just before closing my eyes, 
a squirrel chatters from the tall leaning oak.
Before I hear the blue jay’s answer, 
the world loses focus. Leaves are fluttering
everywhere above me, sunlight dancing 
and reflecting shadows on my closing lids.
Tension released I can feel myself let go.

About this poem:  I wrote this poem when the original cabin at my current address on North Shore Drive in Eau Claire stood. I used it as a retreat between family gatherings.  The old place had a rumpled charm.  Many a poem was written there.