Notes to Myself

Yesterday I found this box in the studio…while searching for something else.

I’d forgotten about this series of collages I made sometime in the last decade…using old photos and other bits and bobs.

I called them “Notes to Myself” and I still understand what I was telling me and they delighted me, as old work often does. They are numbered, some have titles, several have poems on the back that I wrote two decades ago. No reason to post them here except I want to. I don’t have much to say about them.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8 “No Place Like Home”

#9

#10

#11

#12

I bought a red tool box

over at Ace Hardware for hauling paint.

It began to seem

like a magic box this fall

‘when I wasn’t painting.

Painting began to seem

like a magic act

I could hardly remember,

this past September.

Today I imagine that doing nothing

is really doing something

in the back of an empty brain.

1-14-05

You can’t draw a sound.

No poem captures any

of the crows, the gulls,

the lapping bay curling in your ears

and boom ocean boom.

The danger sign says

warning sneaker waves,

deep water and strong currents.

Drift logs roll in the surf.

Incoming tides isolate rocks and headlands

from the shore.

Sometime in 2000

The farthest place

I could imagine

was Chicago, the city.

Eighteen miles

was not enough to save us

from the bombs, I thought,

a little, damp, summer girl

in my suburban bed.

The fireflies snapped off and on

out beyond the screen.

The new house dirt hills,

drainage ditch snow piles,

weren’t mean streets.

Riding a bike

behind the mosquito truck

wasn’t heroin.

Pete Pete Pete Pete Peterson

wasn’t the Candyman.

April, 2004

With you it’s hard to know

the most tender part.

Two spoons positioned

just so on the counter

seem like a large bouquet of flowers

arriving quietly on a regular day.

5-30-03