In the Early Morning
Vertical trunks of nightstand in snow all around the mound where we saw the fox go.
It is two years past the Thanksgiving when my mother laid on a hospital bed, both thin as staves.
We had a party the night before wine and orchids- singing and mourning lifting the bare room's coma.
Teaching at the Women's Prison
I didn't know what to expect. It took some effort to be able to become a volunteer, and I was refused the Kentucky grant I had applied for. The first step was to get cleared by security. The last time I had a security check I was refused entrance to the White House – in spite of having an appointment with the Correspondence Secretary for Cheney- so I was a bit apprehensive.
Once I passed security I was enrolled in a mandatory training program for anyone teaching at the prison.
Before Dawn
I. Before dawn this morning the last firefly of summer sails by the window like a star.
II.
This morning before dawn before trash trucks or lawnmowers- before birdsong; the last firefly of summer soars by the window
Art classes at the Women's Prison
This morning I am up early, I need to be at the Women's Prison by 7:30 with my approved list of supplies for the students, ready to go through all the locked gates. The women are beginning to tell me more stories- about their families, what they lost, and what brought them to prison. There are women that test at the fourth grade level and there are college graduates. When I arrived for my weekly visit, Cathy arrived a few minutes late to class. She had just emerged from "Medline" and could hardly keep her head up. "Will you tell us a story?" she asked. I have been telling them tales of women who have lost everything- like Psyche, just after she was abandoned by Eros and fell hundreds of feet, alone, into an unknown country. To find her way back she had to perform four impossible tasks. I tell them, in the stories the tasks are impossible because that is just how it feels when we find ourselves in an untenable human predicament. There doesn't seem to be any way out. How do we find the willingness to go inward for answers that have nothing to do with logic? How do we know what we need to take with us? How can the struggle we find ourselves in, the loss, lead us closer to who we are, to what we are here to do?
Artist statement for painting exhibit at Swanson Contemporary Gallery
Painting is like poetry, an attempt to say what cannot be said.
I wish to communicate moments of fluidity between this world and the world of dreams. I want to share the sense of confirmation that happens when a dream steps right through the daytime door.