What we love stays
with us, sometimes.
The road slick with rain and
borrowed light. The machine of
the city turned quiet as feathers.
He walks wet with courage,
by turns incandescent
and dark. Two floors above,
a window flares on.
He could look up. He could.
This has always been
our story: the resolution
farther than we can yearn,
still damp from our hands,
fraying into the night.
Noodler’s Baystate Blue stains skin, sinks, pens, everything. I was foolhardy and loaded it into one of my Danitrios, and now I have very subtle spots of blue on once-pristine beige lacquer. Let’s just call them spots of honor - I have used Baystate Blue and survived.
Waterman’s Florida Blue is brilliant wet, but dries buttoned-up and somber. The path gives me more pleasure than the view. Diamine China Blue whispers. Caran d’Ache Blue Sky is only pretty.
Baystate Blue is unapologetically, drunkenly blue, and that is why I keep on using it even if I can’t wash it off my hands. I miss chocolate. If I dance on a barstool, I will fall and break a hip. Our new visualizer told me I remind her of her mom. Surely there is some wickedness left in these bones. If I find more in an ink bottle, or in the lyrics of a song by The National, then that’s the way it goes.
What’s a girl to do? There are too many plugins to play with and not enough brain cells to understand them all. Massive props to Matt Jacob for developing a Wordpress.org plugin that plays nice with Ping.fm. I have been waiting for this for months.
Birthday Letters came out in 1998, and peculiarly for a book of poetry, became a bestseller. Ted Hughes left his wife, Sylvia Plath, and their two children, after 7 years of marriage. She killed herself months after. A legacy for a mother: it strikes me as a pitiful trade, like thorns for blood, fish bones for bile. But what her children lost, many women years and years afterward gained. I remember dusting off The Bell Jar in the Ateneo library and skipping class to read it in the aisle. I could not bear to read it on the same table as the others cramming for accounting finals.
“I look up–as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story.”
Poetry transcends biography. The tightrope that Ted Hughes walks is not kind, or forgiving. That he clawed such beauty from under the ground - I must not read too much of it on a Tuesday morning, when the world is urgent unto the most trifling details, when I cannot afford to lose sight of the daily words for the words that might live beyond the day.
I am fascinated by the Noodler’s line of inks because I never thought the bottled ink market could be segmented even further, small as it already is. Within the line, there are inks that highlight, appear only under black light, and prevent forgery.
Noodler’s X-Feather is for those who write on cheap paper - where ink normally feathers and spreads itself into unintelligibility. It’s ideal for the confident crossword puzzle solver and the restaurant napkin idea doodler. It has a very long drying time, and low paper penetration (meaning most of it sits atop the fibers).
The very properties that make X-Feather potentially irritating in normal use (a longer drying time means more chances of smudging, for example) do make it one hell of a drawing ink. I discovered this while in the throes of work-related angst.
A spatter stays a spatter, hairlines don’t drift, fills seep to the edge of a line and stay there. I use a glass-nibbed fountain pen, a crescent filler; in the middle of a stroke I press the crescent to release more ink. The longer drying time means I can still blow on a blot to make it spread, even minutes after the ink hits paper.
Paddy McAloon, take a bow. I now can’t stop listening to Life of Surprises. As with many things, I don’t know why. “Never say you’re bitter, Jack/Bitter makes the worst things come back.”
A Life of Surprises, the album, collects many of Prefab Sprout’s best songs, from Two Wheels Good to Andromeda Heights. On several songs, the production did date; on many, however, the songwriting triumphed over the synthesizers.
On a related note, it was only Charles, an old officemate, who recognized the origin of my Facebook status message: “Never let your conscience be harmful to your health.” I might change it to “Where’s Me Jumper” tomorrow. Or maybe not.
I ask, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “not out of sorrow, but wonder.” My old hand drew familiar lines: hairlines, tightly spaced, scrolled at the ends. It paralleled how I like to approach the world, gentle and controlled.
This hand is a stranger in a bar, offering to buy me a drink, and at first I am tempted to refuse, but accept out of curiosity. Curiosity gets me into trouble. Trouble, it seems, gets me into that part of my brain that usually minds its own business and gets along quite well without my superego handing out orders as if it really knows what’s going on.
This hand dislikes planning. It prefers accidents of ink.
I think this atm’s customers are poor shots. Or blind to blue. I myself am quite used to missing the obvious.
Chasing the morning
I always lose. Passing buses
sigh smoke and strangers hunching
forward, each into his own day.
With the dust, a face settles into my eyes.
He is a painting
in a traveling frame, one that will never
stand still before me, but will find me
when I am ready.
Anger, I had not known
you could be white.
You are a line on my lip,
a ripple of knuckle.
You have never visited me
this silently.
I had forgotten you liked
the rims of my eyes.
I would walk with you tonight.
We have much to talk about,
and do not need the moon to see by.
