02 April 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Will Say Sometime Around His Ninetieth Birthday
The newest place on Earth is always wherever a creature has just been born, warming the space around it with fresh exhalations and filling the air with expectations of the future. Where does the promise go as the world ages around the newly born, each moment dissolving into a choice made and a freedom lost like a spent coin? When the energy winds down to a senescent line of minimum motion, is there enough juice left at the end to look back, even for a second, to the beginning, when knowledge was hardly a concept, let alone an unwieldy torment.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
01 April 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says While He's Going Through His Important Papers in Search of His Birth Certificate
Every spring we rolled marbles over melting ice, the sun turning the frozen ground to pudding. We couldn’t wait to start playing baseball so we skidded around on slick grass, scoring runs with mud-caked shoes. Snowbanks shrank slowly, many lingering through April to May. The drip of liberated moisture was a clock’s ticks marking the season’s passage. Sometimes a late snow covered everything with an inch or so of white fluff that disappeared by mid afternoon. The smell of the drying grass on those days made you think of animals coming out of the cave to break their hibernation fast.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
31 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says After Examining the Nested Russian Dolls He Got For His Birthday One Year
Unwrap a dream and you’ll find an egg. Crack the egg and you’ll find a shell. Pry open the shell and you’ll find an ocean. Drain the ocean and you’ll find a thought. Forget the thought and you’ll find a bone. Snap the bone and you’ll find a cell. Penetrate the cell and you’ll find a theory. Disprove the theory and you’ll find a world. Move the world and you’ll find a friend. Betray the friend and you’ll find a heart. Break the heart and you’ll find the center. Move off center and you’ll find the self, wrapped in hope.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
30 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says When People Ask Him For Advice
Go to the Golden Gate Bridge. Pick up one of the distress phones. Talk to the voice on the other end of the line. Tell them you are going to jump. Then hang up and walk away to whatever new life you have planned. People will think you are dead. They won’t know you are just being inconsiderate. You could read your own obituary while glancing behind yourself to see if your old life is still there, with its hooks and wires cutting deep into your neck and shoulder, pulling you back to whatever you thought you needed to escape.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
29 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says When He Visits the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Brown floor. Bleached bone. Yellow stamen. Green stem. Curving petal. Shaded ridge. bursting line. thick light. flowing red. yellow blob. Green sky. Purple cradle. Black star. White tree. Small corner. Green line. Separated lobe. Burst husk. Wavy edge. Smudged blue. Lifted corner. Drooped tent. Spiral cloud. Stretched sky. Octopus tree. Black square. Shining hook. Pastel river. Floating ladder. Tiny apple. Red thorn. Petal delta. Stacked lobe. Rayed hood. Striped pillar. Ragged cape. Twisted apex. Falling dart. Invading cloud. Warm snow. Sad jawbone. Rocking rib. Puddled shell. Blended sky. Broken bone. Fleshy flower. Cleaned socket. Dead calcium. Deep rivulet. Cleaved edge.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
28 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says When People Ask Him to Go Fishing
We never really left the ocean: we took it with us. Its salt taste courses through us even now, a red sea rippled by steady waves, beating against the shores of veins and arteries. The surging lub dubs rocking your head with tiny throbs is the shell on the snail’s back. It’s the briny home that has clung to you since birth and will stay with you even if you leave Earth and voyage to another star, where alien creatures will learn about our planet simply by pricking your finger and analyzing the oozing liquid, beading wet on its tip.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
27 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says When He's On a Road Trip and Sees One of Those Gas Food Lodging Signs
Living the road life: a simple stripped down version of existence marked by basic needs of fuel and grub and shelter, the sound of pavement hum humming under you, a trick of road perception making highway noise into music, soothing wandering minds. Your ultimate ending place does not matter. Boys and girls and men and women, we all crave the road life for the new consciousness where the glyphs of windshield insect splatters define a language based on movement, where the press of rolling wheels—the odometer a time piece clicking over the temporal miles—is haven for stationary exiles.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
26 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Says to the Walls When He Can't Sleep
How did we move from being a body, to owning a body? From I am sick, to I feel sick? When did the secretions of the brain take primacy and allow us to treat our flesh as a suit of clothes we’re stuck with because we lost the receipt and can’t exchange it for another? Who told us souls inhabit bodies? Why do we easily proclaim we are spirits who just want to fly but are burdened by this accreting bloody mess we have to drag around like overstuffed luggage? How do we find grace in our amazing forms again?
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
25 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Often Says When He's Sorting His Recyclables
Peel off oval orchard sticker, the one that says it’s a product of nature. Twist stem three four five times until it snaps off. Hold apple under tap water for a few seconds, giving it a temporary translucent coat. Dry it on a dish towel. Decide you don’t want to eat it after all. Leave it on the table for a few days until it gets too soft for your taste. Throw it out on the front lawn. Watch crows beak-stab it for several days. See it dissolve into the lawn. Turn attention to the banana in the fruit bowl.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
24 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Tells the Trees When He's Walking in the Woods Just Before The First Snow Fall of the Year
Remembering complementary seasons across half a year: anticipating the semi-annual turn and wrapping your neck in wool, watching your breath cloud the air, trudging through the future, following the winter trail. Either way, balanced in the land of crackling leaves and an over abundance of zucchinis, your mind can take you this way or that way but you still end up at the same place: budding green and matted lawns, returning birds and rich dark odor. From autumn’s perspective spring is a foreign land, it might as well be colored splotches in an imaginary atlas of places that never were.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
23 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Tries to Keep Himself From Saying When He is at the Emergency Room
Carrying pop bottles in one of those cardboard slings. Tripping on concrete steps, the kind that turns bottles into shards. Cutting myself on the razor edge of a piece of glass. Looking along my outstretched arm to a white-smocked doctor leaning over my hand. Registering this image as one of my earliest memories. Filling in the above information by inference and domestic detective work. Examining the scar at the base of my finger. Tracing the inch long ridge, pale and thin, punctuated with five short cross ridges, now fading. Never identifying this constellation as a distinguishing mark on immigration documents.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
22 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Might Say at the Unemployment Office
When I was eleven, or maybe it was twelve, somewhere around there, there was this one kid who ridiculed this other kid who said it wasn’t right to keep fish in aquariums because fish come from oceans and lakes where they have plenty of room to swim around and be fish but an aquarium is just a box where they are trapped and the other kid said you don’t think people get trapped, huh? you don’t think getting up and going to work and coming back everyday of your life isn’t a box? you don’t think that isn’t a trap?
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
21 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Has Been Heard to Say On Dark Evenings With the Sewing Basket By His Side
How comforting: the push of needle through cloth, dragging the binding power of two fibrous snakes joined at their heads and knotted at their tails. You cinch the weld with firm punctuating tugs, repeating until the snakes are embedded in the cloth as twin standing waves, then sever their Siamese bond with a cutting slide of tooth on tooth. You shake out the pants, admire the repair, absurdly proud of having maneuvered the serpents into the dense reeds of cross hatched threads. They’ll hold that pose for years, living next to your skin whenever you want to feel their protection.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
20 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Likes to Say While He's Waiting in Line at the Post Office
Check your birth certificate for the date you entered the fray. Most people think it was against their will but we don’t know this for sure. It’s possible we all chose our birth place and time and don’t remember. The long sleep before our debut is imprinted on our bodies but memory is a slippery thing that gets away from you. Sometimes it slides and dissolves. Then the date on your official documents is nothing but the equivalent of the journalist’s five Ws: as meaningless as a birth announcement in the local paper placed by parents you’ve never heard of.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
19 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Likes to Say When He's Feeling a Little Cranky With the World
I’m pretty sure we’re the same species but I don’t feel a kinship with my neighbors. They have reproduced and their offspring are in their obnoxious teenage years, full of pointless bustle and sullen stares. My neighbors keep companion animals that bark constantly and leave calling cards on my lawn. My neighbors sear animal flesh over big bowls of hot coals in their yard. They drink out of aluminum cans and laugh over arcane anecdotes. I’m sure I would be in danger if I got too close so I keep away. I smile and nod when they catch my eye.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
18 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Often Says to Pass the Time
Sand makes a noise: I don’t mean the sliding shimmering rush of thousands of grains slipping through your hands in a shower of streaming whispers. I’m talking about booming dunes thumping across the landscape. I’m telling you that if you put your shoe down on sand with a twisting footprint it will squeak under your foot. Drag a stick through a wet beach of the stuff and you will hear the ocean. Put an hour glass next to your ear and hold your breath long enough to catch the sound of time slipping almost silently into a softly hissing pyramid.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
17 March 2006
The Sort of Thing Claypot Dreamstance Likes to Say When He Has a Few Too Many
Listen: We’re all bits of fire. Sparked in a warm embrace, we flare up out of our mother’s wombs, sputter on the bottom of a gaseous ocean, oxidize the molecules breath by breath, and are replenished by trees that keep us from extinguishing in the emptiness beyond. All the while we burn, our shining flesh coated with auras of heated air. And all that we are, all that we give, is more air. Generated by our combusting blood, pushed out of our simmering lungs across our tepid tongues, to disturb the sea with the fading pressure of heat wave ripples.
Labels: Claypot Dreamstance
