A New Year

I unloaded the dishwasher.
I loaded the dishwasher.
I changed the table linens and folded the napkins fetched from the dryer:

pattern/fold/pattern/fold/pattern/fold: these napkins are the most colorful fabrics I own.

I broke apart my New Year's bouquet, re-arranging the flowers and greens into smaller glasses on the table. The mums match my tablecloth, the new one.
People say they like it but I think it is too busy and bright and I like my worn blue & white tapestry the best.

Some things that never change.
Those are my favorite things...

I got a letter.
no, it was an email.
no, well...
it felt like a letter. from a friend.

She said I should make things again. She said that I live my life in a way/as a maker, maybe folding the napkins and cooking dinner and moving through the world as I do is enough
and that would be enough for her.

shit.

Overturned my rock and there I am clinging to the moss.

I like the green and soft and wet and cold and dark but it isn't a good hiding place.
Or it's just no good to hide, to try to be something that doesn't change.

Let me introduce myself.

SO FRESH AND GREEN AND CLEAR AND BRIGHT. I took the title for this blog from a scrap of player piano paper. I do a lot of drawing on this paper. It is old, thin, sometimes stained from years kept in a box in a basement. I love this paper. It has holes. Each hole is perfectly placed so that the piano will play a particular sound. Every hole in this paper is music.

The words printed on the paper are the lyrics to a song. They seem backwards unless in their original context. Most of the songs are old, I don't recognize them. I picked the lyrics above, the title of this blog, as the title for a poem I wrote in May 2009:

I have never broken a bone, but I know what it feels like to be a mountain.

In the making: Upward heaves. Crashing plates.
A forcing to the surface of what is underneath.
Bright hot heat and splitting!
Exposure.
Closer to the sun but (for all that effort!) colder- warmed from the ground up, I am high and the air is thinner.

Pushed up and out, things growing in me and on me and maybe there’s some hot stuff boiling just below the surface.

Some of it/me might break loose and fall in streams or crashing boulders…

Cracks and fissures are born of making on my face, hands and arms.
My legs bulge veins of silver below the surface, sometimes the weight makes me want to cut them out.
White streams cascade from my scalp,
My skin is dry and spotted.

Everything is heavy.

My body is eroding!
It is gravity, and the washing of 30 + years of rain,
Some of it I have done myself.

On a good day I stand taller, stretching.
I pull the trees tight around me and feel comfort.

The impending weather, and thus weathering, stands still. The rain stops. I am the biggest thing in the room.

Maybe awkward, still fragile, but radiating.