Cracked Thirty-One

Cracked Thirty

Cracked Twenty-Nine

Cracked Twenty-Eight

Cracked Twenty-Seven

Cracked Twenty-Six

Cracked Twenty-Five

Cracked Twenty-Four

Cracked Twenty-Three

Cracked Twenty-Two

Cracked Twenty-One

Cracked Twenty

Cracked Nineteen

Cracked Eighteen

Cracked Seventeen

Cracked Sixteen

Still ... no words.

Cracked Fifteen

Cracked Fourteen

Cracked Thirteen

Cracked Twelve

Cracked Eleven

Cracked Ten

Notes on what I have learned thus far about painting:

These images drop in from the recesses. I do not have a formal relationship with them. My hand paints them and later the images introduce themselves. Sometimes the wrong color and line emerge, and then I go in and move the paint around until it feels right somehow. This is really an enjoyable process. I think it is the same image trying to come through even though the painting looks completely different. I am uncomfortable leaving something unfinished; meaning only it is something I don't quite like. That's a very new experience, to insist on completion (knowing too that it is always still evolving). This way I can move freely to the next painting with fresh eyes and spirit, without residue.

Cracked Nine

Cracked Eight

Cracked Seven

Cracked Six

Time collapses yet again. Yesterday I saw one of Bart’s sisters at a contemporary art museum in the next town. She lives 2000 miles from me and was not visiting, but there she was. On the far wall of the print exhibit, a familiar name, a project combining the efforts of a poet and an artist. Bart’s sister had lived with the poet in Santa Fe when we were living there.

Our home was an apartment in the basement of a house on a sleepy street just the right distance from the plaza. I remember the sky there, the open, open sky. I remember walking down the hill toward the plaza on warm mornings and looking up at the snowy mountain tops. I remember the colors, the faded oranges and yellows of the craggy landscape. I remember the jewelry sellers and the smell of fry bread. I remember the food at Molly’s where the locals went. I remember filling glass mugs with chili in the restaurant where I worked. I remember dinners with Anna and the poet at the house in town and seeing a brown bear across the river at his ranch. I remember the enchanted Christmas walking with Bart and hundreds of others through the midnight streets lit by candles in brown paper bags. I remember Bart painting portraits in the kitchen. I remember it all.

Yesterday the poet returned from his journeying, from his wandering through time and space, and he brought Bart’s sister with him on his arm. For a moment, we were all together again. The poet, Anna, you, and me. The poet’s poem that lay in the glass case on the far wall of the print exhibit began … True record of my seance with Anna.

Cracked Five

Ken’s apartment was on 8^th Avenue. A 5-story walk-up across from a Salvation Army and a gay bar, we always referred to it as Ken’s apartment even though we had taken it over after he moved. At the time, Chelsea was a wonderful mix of a neighborhood. On late summer nights, the guys would linger outside the bar, tight pants and t-shirts, next to old men at card tables playing dominoes. Our windows opened wide to capture any slight breeze, their laughter and arguments hung in the heavy air.

The apartment was so slanted that if you dropped a pen, it would roll to the opposite side of the room. We loved Sundays. Our neighbors opened their front doors as they cooked huge pots of paella or rice and beans. The smells wafted through the narrow halls, up and down the crooked stairs. Most of the people had lived in the building for decades, parents, children, grandparents; we were temporary inhabitants.

All these years later, I am scratching a message into the hideously beautiful, pink sponge-painted walls of the tiny kitchen on 8^th Avenue for Bart to read when he gets there.

You and I.

Metaphor and memory.

Lifted up by the sovereign wind,

The first time,

Everything right there,

On the table, a bounty of possibility.

At every juncture, another chance.

Crossroads, corners, pauses in the forward motion.

No, yes, no, well, yes.

Longing has a taste and smell.

It reaches the senses,

Engages them beyond reason.

Real as sleep and hunger.

We are the metaphor, love.

We were here.

Cracked Four

I have been thinking about the woman whose husband died in the attacks of 9/11. Her husband communicates with her by leaving coins with significant dates on them for her to find. The story brought to mind the many people who have asked me if Bart has made contact with us. The answer: no. In fairness, he knows very well that we don’t live in the type of house where we’d even notice a stray coin on the couch or kitchen counter. A hundred dollar bill or brick of gold, maybe; a coin, not likely.

But a couple of months ago, my son answered the question a little differently. He said that he could feel his father when he is is working on something he is passionate about, when he is painting or writing or performing; that’s when Bart feels close by. His words were a revelation. Yes, this is also my experience. On the good days, Bart is just with me, smiling at the world, seeing through my eyes, touching with my hands, embracing life through my willingness. On the good days, there are coins everywhere and every date is significant.

Cracked Three

And there was Rivington Street. Chickens in the hallway then, and lots of drugs, nights so filled with sound you couldn't tell if someone was being killed or having great sex, and late, late mornings, ghostly quiet. The transvestite upstairs liked to throw food off her fire escape and scream out to people below, friends and strangers and some only she seemed to see. Bart moved through it all easily, chipping away at the menacing plaster walls, pulling out the newspaper-insulation beneath, replastering and then add ing a fesh coat of cheap paint. He and his roommate working hard to make the place livable. And they did. An oasis.

I haven't been back there in a long time, not even in my thoughts. Of course, it's different now, inhabited by models and film students; all they bring with them and all they expect from their surroundings. I wonder where Bart's neighbors went. What happened to the chickens. An old quandary for the city. Who has dibs on what is considered home. The winter was cold. The summer was hell. Still, there was something about it, like walking through an hallucination, scuffles or mad laughter breaking out for no apparent reason, spontaneous combustion, sharp or melodic Spanish fragments richocheting off the buildings, and the air so still it made you light-headed. Strange that it had such an enticing quality, has even now. I suppose we always knew we were visitors.

Cracked Two

Today is not a bad day. Breath feels a little easier. The veil a little filmier, lighter. Just those few sentences strung together yesterday gave a bit of shape and verve to what are otherwise amorphous feelings just kind of hanging around, ready to pounce at odd hours. And knowing that when you call something "Day 1," "Day 2" is implied ... well, that's a good nudge, a moment to look forward to because it's a chance to blow off some more dust, another good exhale.

This has been with me all day. My first date with Bart included a friend of mine, two Lina Wertmuller movies, ice cream on 8th Street, spaghetti and broccoli at his apartment on Tompkins Square, and my friend says a few beers at MacSorley's, although I thought that was another night. The "date" was impromptu, spinning out from lunch at Sandolino's on Barrow Street following a poetry class at NYU.

Aside from the specific memory of being with Bart, there is NYC in the 1970's. I guess it was a scary place then, but I had no idea. I loved it -- gorgeous, chaotic, spooky, aggressive, multitextured everything, charcoal buildings, velvet-clad people, urine and pachouli, creaking subways filled with overheated skin, music, days and weeks and months, mundane and magnificent, religious. Some people have country roads and wide-angled sunsets, soft grass underfoot, kids selling lemonade. I think of the city in this way too, romantic, and in some ways gone.

Bart was from Skaneateles. Never heard of it. I was from Brooklyn, at least then, and everyone had heard of it. He played the violin, painted, waited tables. The perfect New York 20 year old way back then, not entitled, just so happy to be a part of whatever it was that was going on. Even with the roaches in the halls and the thin layer of soot on his walls (he lived in a basement apartment) -- maybe also because -- he felt good, he felt he belonged to his time and to his adopted city.

Makes sense that the beginning comes to mind when you sit down to write. I don't often look back. But it's a good thing to acknowledge time spent, experienced gathered, love lived. Tempting to turn away from what is painful, things lost, but the truth is that gathering it up in my arms softens the sense of loss a little. Different for tears to run down your cheek than for your heart to harden and become inaccessible. Cheers, Bart, I am still here looking around trying to collect some misplaced pieces, always dawdling a bit. Right now, I see your beautiful smile as I climb the stairs of the Lexington Avenue subway to meet you in front of the cube.

I am starting this blog some 18 months into the loss of my husband. Grief has so many disguises that there are some days when I can hardly keep up. Anger, sadness, physical pain, withdrawal, fatigue, you name it, moment to moment. But recently, it seems to be enveloping me in a kind of veil so that I am a few degrees from reality, hearing things slowly, waking late and not fully, moving through rooms that seem distant even as I step into them, letting the practicalities of daily life slip by, out of sync with the is-ness of things. This is normal I suppose. The veneer of precarious life is cracked; not just the fact of it but the being of it.

So, I am writing to you, to me. Each attempt to describe, each word on the screen, one less to pool in my mind and body, one more toward movement. And perhaps we get to come back to ourselves soon, not leaving the dead behind but bringing them into life with us, showing them how we go on, connected but still grateful for each day. So, there I have written it: that is my goal.