drowning

in the past week

i took a boat out to see whales. three humpbacks breached to eye us with strange affection, and fin whales rolled in the brine long as sea serpents. it's surreal to think that this churning life is happening just past your scope of vision on the shore. these are real whales, and they come out to feed every day, and they know things. secrets. 

i saw fleetwood mac and cried a little during 'sara' and was amazed that i could be buoyed along by music to the extent that i was able to handle a stadium show. it rained on us as we left and i had to lift up my long black dress to and scurry to the car.

the sea took a friend of my parents. we spoke to her in the morning, and that evening she was pulled under

i read once that the ocean keeps count. 

it is made up like our blood, or more accurately, our blood mimics it, and like gets thirsty for like. 

maybe whales are psychopomps. i believe in whales.

letting the brythonic out

itinerary.
tiny white candles
mead, apples, cereals, vanilla, milk
breadbaking
gentle balmy rain outside
fire
holy wells
feasting
getting rowdy with the record player
mussorgsky

drifting west until it's east

my mind has been drifting west, westerly, westernmost, to hawaii and then japan. both places that were important to my grandparents. i'm looking at the lilies kept on top of the refrigerator because it's the cat's fondest wish to eat them, looking outside at the late-april snow (snow!), feeling the harp notes coming from the turntable plucking up white-hot shocks of wanderlust in the soles of my feet. each an icy, platinum pricking that wants me to move, move, move.
i miss my grandparents. maybe i can be nearer to them by moving farther away from their ashes.

my head has been heavy with indecision, self-chastisement and indirection. god, this has been such a sad blog, hasn't it? i never intended that. in reality i'm dreaming of the buddhist temple i saw when i was nine years old, tucked into the side of a slumbering volcano, deserted at the time but for resident peacocks and smoldering incense. yesterday i baked banana bread based on julia's recipe, the dense freckled tiny loaves that you can buy after a steep treck up to her little lime-green treehouse.

japan, i've never visited. my mother spent her early childhood there, and it's been a dream of mine to go, for many years now, somehow intangible and surreal. the number of people i discuss travel with, who tell me that it's 'not really that hard'? that there's 'literally nothing stopping [me]?'...must have caves full of gold coins. but i'll get there. i will. someday.

hopefully i'll be leaving for england again fairly soon to stand with the stones and see dear faces. iceland must happen. japan. these thoughts propel me.

only vaguely related

writing prompt courtesy of The Chiaroscuro Sepulchre.

visit cale's photos, they are good.

last week i found myself impatiently circling the assyrian wing of the museum Back Home. a jazz ensemble had inexplicably set up in the room housing my favorite lamassu, genii, worship figures. i stood with one foot in the roman empire and, for a classics scholar, showed very little interest (or so my traveling companion tells me) in the blank staring busts and sarcophagi. eventually we retreated hoping that the musicians and their odd assembly would vacate before closing time. i wept and remembered babylon, sniffle. my hair was in sloppy buns, my hands jammed into the pockets of a ragged hoodie, my face a little blotchy, mood generally pleasant. tired.

we parted ways in the romanesque, my partner eyeballing misplaced madonna's breasts, and i shuffled on through the cloisters that were so well loved and familiar to me that i dreamt mostly of cherry pie between the brief pauses when i stared through a haze of tears at the tender flesh tones, emeralds, ceruleans, and scarlets, st. jeromes, fantastical landscapes, anthonys tortured by dewy thighs and dopey beasts. and everywhere, god god god. baleful statues and sad-sack tower-imprisoned barbaras. the late medieval always strikes me with a kind of ineffectual emotional blackmail, lurid and frustrated like the gross summertime backyard tricks that boys perform for their friends or spring on their enemies, depending. watch me flip my eyelids inside out. all the surprising stunts discovered in front of bathroom mirrors while grounded, that betray tiny windows into viscera and gutmeat. 

but i love you, medieval, and even you, static and classically confused renaissance. even your plaster saints. on a good day, even you, religious baroque, and especially you, mannerism. 

i never did get to visit, this time around, those indifferent and fearsome genii. what i did was put my name on a small framed psalter page while cleaning out my grandmother's house. my dad swung into the room, announcing to no one in particular that this psalter page, maybe the most valuable thing in the house, was unclaimed. his voice rose and my companion says, is he drunk, and i say no, hypoglycemic. i say loudly, i've taken it. i want it. the medieval followed me from february into march.  i still wish i were eating pie. 

all books, persian jewelry, listening to french movies while i clean, georgian rings, grey, big sweaters, oriental rugs, boots, rain, cello, bagpipes, bass viol, chamber music, post punk and new wave, wagner god help me, blackened wood new england houses with warped windows, going to the cinema, cafe miels, ballet, vinegar, jolly suppers, enthusiasm, museums, leaving the country, ceramics, crop circles, tea, walking, ghosts, sci fi, horror, monsters, any history well written, 90s MTV, grunge, documentaries, the bering strait, london, bloody marys, the civil war, bicycling, black, bonfires, orchards, wagashi, smoothies, edward gorey, the moon, egypt, 1970s new york city, baths that reach my chin, surprise parcels, pilot G2 pens, nightgowns, the faroe islands, water horses, wild hair, sumerian art, bruges, abstract tattoos, vinyl records, animal life, waking up slowly, pretty packaging, down comforters, knitting, being held, road trips, rice, patchouli, lavender, regency hellfire clubs, my grandmother's house, flemish painting, cartoons, rubbing sore muscles, snapshots, kansas city, healing, farms, beeswax candles, serpent and ram motifs, cathedrals, standing stones, holiday nights, thrift stores, sleigh beds, dead languages, pizza, small concerts, hidden shops, going to breakfast, quilts, grooming, horseback riding, english gardens, learning, clouds, swimming in warm water, moonstones, tudor buildings in the snow, orreries, vintage/antique dresses, handmedowns, flowers, arabic, hot springs, maps, stones, tea, urns.

"we belong dead."

i've been slathering my face in all manner of masks which are strangely comforting like a weighted blanket, an extra skin that keeps me moist and breathing like a salamander. and i pretend to be the bride of frankenstein!

now my hair is in rags, to curl. it's too long now for even its natural curl so i'm helping. when rag curls go wrong in other people's esteem is when they're just right for me. wild, different sizes, standing out at all angles.

i'm watching 'creation', the beautiful film about charles darwin. there has been loss upon loss lately in my family and it has me reflecting more than usual on the brutality and chaos of life and all that we can't control. swirling green paramecia under microscopes and finches upon finches upon finches and pigeons' bones boiling to cleanness, and even a female orangutan dressed in bloomers to be made presentable to decent english folk who'd never seen one before. ridiculous dada circus, meaningless biology.

i write about grief a lot, different kinds, but maybe...all tiresome? sorry to be so dull. after this entry will be a list of things i like.

tomorrow we brave the ice to visit my family now that i have no time and everything but time. it will be good to be home, i think, and strange. families reduced by three people suddenly. all things arise eventually and as much as it hurts, there's no injustice in losing someone you've had the privilege of knowing for so many years, them passing through old age as you grow up. so the hurt will pass.

escape escape

most image sources available at my tumblr.