Shapes

I’ve been thinking of lines and spaces lately. Every leafy tree invites me to see it two ways: once as an image of the multitude of greens and branches, then once again in negative, seeing only the jagged splotches of sky between branches and leaves.

There’s one tree especially that I keep noticing for some reason. It draws me toward it every time I pass by it on the road leading northward to our street. It’s an ordinary tree, and I have no cause to notice it. It’s not standing alone, nor is it outwardly unique. It’s just a wide-spreading maple at the top of a small hill near the road. Regardless, something about it has caught my eye repeatedly for well over a week now.

There’s a hayfield next to the tree, and a long greystone wall that holds back the farm beyond and follows the road for miles. So maybe the open space that precedes the tree brings attention to this maple. But there are other maples next to it, behind it, across the street. It is only this maple, with its wide branches, that has captured my thoughts enough to notice it each day, to have it enter one of the bedtime stories I spin for my daughters, to write about it now.

Today I drove past the maple again, and as I approached, it dawned on me that perhaps it’s not the tree itself, but the overall outline of the tree’s shape that interests me. I slowed down and saw the tree in a new way. If one were to follow the top of the tree’s branches--the very points where they meet the sky--one might make a line drawing very much like a dot-to-dot picture that children do in coloring books. This morning I noticed that outline, and I noticed also that it was almost a perfect half circle. That must have some meaning for me. It felt right to recognize it. It was beautiful, round, welcoming--a sheltering arc rising above the field and road.





It took a second look to see it. But something in me must have noticed it right away, and kept calling my attention until I really saw the tree.


Last year I celebrated my 10th anniversary of learning to draw. That sounds too self- congratulatory, so I’ll be more precise. The series of classes I took in 1999 were technically drawing classes, but I wouldn’t say that’s what I found so life-changing about them. Even now I’m not particularly good at sketching, but I absolutely love to do it. There was something life changing, though, in those lessons. I learned to see.

Learning to see? Talk about self-congratulatory. Honestly, though, the world did change for me visually. Everyday things, things that I had lived with or walked past for my entire life--these things suddenly changed. Objects like teapots or screwdrivers, chairs, paving stones, an apple peeler, a pear, a tree--these all shifted from their ordinary selves into lines, and shape, shadows alternating with light. The world undulated with color, and and individual colors broke into strange and exciting combinations. I was practically dizzy with letting my mind re-vise them.

My new perspective distracted and thrilled me for months--I learned all of this while we were living overseas, and it simply added to the exciting, exotic feeling I had of living so far away from home. When we returned to the US, I retained a great deal of my giddiness about “seeing,” but I fell back into a routine and just enough of the magic faded so I could about my life without reeling every time I noticed the color of a glass of milk or the curve of a teacup handle.



In the past few years, I’ve learned a little bit more about how to “see” through a camera’s lens, to recapture an element of what I am noticing in a moment. It’s far from perfect, and I’m not a photographer by any stretch, but some of my photos are good enough for me to enjoy later, and that seems enough for me.

There is a difference to seeing and being seen, and I while I might often have a camera to my eye, I am seldom in front of one. It’s my dread to be tagged in a Facebook photo. I skulk out of view when I see someone swinging a camera around, readying a shot.


I have a disconnect between what I see in the outside world and how I see myself. I look in the mirror, and I think, “Not too bad. Not perfect, but not bad.” I like myself, and for the most part, I like the way I look. However, the scale and my clothing are reminders I need to lose some serious weight, and last month I finally listened. I’m on a good path, and I’ve dropped 6 pounds so far. Again, not bad. I’ve cut sugar from my diet, I’ve been feeling increasingly strong. Most shockingly, I’m actually enjoying working out. I put on my loose(r) pants and head out of the house knowing all of this, wearing my confidence like a must-have accessory.

Last week we visited a goat farm, not too far down the road past the maple tree, in fact. I brought our camera, and got some great pictures of Esme running after (and with) the baby goats. She captured a few for hugs, and so did I. My husband took a photo of me, laughing as I cuddled a soft brown and white kid. I felt a twinge of self-consciousness, then let it go.

I downloaded the photos later that night and discovered, to my disgust, that I still don’t recognize myself.

As fantastic and confident as I might feel, the camera (and everyone else, I presume) sees something different. In fact, people who have known me for only the past 5 years have no other template for Kirie. I’m just that same old chubby mom they see in town (I cringe as I type). I don’t know which is worse--to be only known as the chubby mom, or to be recognized by people from my long-ago life accompanied by a thought like “Hey, didn’t that girl used to be small and cute? What happened?”

I get myself all worked up for nothing, I realize. Do I consider the appearance of my friends? No. These harsh judgements I reserve for myself alone. Honestly, I know that few people even really care a whit about how I look. Oh the vanity.

If one were to look at that photo of me with the goat, to follow the just edges of my clothing--the very points where they meet the sky--one might make a dot-to-dot picture that captures the general shape I fill. It is not a shape I recognize. It is not a shape I claim as my own, obviously.

But like the maple on the hill on North Road, there is something in my outlined and foreign shape, something hidden, something special waiting to be seen. There is more to me than what I must appear to be on the outside.

I am in that in-between time of fat and fit. I am embracing the ambiguity as much as I can, feeling the dissonance of feeling healthy but looking heavy. In equal parts I hate and love this sensation of being in flux. I hate this time, knowing my new feelings are hidden. And I love this time, feeling silently willful, knowing that I can make the changes happen, regardless of how I’m perceived or not. It’s as though I have a secret engagement--one to myself--an engagement that only I and a few people know about. I’ll reveal this new relationship with myself eventually, I know, and I will celebrate.

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Lines in my head, part 2 of a series

More lines to inspire, to haunt. These glow like embers in my mind.


"You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me."
from "The Cinnamon Peeler," Michael Ondaatje, from The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems


"The word spills from my tongue, not scientific: Genes,
folksy and proud, like they’re crops grown on family land."
from The Storialist
"Monday, October 6th, On the Street, Mr. Pinguet, Paris."

"The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls."
from "To Be of Use," by Marge Piercy, from Circles on the Water

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying."
from "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," Robert Herrick

"The sea is so beautiful,
she is so young and old.
I look at her and
I see the beauty
of the light of music."
from "You are Everything," REM, from the album Green

And, to serve a different sort of gluttony:

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."
from "Eating Poetry," Mark Strand in Selected Poems

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Lines that haunt me, part 1 of a series

Halloween is over, but I've got hauntings on my mind. 

I'm not haunted by ghosts, though.  I'm haunted by words.   Coming from songs, poems, mentors, supporters, and the occasional enemy, certain phrases linger in my mind and visit me at unexpected times.  Sometimes they are malicious, but more often they are welcome friends.   Inciting me to action, rebuking my insecurities, reminding me of time's quick clock, these lines have a great influence on me.   If one were to look at all the lines that run on a loop through my thoughts, one might even be able to do a little head-shrinking on me.  

I was talking about this with a friend the other day, and she confessed to having a particular verse stuck in her head, too.  I imagine we all have sayings that rattle around in our minds, and I'm inviting you to share yours as well.   

Because I seem to have a little collection of these, I'm going to start a series of posts on this theme.  Here are a few of the lines currently coming to call on me lately.

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

from "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Dylan Thomas

"Because the  Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast, and ah! bright wings."

from "God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I hear the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me."

from "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot

"I would like to be the air

that inhabits you for a moment

only. I would like to be that unnoticed

and that necessary."

from "Variations on the Word Sleep," Margaret Atwood

"And as for the me that was then, well,

she 

is lost at the bottom of the oily lake,

waiting

(for now)

for a tide."

from "Doppelganger" 

"It's so easy to laugh; it's so easy to hate.

It takes strength to be gentle and kind."

from "I Know It's Over," The Smiths

"We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

from "The Waking," Theodore Roethke

"Keep going, Kirie.  Keep going."  Alan Friedman, a mentor, and author of Hermaphrodeity

"Here is little faith and the turn of the wheel.

Here is the promise to unmask mountains

and see woodlight and this tender portion

of hands gathering love and dreams."

from "Liberation," Dana Thu

"....And yet sometimes

The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty

Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear

Water, cold so cold! you cup your hands

And gulp from them the dailiness of life."

from "Well Water," Randall Jarrell.

Okay, now it's your turn.  What lines haunt you?  

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