I was…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

THE SPACES…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

overwhELMed…

How eager the Ulmus, spring limbs laden with pendant promise, profligate in its disc-winged seeds.
Yet how tough, unwelcomed, these papery lozenges, these flighted samara, in even this moist and fecund earth. For surely if they succeeded in proportion, then instead of Doug fir and maple, cedar and alder, we would be enveloped by elms.

the husks…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

akin…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

imposing…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

this decadent dawn…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

smoker…

This week, in Albuquerque, we went to a casino. In addition to an assault of noise and lights, we were engulfed in cigarette smoke. In the U.S., it’s easy to forget that this used to be the norm: people smoking in offices and movie theaters, in restaurants and on airplanes.

My parents were both smokers. My dad quit in his 50s after he tore something coughing — but not on the first try. It took my mother saying that she bet he couldn’t quit to get him to stop for good. My mother smoked right through her pregnancy, but she quit when I was born. She said she didn’t want to pollute that sweet-baby smell with smoke. I know it couldn’t have been easy and I count it as a gift.

But it didn’t stop me from smoking, starting at about 11 or 12 with stale cigarettes cadged from the crystal box that my parents would put out for guests and continuing until I was 25. Every time I lit up someone was sure to say, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

One day I caught sight of myself in the mirror, cigarette in hand, and was shocked at how wrong it looked. So I quit. Finished. Done. But even now, after all this time, and not ever being a heavy smoker, I sometimes wake up in the morning and realize I was contentedly smoking in my dream.

The casino visit feels like an inoculation — a booster shot — against the dark temptations of such dreams.
. . . . .
drawing by Dorothy, circa 1941

watching New Mexico…

the busy sky…
virga — the veils of rain that don’t reach the ground…
shadows draped across sculpted mesas…
the many colors of sand…
prairie dogs…roadrunner…woodpecker…
a shaggy donkey…a pink-nosed week-old calf…
the fragrance of ponderosa…
. . . . .
photo of Red Rock Park

Happy Mother’s Day

This is a card for Mother’s Day by jik, age 6
© j.i. kleinberg

the sacred slow waters…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

rock the pastoral…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

feathered…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg
(Yup, permanenence. Straight out of the magazine.)

as the moon…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

unfolded…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

each whirl…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

what we wear…

My mother loved clothes. When she was young and still trying to fit in, she selected each garment with attention to style, color, fit, fabric and whether it was classic enough to endure the fickle seasons of fashion. Classic was a word she liked and one she emphasized as she instructed me in my own choices. She had beautiful clothes and yet she was rarely extravagant and not averse to wearing the same clothes many times over.

Dorothy loved to shop. It was an adventure, an artistic endeavor. But it was also a frustration because the garment she envisioned would not arrive in the stores for at least two years. She would set out with the conviction that her closet required a corduroy jacket or harem pants or something in a particular shade of pumpkin and it would simply not exist. Yet, had she waited a couple years, the shops would be bulging with pumpkin and corduroy and wide-leg flowing slacks. This ahead-of-its-time vision never failed her. But it was disconcerting in the moment, as she found herself unable to assemble the look she sought.

As she grew older and acknowledged the advantages of her identity as an artist, she became less a slave to convention. Still not extravagant, she recycled familiar garments into new combinations, became the queen of quirky accessories and relished the attention she garnered. (Note that in this photo of Dorothy at age 76, her ‘necklace’ is made from an electric cord, complete with plug.)

When I was an adolescent, everything about my mother embarrassed me. She could have dressed — and nearly did — with the restrained elegance of Jackie Kennedy and, from my uncomfortable-in-my-own-skin vantage, it would not have been suitable. I wanted her to be a mother that no one would notice so that I could be a girl — and I nearly was — that no one would notice.

Yet by the time she had transitioned to quirky, I had grown more tolerant, more appreciative, more able to laugh with her as she thumbed her nose at the expected. I discovered in myself the two-years-ahead sensibility and admired her willingness to be odd, even if I was still uncertain how to dress the person I hoped eventually to recognize — and accept — as myself.

After spring…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

memory…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

signs of spring…

The perfect greens of spring, scale precise upon scale, new growth bright as the robin chick’s gape, this hunger for air, for life, this urge to twirl the slowest waltz.

. . . . .
thujopsis dolabrata – elkhorn cypress