This is the image I made for my little poem “Picking Apples in the Dark”. The words are about the conclusion to the growing season in Klamath Falls. The only harvest left is my annual murder of a Christmas tree or five on Thanksgiving weekend. It is a father/daughter tradition.
It was the last picture I took on Sunday evening in my effort to squeeze every opportunity for unusedfun out of the unfolding potential. Even the brightest Autumn days end cold and quickly. I came to realize that picking apples in air below 45 degrees means that the fruit is also cold.
My hands were getting pretty stiff. Enough is enough.
Ideas come quick in the race to the end of the year. Plenty to think about, but no light to build in. Mornings will be cold until March now. Maybe it will get cold enough for me to make a 3-D ice skating rink in a lap around my property. Just run the hose on a long tarp and build it in sections. Seems doable. 10 feet of vertical change to deal with, but the runs can be long to deal with that problem. Minimum 150 feet.
Last night’s ice making experiment went pretty well. My estimate of two days to evaporate and melt the mound might be accurate. The evaporation and melting on top has stopped for today, but it is probably melting on the bottom because the ground is not frozen yet. I guess we will find out tomorrow morning with the dawn photo session.
At least dawn comes at a reasonable hour these days. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really care what time it is, but I feel less tense making coffee knowing that my wife won’t be woken up by clumsy me. It takes a few minutes for my body to move properly when I get up.
Something I do more in the dark season is drop poem seeds.
They fall out of my brain like nuggets of dark matter or a Russian nesting doll. Very dense, and then the challenge is to unpack and spread it thin enough to form a phantasmagoria that actual humans can relate to.
Here is an example of a poem seed I wrote in 1993. I was young and new to empathy. I was deeply unenlightened–bordering on retarded spiritually when I experienced the feeling of love for the first time in my life.
And I don’t mean like I fell in love or something.
I thought I fell in love, but I didn’t. I was confusing actually having an emotion of love (like you might have for your parents or friend or someone you care about–empathy, joy), with what I later found to be a true soul connection with another. I probably would not have found the latter without the former.
Anyhow, until August 3, 1993 I only knew the emotions of fear and frustration. I functioned OK and I always abhorred violence and tension. I was always well intended.
I just never knew what it felt like to love or be loved. I did not love myself on any level.
So this poem seed is about the moment when my consciousness changed. It later became a long poem that was pretty frustrated, and I kind of regret writing, but at the time it is how the idea flowed. As I said, I was confusing this new feeling of simple love, coupled with sex, as actual “soul to soul mate” love. Completeness.
(first scribbled in a notebook margin Dec. 1993)
Her in I in
Her voice sinks in sinking light
Her shape shining soul
Throws significance prisms
At Madrone sunset skin
The color of gravity
Shines from your face
The time of my life
was inside you was in me too
For a week with you
Sometimes a poem seed comes to me and I have no language to describe what is in my mind. Sometimes I just don’t know where to take a compelling line. Occasionally I will change my mind about the strength of my motivations and just shelve a poem I have pages written for.
I have one about Nevada that opens with one of the strongest first lines I have ever come out the gate with. Four pages in it reads like a Johnny Cash song. It starts:
“Maid to be a whore
Nevada, you are hallowed ground…”
From there I ramble on about how haunted I am by that part of the American West, and how disgustingly mistreated this beautiful land is.
I started it in 2004, and I was a whole different person then. I wonder how I would write it now if I was driving across Nevada as I used to do with relative frequency. Hopefully I would be more thoughtful and optimistic.
Idea seeds are ephemeral. Sometimes I simply forget them because they come on a bike ride and I don’t feel like stopping to take notes. Other times I start to explore and decide that development is wasted effort.
Shelf the seed–maybe it works in another context.
Recently my seeds are all little projects. With luck they are manageable and with a few major hurdles complete going into Winter, I have a positive outlook on the coming season of indoor artistic production.
Some seeds grow easiest in the dark.
Write every day–it doesn’t have to be good.
Peace.
