Poem: "Securities/Agency"

Securities/Agency

Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938,
A photograph taken during her tenure with the Farm Security Administration

I. Security

The government controlled the development
process, kept a tight grip on the negatives,
dictated just what and just how much
truth was released to the public.
But they underestimated the power:
speed of the shutter, grip of the lens,
how one woman could harness blatant lies
told by natural light. She could photograph a soul
without a single body trapped in the picture.

II. Agency

We did not know, some sixty years prior,
we’d been caught in a frame. The taxed-out
state of soil not yet evident,
sold undisclosed. We did not know
our new coat of paint would peel like dead
skin from a clapboard farmhouse in the heart
of drought. Can we be blamed for our love, long
dead before the purchase—a gray-scale field,
one thousand rows, monochrome rainbows
bled fruitless to frowns?





















Image Courtesy of Christie's; Lot 21, Sale 1451

Midnight Musings (After the Writers Conference...)

It's one of those nights when my mind won't shut down, and I have to force it like a heavy door against a persistent draft.

Perhaps it's the dinner of pintos, raw onions, and corn muffins that my boyfriend made while I was out mingling with the Intellectuals. Or it could be the cup of reheated coffee I drank several hours ago. Maybe erratic biorhythms are to blame. More likely, however, it's the fact that I spent all day in seminars regarding the craft of writing, and that always does it.

It happens like this; my stomach twists and turns; chest muscles tighten. I start to sweat and to think and think, and I think I cannot stop.

A couple of these seminars discussed social media, and it hit me like a ripe walnut falling from the naked branch. I have been cataloguing my life intermittently on the internet for eight years. From the pithy, angst-ridden rant to full-blown dis-ease of the mouth, mind, and heart. The affair began in 2002 with Diaryland and morphed into Livejournal. Then, there was a pregnant pause, dictated by a divorce, the subsequent deep depression, perpetual drunkenness, and poverty. My laptop's motherboard died. And if I couldn't afford internet service, I certainly couldn't afford a new computer. When I attempted to write through all that pain and the vodka tonics, I couldn't read the illegible and fractured thoughts the next morning. The scribblings embarrassed me. I have lost some of the most important years of my life.

Recently, this life has been resurrected on Facebook, and I do love my Facebook, but I have been delicately pondering the shape of this blog since October 2009. What do I want to say? How do I say it? To whom am I speaking? I know that I have no fewer than ten thousand stories to tell, but are they even relevant? Who would even care, really? But we all, as humans living lives, have stories to tell, and sometimes, if just one small part of one small life reaches out to touch or brush up against some small part of someone else's life, then one good deed has been done for the day. So...

I'm just going to plant this blog like a tiny mystery seed I found, dried up and setting on my grandmother's windowsill. And who knows? It may sprout a stalk of divorce, a tiny, but consequential, leaf of alcoholism, a bright bud of recovery clustered by the baby's breath of self-discovery. Who knows what this will be?

Together, we will watch it grow.