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My Body Rolling Away from Me

by

11″ x 14″

I am not afraid of being sick, but of losing my body entirely. Misplacing it, and having to go without. Like any of the ghosts we hear about, the ones from the movies and our imaginations, they can see things, but cannot be seen. Cannot touch or be touched because they have no mass, only invisible vapour. I fear my body rolling away from me, like a coat button, under the radiator. I would have no fingers to reach for it, and no way to use an impliment to retrieve it. And no voice to call for help from a friend or loved one.

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Offer of Marriage Refused

by

7″ x 7″

This drawing is based on a Harper’s Weekly Illustration (1860’s), “Offer of Marriage Refused” is its caption.

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The Bedraggled Mother

by

11″ x 14″

On the wall of my Grandparents’ dining room in Natchez always (since the beginning of forever) hung a print of the 1906 George de Forest-Brush painting called In The Garden. I have only known it by its nickname within the family: The Bedraggled Mother.

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The Effect is Cumulative

by

3″ x 5″

A drawing about my attempt to change the way I make my N’s. From the jagged up-downdiagonal-up, which I’ve never liked, to the more appealing dome-shape. It hasn’t taken hold yet, but the process is underway and I will enjoy signing my name better with my new N.

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Scratches

by

4″ x 6″

This is a collaboration with Laynie Browne, for the postcard collection of the Academy of American Poets. The text — punched with the timeless and immutable Dymo label-maker — is an excerpt from her brilliant novel-in-progress.

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Poor Possum

by

5″ x 7″

From a group of five drawings of roadkill made while driving across the Smoky Mtns to teach at WCU years ago. Thanks to Ann Patchett for sending me the Gerald Stern poem below, a perfect pair.

Behaving Like a Jew
by Gerald Stern

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
—I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

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Wastrels in a Bunker #1

by

8 1/2″ x 11″

A process sketch for a collaboration with Kate Bernheimer. It will be unfolding in the coming weeks, so you’ll be seeing quite a bit of these two castaways.

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Xia’s Library Bunnies

by

Xia is the daughter of my friends Kate and Brent. They bought the drawing I did a few months ago of a bunny that I dreamt I check out of a library and then forgot about. Xia has been making tender drawings of that drawing and I’m proud to show them here. Thanks for contributing to the Work-a-day page, Xia!

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Paragraph (with Laynie Browne)

by

A small collaborative piece with Laynie, an excerpt from her novel in progress. Possibly more along these lines to come.

from Periodic Companions

When we are all assembeled in memory I ask myself why sometimes it takes so long to
compose a paragraph but O. says it is because we have to be able to comfortably inhabit
that space. He isn’t talking about reclining or tromping about but the physical sensation
of words falling out of the mouth, off of the fingers. He says this very confidently, as
if he has spoken of himself as made up of characters of an alphabet as long as he can
remember.

—Laynie Browne

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Search Party

by

11″ x 14

There had been a murder. No one knew what happened to the boy, but a group of conspiracy theorists had gotten in trouble for trying to sneak out to the bottom of a swamp where they said a couple of renagade cops were holding the child at an underwater roadblock.

All the tv crews came out to document the quarrel between the local police and the conspiracy theorists. The sheriff finally decided that it was his jurisdiction and not against the law for them to go under the water to look for the underwater roadblock.

So we were all there at the edge of the swamp, and getting in the water to see what would happen. The newsmen were chest deep in the still water with dress shirts and microphones describing the scene as the preacher who led the group disappeared into the water with a flashlight.

You could see the light of the preacher’s flashlight go further and further out and before we knew it we were all following him.

Someone in the crowd said, if you go too far into this, you’ll hit the Mississippi River and there’s no way you’ll survive. The water was still, but the further we went, it became clear that what we were sloshing through was not a swamp, but the overflow of the Mississippi and that eventually we would come to the River itself.

I was travelling with two newspeople and I saw that ahead the water was not still but raging and screaming. It’s the River! Grab something! And just as our bodies were going to be pulled into the current we grabbed a concrete pylon and pulled ourselves onto what turned out to be an escalator. It was a down escalator, and still functioning, though at this point it was pouring rain, and the three of us looked up the escalator with water cascading down its steps. I was imagining how difficult it would be to go up this eascalator, with its downward moving steps, and how I desparately wanted to. One of the newspeople said: there is always something creepy about an escalator. I said, yeah, I know.

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Catfish Dream

by

11″ x 14″

A couple of high school kids came in, with an enormous six foot catfish and threw it down on a bed that I didn’t realize was there and slashed it across the middle. Gutted it right there on the bed.


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Jacob’s Dream

by

11″ x 28″

This drawing is inspired by a dream, dreamt by Jacob, the son of my friend Laynie. Here are a few lines, as transcribed by Laynie:

I was a six-legged llama fighting human-sized cats.
We fought in a restaurant surrounded by empty space.
My only weapons are ladies and butter knives.

“ladies” was actually “ladles” which makes more since, but I misread it.


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Black Milk of Daybreak

by

9″ x 12″

Black milk of daybreak we
drink it at nightfall we
drink it at noon in the
morning we drink it at
night
drink it and drink it.

-Paul Celan

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Sadness, When it is Without Cause

by

9″ x 12″

from Odilon Redon’s journal in 1913:

“Sadness, when it is without cause, is perhaps a secret fervor, a sort of oration, something vaguely like worship in the unknown.”

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This is What He Wanted

by

9″ x 12″

A grammar lesson:

THIS IS what HE WANTED; THAT IS TO SAY, the things which HE WANTED.

That is applied to both person and things; as,
HE that ACTS WISELY DESERVES PRAISE.

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Once a Woman in Madrid

by

7″ x 11″

Once a woman in Madrid
Ate sixty-five eggs for a quid.
    When they asked, ‘Are you faint?’
    She replied, ‘No I ain’t,
But I don’t feel as well as I did.’

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We Got Ter Go Ter Nudder Kentry

by

7″ x 11″

Wherein the children have lost their way. I feel like posting with this an excerpt from Carl Sandburg about Potato Face Blind Man:

There was a Potato Face Blind Man used to play an accordion on the Main Street corner nearest the postoffice in the Village of Liver-and-Onions.

Any Ice Today came along and said, “It looks like it used to be an 18 carat gold accordion with rich pawnshop diamonds in it; it looks like it used to be a grand accordion once and not so grand now.”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes, it was gold all over on the outside,” said the Potato Face Blind Man, “and 42 there was a diamond rabbit next to the handles on each side, two diamond rabbits.”

“How do you mean diamond rabbits?” Any Ice Today asked.

“Ears, legs, head, feet, ribs, tail, all fixed out in diamonds to make a nice rabbit with his diamond chin on his diamond toenails. When I play good pieces so people cry hearing my accordion music, then I put my fingers over and feel of the rabbit’s diamond chin on his diamond toenails, ‘Attaboy, li’l bunny, attaboy, li’l bunny.’”

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A Picture of Virginia Woolf

by

7″ x 9″

Here’s a drawing of Virginia Woolf made on the anniversary of her sinking herself in the River Ouse. Well, the anniversary was a few days ago when I was in airports and I tried drawing her then, but couldn’t get a good one. This one is okay.


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Rast auf der Flucht nach Ägypten

by

9″ x 12″

Continuing (read: starting) the images for a forthcoming retranslation of Rilke’s cycle of poems “The Life of Mary”. A number of these will be showing up on the work-a-day in the next few months — results may range from pretty successful to laughably unsuccessful — as I try to enter a very challenging text with brown ink and gold leaf, materials I don’t understand. Will start by drawing. Here is me beating around the edges of “Rast auf der Flucht nach Ägypten” (Rest on the Flight to Egypt).


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Cat Box

by

9″ x 12″

Bought at the old Value Village here in Tucson.

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Feast of Belshazzar

by

10″ x 16″

This from the group of drawings when I did copies of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya and Carravaggio paintings replacing all the figures with ghosts. Some were more successful that others. A couple of those will soon be on the cover of Gordon Massman’s new book with New York Quarterly Press. The Fear of Operations and Fear of Anaesthesia drawings from the beginning of the work-a-day page.

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Scar

by

9″ x 12″

Well well, so much for the idea of keeping up with the work-a-day’s while traveling for a month. I’ve been scolded for drawing while driving more than a few times in my life, and even though it may not feel hazardous, I’m sure that it is. So now I post some things retrospectively and trying to get this sucker cranked back up again. Here’s one that I found in a sketchbook I had lost (in my closet) and is a preparatory drawing for the two scar paintings from the Edelweiss series.

I think I’ll give up not doing work-a-days for lent.

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Bunny Neutrino, with Anne Waldman

by

22″ x 30″

Work-a-day, shoot, more like work-a-week. Traveling across country, so in lieu of posting new works this week, I’m posting images from the exhibition I’m installing at Warren Wilson College (opens Friday Feb 11) of some excerpts from some of my text/image collaborations.

This is one I did with poet, Anne Waldman, when she came through Tucson last Spring.


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Picnic on the Grass

by

6″ x 8″

Autodidact: a self-taught person. To teach oneself. Happily bringing this word more into my vocabulary, thanks to Tim Hyman for reminding me of it. And according to Webster’s online, “Autodidact” rhymes with: cutthroat contract, matter-of-fact, and semi-abstract. So it does.

And thanks to Frankie for telling me last night that the etymology of “autopsy” is to see for oneself.

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Monkey Sultan

by

6″ x 6″

I had a dream one time that I found out that my aunt Helen became “kind of a big deal” in the 1960’s when she wrote the lyrics to a song that got famous. The song was called “Monkey Sultan”.


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Fountain in Costa Rica

by

8″ x 12″

Did this one a few years ago, on a trip with my father to Costa Rica. I had strep throat but it was still really fun. This is a fountain.


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Emily Dickinson in a Hailstorm

by

8″ x 16″

Pentimenti: term referring to visible alterations to a drawing or painting, the trace or evidence of previous marks revealing the artist’s change of mind.

From Italian pentirsi, meaning ‘to repent’.

Here is a drawing of Emily Dickinson in a hailstorm.

and she’s reversible.

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I Give Something Up

by

11″ x 14″

Variations on the definition of surrender. The figures loosely swiped from Goya’s Los Caprichos [42] subtitled “Tu que no puedes.” (You who can not). The two things just kind of went together.

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RFFTKPFRSKP

by

3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″

This drawing came from the vault and been hanging around for eight year or so. Seems to me those letters came from somewhere, referred to something, but the reference is lost to history now.


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