Tuesday, September 30, 2014

64 x 53 (Days Like This)



Too many angles. Too much spin.
Too many forests to get lost in.
Too much noise and not enough rhyme.
Way too many questions and not enough time.

Where did the brush go? Where is the glue?
What's with all the acorns?  What can I do
To get back to the way that it was at the start
Before it unraveled and fell apart?

Process Reflection: This one wrote itself, and in a hurry. The first two sentences just came into my head. I had just come up from the workshop where I had glued up and varnished a frame I had attempted to make out of koa wood, and decided, unwisely, to go ahead and clamp in the wood collage that was to go into the frame and let the whole thing all dry at once. The pressure of the clamps broke the bonds on the frame, and the whole thing came apart into pieces, each piece coated with wet varnish and/or wet glue. A godawful mess. Managed to get the pieces separated, re-organized and reasonably set up to dry, and will have to try again tomorrow to finish it off. Lesson learned: I'll take it one step at a time. 

Once there, the first two sentences basically framed everything that followed: four beat lines, rhyming couplets, even the stanza form seemed given rather than chosen. So while the piece does have a kind of thematic mama-said-there'd-be-days-like-this orientation, it is also, in this case, pretty much literal, even the line about the acorns, which may seem a little random (which is one of the things I like about it: I sometimes see myself as an advocate of randomicity), but I've been noticing every time I walk around back to the workshop that I'm knee deep in acorns, and I've been wondering about that. The oaks seem to be overcompensating this year. Maybe they know something we don't? 




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