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a loon alone

November 24, 2024
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here is a loon alone/whose mate disapproved of the nesting site he’d chosen/and ended up with another/whose upscale site she loved

the window is closing/for him to seduce another female

and it is not in him/to fight another male/in an attempted eviction

so write what happy ending you will/at this early-spring frigid-lake slice of time/he is a loon alone/totally alone/but for the clicking pebbles in his belly

humans call the pebbles gastroliths/ because they aid digestion/of those vertebrates the loon swallows whole and headfirst

but this poet calls them pebblehenge/and uses poetic license/to arrange the pebbles accordingly

and then brings the loon a mate/who will drive him just the right amount of crazy/and he will give his utmost/to make their united life a waterfowl paradise

the reader may suspect/that the poet is not writing about loons anymore

the poet is uneager to explore this possibility/and so the poem ends/with a happy unalone loon/giving the reader a wink

stuffscape in F major

October 31, 2021
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2021 1031 stuffscape in F major

This is a value study, which is to say it’s an array of light and dark from paper-white to graphite-black, with many shades of grey in between. I did it to warm up for an important drawing, of a friend of mine and the dog, now deceased, that she loved. I have made sketches of them prior to this value study, and found them lacking; so, to take some pressure off and get some momentum going, I carefully over the last few days built up this “stuffscape.”

The title, “stuffscape in F major,” has a musical reference because making an array of forms in a careful, rhythmic arrangement is similar to composing music. Some musical pieces are called “tone poems” for a similar reason: some music partakes of poetry.

There’s a pencil amongst the stuff. You don’t have to be a “Where’s Waldo?” whiz to find it. But to some it may sully the non-objective purity of the image. I say Rejoice, for this drawing is now Meta. There’s a lot of Meta going around these days. 🙂

I had a devil of a time, what with the soft graphite in the pencils I used, keeping the paper unsmudgedly clean. Old-school draughtmanship has its drawbacks.

Wasted Effort

June 19, 2020
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I can’t lose with this one. If someone doesn’t like it I can tell them it’s self-demonstrating, and of COURSE they didn’t like it, since it is a Wasted Effort…

2020 0619 wasted effort

Wasted Effort

We now no longer have Ms. G. O’Keeffe
And so we lack a mattriarchal Chief
Since passing Time’s an unrelenting Thief
There’s reason to crack open that Cointreau–O
Epiphany may quell the need to know–oR
Deem it best we bid à bientôt

Pencil Pencil Sketch Sketch

November 13, 2014
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A movie called GONE GIRL featured a bar called “The Bar.” Mention was made of the name of the bar being “meta,” which means self-referential in a self-aware sort of way, sort of. Meta’s been around for a while, as witness this first verse to the theme of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”:

This is the theme to Garry’s Show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s Show.

So this is a pencil sketch featuring an acrostic of “Pencil Sketch.” It features Imogene Coca, who as a player in Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” performed in many a sketch. Apologies to the memory of Ms. Coca for such a sketchy description of such an outstanding comedic mind. Apologies, too, for an indecent attempt at caricature without reference to a photo source. This time round I elected to fly by the seat of my mind’s-eye pants and draw without looking at anything except the page.

Here are the words to the acrostic. Each line describes a sketch to be found on the page. Near the lower right-hand corner is a sketch of a pencil, which illustrates the double acrostic in heavy meta.

Party hats seen through refractive glass
Elephant sniffs at a whiskey flask
Nightstick next to an alley’s grate
Cat all tie-dyed per the dyer’s trait
Imogene Coca as a bumbling narc
Lastly–a profile of a matriarch

My own take on Meta is that being self-referential has its place, but self-REVerential–not so much.

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