Nose beans and other foolishness

My father's mother spent a lot of time worrying when Dad was a toddler. The house where Dad was born was a sawmill in the early 1800s. It sat right next to a waterfall that thundered over a dam in the springtime. Beneath the falls was a fast stream which ran only about eight feet from the house, right outside of the kitchen door.

Grandma worried a lot about the possibility of my father falling off the dam onto the stones below or about his drowning in the millpond or the stream. I guess she needn't have worried. My father was busy exploring the cupboards and sticking kidney beans up his nose.

Who would've thought it? He was mostly normal in all other respects. My father claimed one particular bean was struck there for a couple weeks. He couldn't get it out and couldn't tell anyone because he was only three and didn't say much in those days.

After a while, his nose began to swell.

"There's a bean up there, Mrs. Walker," the doctor told my Grandmother gravely, "and the things begun to sprout.'' According to family folk tales, Dad was then subjected to an undignified ritual involving fiendishly long and torturous tweezers.

Yuck.

Now why would a boy put a bean up his nose? I asked Dad that very question once. ``Why did they climb Mount Everest?'' he asked indignantly, looking a little insulted that I had asked.

After that he thought it was only fair to raise another question: At the same tender age of three, why had I put all those roofing nails into the toaster while it was toasting, which sent a shower of sparks into the air and blew a fuse?

``DNA,'' I said grinning a suspiciously similar grin.  Other than that, I have no answer to this question.

NOTE: the photograph is Dad, standing in kitchen door of the house on Saw Mill Hill. Quite some time after my grandparents left, it became the summer house of. Author and tv writer Arthur Arent of New York City .  More recently  newscaster Morton Dean owned it.

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getting a head

This is a picture of another sculpture, a self-portrait I made in Shundi's class at Wooster. At the time I originally posted this on my Gallery blog (which I am slowly merging with this one) this head sat on my desk at the Redding Pilot where it reportedly "creeped out" my fellow reporter Maggie Caldwell (who is now the editor of the Easton Courior). She refered to it as my 'death mask.' Hope not

The picture was taken at my old New Milford apartment, on the third floor. The pattern visible above the head, is formed by white lines in the parking lot below. This photo was featured on the splash page of old version of The Metaphoratorium.

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Gould's* Contingency (from Inverse Origami)

Just questions, and like Damocles,
the point is over our heads, spinning
like roulette, wedges of color and number blur,
when the odds favor the house and its hordes.

Dalmatian cubes tumble in twos
Old Snake "I"s writhing-down,
the double helix hissing "There's a world
outside this garden, aren't you curious?"

Clever Snake Integral, the atomic wait
of putty sings in your "I"s.
Give us the rest of the apple and a helmet
before the next twist in the chain.

---

- Feb. 16, 1996 ...
* Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist

Custom digital drawing by the poet, and the poem, appeared on page 8 of Inverse Origami

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

POEM: Tattoo Me (from Inverse Origami)

Went to the parlor.
Studied steel needles under neon.
Shaved my head
and the burly guy began to make
tiny holes into which he injected
three and a half gallons of windshield washer fluid
so I could see what was already tattooed there.

Look! The internet directory
lawn clippings from Walt Whitman
the TV GUIDE
the golden rule
ma's one hundred thirteen
favorite rules of thumb
the law of the jungle
the Khama Sutra
the Windows help index!
(Boy have I got a headache.)

I expected roses
but here I am in a downpour
waving a torn baggie
which only moments ago
encircled a half-pint of blue fluid and a goldfish.

Suddenly my blond mopís matted, slippery
the world, a fish-eye-hubcap reflection.
And I am only beginning to breath/see/hear.

When I complained about the mess
the burly guy
pointed to a disclaimer on the wall
noting that birth may involve screaming
and that the midwife may NOT cut the curls of self-reflexive cord
which loop back for generations
through thickets of abandoned fishbowls.

This act you must own for yourself.
For this act, you own your self
For stealing fire you get to lay on the mountain
and offer up your liver daily at dawn

Each night in fecund darkness
you grow another.

---

- Mar (Mistryel Walker
pg 12 & 13 Inverse Origami, the art of unfolding 1998, Out-of-the-Mist Press

this poem was also published in the original print version of the CT Poet Newsletter

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

POEM: Busybody (from Inverse Origami)

Poems curl to a pointlike skunk cabbage in the mind

pungent purple and green verse,

smooth lines speckled with rhyme.

Poets dawdle

over jack-in-the-pulpit in deep shade

assist the variegated wood snipe

in its wordy den.

We poke at the blood root,

saucy ramps and sticky milkweed

and snoop (just a little)

in the fungi of ambitious men.

We note the lichen creeping over ideology

as the ferns uncurl

and the spores fly without apology.

We watch the turkey vultures lurk,

count crows at the roadkill tent

of social-jurisprudence, chaos

and manís manipulative bent.

Oh yes,

we watch the world like poets:

meadow-lulling, rhyming nags

content to meter out the observations

to which these nosy lines are lent.

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998

Poetry poster based on a sculpture

This post was originally made on my Gallery blog on 2/3/07:


A few years ago, I took a sculpture class from the eccentric artist Alex Shundi at the Wooster Community Art Center.

The sculpture to the left was my project or one of my projects in class, and was done from a live model. On the right  is a poster for the Wednesday Night Poetry Series created entirely in Painter Essentials 3 from this same photo of the sculpture. The poster is really a digital collage. The materials are the WNPS logo (the chair) photos of the poet and his various books, etc. A lot of changes were obviously made to the photo. After arranging the collage materials, I did a bit of drawing over them to create the over all effect.

This is the first poster in that series that was created entirely by digital means. Early posters were a long series of hand-glued collage, drawing, then scanning printing, drawing more with digital effects also applied. The poster was for a reading (several years ago) by poet Charles Rafferty at the Wednesday Night Poetry Series.
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Valentine Postmortem

 My odd little marriage began strangely - on Halloween. So, why I did I marry my future "ex" on Halloween? You may be wondering, or not in a million years wondering...

"Hey -- do you want to get married on Halloween?" my ex said blandly as we were driving down Route Seven in the fall of 1974. Notice he didn't say "Want to get Married?" What he said was "Want to get married on Halloween?" The date was not negotiable.

It wasn't one of your more romantic proposals. Especially followed by the pathetic statement "I'd get $180 more //OR SOME NUMBER I AM NOT RECALLING WHAT NUMBER// a month from the Veterans Administration if we were married instead of just living together." Now where's the romance in that? No mention of love anywhere, only money. But then we had been living together for two years which is quite enough familiarity to beat the crap out of your average romance. But heck, it was the mid 70's and we were idiots.

I had a lot of things to consider. My mother had developed a physiological response to our living in sin arrangement. She had mysterious gall bladder attacks following each of our visits. There could only be one answer to his wretched proposal. "Okay," I said flatly with a tightening knot in my stomach. I was 23 and didn't know any better. He might never ask again, and I loved him, I thought.

On the day of our ill-fated union, we both went to work as usual. We came home and had a terrible fight. He wouldn't allow my parents to come to the ceremony because that would mean his parents would have to come too. Now, I am an only daughter and this faux paux of exclusion cast him in a bad light with an entire array of aunts, uncles and cousins for years to come. Some still haven't forgiven him though we have been happily divorced for two decades .

"I'm not marrying your parents. I am marrying you," he said bluntly. He wouldn't even allow mom and dad to take us to dinner afterwards. So we went to Val's Pizza and each ate a slice in icy silence. Then we went shopping at a discount store, like it was just another day. Finally we visited married friends whose babies screamed in the background while they fought and needled each other. Inside my head the regrets had already begun: I've promised to spend my life with this man - I thought to myself in horror. What have I done?
Perhaps those who wield hearts, flowers and hand-trucks full of valentines know something we didn't know then, something we failed to learn during our five-year marriage. "Oh to be young and in love," people say. Well at this point in my journey, I wouldn't go back for all the chocolate in a mall Godiva store! I'll leave that to all the rest of you. So get busy young lovers, in only a few short decades you'll be fully vested old fools like me, trying to recall the debacles of your youth.



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