Yellow Lady's slipper #100728

The Yellow Lady's Slipper Again

I am still struggling with this.  You probably will not even be able to see how it is different, but I've worked on it for hours and hours since the last send, including today while waiting and waiting at the cardiologist.  I am working on the iPad with my finger and with a "pogo stick".  The iPad art programs are harder to use than Photoshop or Artrage.

If I ever actually decide it is finished, I will say so.  It's sort of like working on a poem or novel, an endless process for me.

Did I mention that all the waiting at the doctor's office made my blood pressure go way up?  Ha ha, even the cardiologist recognized that as a problem.  He he he.  Sent from my iPad

Still in progress

BB has gotten up so we'll go start dinner.  I will work on this later maybe.  Sent from my iPad.

Unfinished iPad sketch

I have a new program on the iPad, sketchbook pro.  It has LAYERS.  I wish it were easier and quicker to open the menus.  I hope to work on this more later.  Sent from my iPad

Galloping Alzheimers!

I painted a picture of a homeless person (self-portrait) and had thend
turned wrong an no arm--I cut out a section of face, blurred it with
smudge and then with a drip spike in Art-rage. It's imperfect, but
better than no arm.

Crosswinds

I painted this at Crosswinds restaurant in Whitehall, but I think I will do some more work on it. Click image to view larger. I did do more work on it.

Counting Sheep

Counting Sheep

 

I force my body to lie still in the bed, tangle it with blankets

to tie it to the dark end of night, close my eyes,

and pretend to sleep, but inside my quiet legs,

my unquiet legs are running, running,

and the tattered moths my of eyes beat and beat

against the cage of my skull.

 

Somewhere, an invisible light keeps calling me,

a light I can't turn off, no matter how many times

I pull its chain.

 

I am as small as an ant.  I am a song in the wind.

Sleep holds its breath and counts and counts,

but there are never enough sheep, never enough

boring stories to fix me in the womb of darkness.

I tumble like a weed, a diaspore. I am an exploding star.

A memory rising from oblivion.  A haunting.

 

 

 

Mary Stebbins Taitt

100608-0220-1st

 

Sunflower painting, in progress

I'm still working on this.

Not Sniping at Sleep

"THE SNIPE HUNT" by Mary Stebbins Taitt (click image to view larger.)

Not Sniping at Sleep

Winged as a curlew, long-beaked as a woodcock,

sleep whistles and dives through the shattered night.

Searching, I scrabble through dark swamps

reeking of marsh gas and fetid with the smells

of rotting fish. My song bursts with yearning,

alternating chipping, burbling and fluting sounds,

like a sparrow held under water. My pleading

tastes like a mesh bag holding raw shrimp and crayfish.

Muddy ooze seeps cold through the knees and hem

of my nightgown, black muck and slime clings

to my fingers and toes. Burdocks and beggars ticks

burrow in my hair. I carry a snare for the snipe of sleep,

but when the bird swoops by and I reach to snag it,

my fingers pass, ethereal, through a taunting fantasia

of feathers, fog and clouds, of unborn sleep that drifts

past, damp, intangible and utterly unattainable.

Snipe dreams tumble by, hauntingly near

but always beyond reach. They refuse to descend

into my wake-parched eyes. I strain

toward the gibbering voices of dream phantoms.

They talk in tongues, whisper and twitter

in unlearned or unknown languages

and their aurora-colored feathers flutter

around my bed, falling like the warm snow

of dreams but never touching my face.

Long snipe beaks tear the night in strips,

shredding it into confettis of longing.

The snipe of sleep will be neither captured

nor kept. It cannot be domesticated.

Elusive, beyond wild, it ranges over

the incalculable waters of night.

It turns bedrooms into swamplands

and sanity into shrieking lunacy.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

A snipe hunt is a wild-goose chase or fool's errand. The term originated from a practical joke where experienced campers convinced inexperienced campers to capture a “snipe,” variously described as a bird or animal. The novice campers were given absurd methods of catching the snipe, such as running through the woods carrying a bag while making odd noises. Real snipes, shorebirds with long bills, are so difficult to catch for even experienced hunters that the word "sniper" originally meant someone skilled enough to shoot a snipe.

I am not a sniper of sleep. OR, on the other hand, maybe that’s exactly what I am! Perhaps I should stop sniping at sleep. Am I on a snipe hunt OR am I a sniper? If I CAPTURE a snipe, I can sleep—if I kill it, I shan’t sleep! This and the previous version at the Rolandale Silk Creek Retreat House in the Hiker Kitty Room. NaPoWriMo (National Poetry month) Instead of writing a new poem every day for National Poetry month, I've been working on the SAME poem over and over every day (pretty much like always.)

I redid both the art and the poetry and the new version can be found at The Smell of Sun (now called "Fool's Errand")

My name is Mary

Hi. My name is Mary. I am eight and a half years old. I want to be
famous. Today I decide to be a famous artist. My Mom lets me use her
paints. I paint a picture of myself. I am looking at a picture my
father took of me, and I am wearing the same green and red bathrobe
over my Pajamas. But you can't see the color in the photo. My
painting doesn't look exactly like me. Mom says it's called "artistic
license."