fromthemouthofmoi

If You Knew Ellen Bass What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned agai...

I feel a level of panic. None of this feels psychotic but what I am going to write may sound psychotic. I just feel shaken, but I feel safe. The panic I think, just hear me out, is that I am dying. That I am preparing to go. Stay with me on this... Back in the late 70's I met a man in New York City whom I shall refer to here as, C. He was visiting from Denmark. We met on a subway platform headed downtown. He approached me to ask for directions and it just so happened that where he wanted to go, I was going too. I was on my way to a party on the Lower East Side but I did not tell him this as I didn't want him to think I was inviting him. I took him to Phoebe’s, a restaurant/bar around the corner from the party to talk with him further. During the conversation, he drew a picture of me and we continued to enjoy one another just spending time talking. At one point I excused myself from the table and went to call the hosts of the party, The McKenna’s, to ask if I might invite...

I have made many quilts in my life. I learned to quilt in Westchester, when I lived in Crompond, New York, just outside of Poughkeepsie. I quilt when I love. In 1997 I made my first quilt for Ericle. That quilt, when I still had a beautiful oak quilting frame, took me over a year to complete. Piecing fabric is actually the easy part. It is the quilting, the hand sewn designs that bind three layers together, which takes the most time. I will not tell you that I am a great quilter at all, but that quilt was asked to be exhibited in the local library for an exhibition of local quilters. The public enjoyed it before Ericle did.  The pattern I used was, Jacob's Ladder Crisscross. Quilts are constructed of squares for the most part and Jacob's Ladder Crisscross constantly fooled my eye, (as well as everyone else), because it is very difficult to see where the square is for that pattern. In the photograph below, I've highlighted the square which gets repeated, because otherwise ...

Years before my dad died I asked him what kind of funeral did he wish to have. He said he wanted to be buried in a pine box. When he died, we got a pine box and had it delivered to the funeral home. It was the kind you had to assemble yourself, and we, all of his children, assembled it together. I noticed that the funeral director looked horrified and upset. He looked so distraught that I pulled him aside and asked him if this was normal in his eyes. He emphatically said: No.  I asked him what other people did -- this being my first funeral where details were on me, -- and asked him to show me what was normally done. He took me to a room filled with caskets that startled me. I felt like I was suddenly in a car showroom being told to step inside the Bentley I hadn't come to buy. None of the caskets were designed for the person expected to go into them. There was no casket for the life spent singing or dancing, painting or reading. Not one casket seemed suitable for those that h...

The last time I saw Jimmy he was a non-functioning human being. I stood in the doorway to his room after knocking, and opened the door a crack to relay some piece of insignificant information to him. In the 20 seconds the door remained cracked open I could see him in a fetal position on his bed, fully clothed on sheets that looked so dirty that I wondered how white sheets could be so black. I also saw that he had three TV trays lined up, with clean white towels spread across them, and an array of peyote buttons lined up on top, drying according to size. That was back in the 80's. Jimmy was gorgeous. You never saw a more handsome man. He had pale white skin, jet black shoulder-length hair, and the bluest eyes you ever saw. If he had a bit of facial stubble one might even say he sort of resembled Colin Farrell. He walked with a shuffle however claiming he had arthritis in his knees which I don't doubt he did. His teeth were yellow, -the colour of mustard- but they were as strai...

To those of you that read this blog I just wanted you to know that I am busy with other projects just now. This blog is not defunct, it's just laying low.

Then I was much younger than you I still had not learned to manage my hands Fingers were shoved into pockets Endlessly picking away at things My feet were both left My lust got caught in the headlights