In the wee hours, before the light, after the dark has long
since settled, when the couch feels alone and cold, I read and the light is too
bright from a screen but my own ideas are too dark to leave in focus
So I let my legs chill themselves into the cold colorless
leather and read about women in a dust storm who don’t know their husbands are
testing an Atom bomb.
When I think I can sleep, I creep back to my bed. Let myself
fall further into a new mattress, the luxury of life sinking into my hips. It
is hours before the children will climb on top of me and compete for my kisses
and I will fold them into me, one tucked into each arm and me smiling and
kissing with stale breath they don’t yet complain about. But not yet,
Now I lay there thinking of the blank of the page. The false
whiteness of bleach and the way it hides the fibers of reality. The way I’d
like a pen to cut into those fibers, slice right in, into the depth where you
can see layers. Then for my pen to morph into microscope so I could tease out the
idea fibers, dark and hidden within and under the bleached page. Why is off-white
unacceptable to my printer? Why does it look strange as a document. My shirts
are never that color. I don’t bleach reality out of our lives. I hide in the fibers,
and look for the strains of dark. Soap gets all the cleaner life needs to be.
My husband and I talked about what art is. This is one of my
favorite topics, art. I used to cringe at the association of writing with art.
Art is out of my league. I’m not good enough, talented enough, cool enough to
sit with the adult artists on the cool grass, a broken picnic table bench,
splinters and sunburns our companions. The artists and I were once not conforming
enough to sit at the cool blue Formica bench tables in the high school
cafeteria. We dropped out, didn’t we? I guess I didn’t. I went on to college
and so did they, but still, we’re still not at the same table. Weren’t then,
aren’t now. But nod to each other in halls.
These days, I’m less skittish of the idea of art as words. I
don’t make that cut yet, but I know the Haven Kimmels and the Barbara
Kingsolvers and the Isabel Allendes are in the cool club, the cool grass, the
cool breeze is between their toes, it comes through their pens, taps out in
keystrokes with a rhythm and cadence of clacking, dancing fingers.
And what makes an artist then? My husband says the
difference between enjoying a medium (songpaintingsculpturewriting) and it
being art is in the darkness. Art doesn’t give into the darkness all the time
but neither does it shy away from its realities. It’s not bleached.
It’s selective. It can seek to draw out the light but it
does not bleach it out, does not seek to erase it, more to sun itself on a
picnic bench. The songs of Michael Franti make me think of this. How we can
make something wonderful that calls us all to be in light and let the sun burn
the love onto our skin. Or it can be just another dance song, poppy, pixy-twit
sweet and light. We like it. We down the sugar, but it’s bleached out white
sugar. Not the rawness with browns and grays mixed into off-white.
