a poem for artie my white dog.

spiraling in my bones 
and floating.
storms rolling in over and past
home, above my head,
blooming what
I need is where I float.
below
my knees where I swim.
slight greens in the skies, fire grows into careening soft thunder, shaking little doggie, panting little tongue - lolling, head askance, this is fear                                                                                                                 wanting me to embrace it.
the little doggie terror at it's gate alive
with tremor and dulled eyes.
maternal grace hugging the fear, pushing it inside where it's hidden below the green sky, where the rolls of thunder silence themselves momentarily into monuments, into beleaguered valleys, dryness surrounding their claps.
QUIET y'all everything.
stillness awaiting the little doggie tongue
reminding beckoned skies to surrender to the fear.
abated once more, the space where the sky shone
emerald becomes sapphire blue crystalline palace of emerging possibility, of the terror of fear now exposed
immediately begone!!!
the spiral and float now in view again
in vain of all that was storm.

a tentative look
a step at least. a step! as in the beginning of walking.
I don't know when I will make another one.
what I do want to say is that
I have not been painting in the studio for about 4 weeks or even more!
that will be a thing of the past soon so instead of joyfully painting I am
also
joyfully notpainting.
perhaps it is a time of do nothing

Mankle seems to have a spiral fracture, perhaps this is better than originally diagnosed as a minor fracture 6 months ago, perhaps not. anyway it is good to be floating. I am happy that I have time to be so slow slow slow time allowing for book designed with poetry by two poet friends along with my paintings. Nice juxtapositions. Here is a sample page. Some of the poems bring me to tears because they are so beautiful and deep. reproduction of my artwork is a little iffy, meaning that some look good and some look less good. Ah well my first attempt at a book.

coyote coyote
where are you hiding.
why are you showing me your tail, your breath your smile
me thinks you must love me! oh big coyote!
waiting for my little doggie, hiding in the middle of the midst of forest 
behind the house, below the arroyo the waterfall.
i hear you every evening yow yow yow
yum the little kitties, the mushroom mice minced meat delight
and still, and still i wait to meet you the furry gait eluding me.
i wait.

The Mankle Report Blog is ending and becoming merely another blog, maybe about 2 mankles, or the weird 3-mankled being.  Now, that being can be a four legged creature who has lost, due to an accident or birth defect or other unusual circumstance, a newly formed three legged being.  And many creatured bings are mankled, including lizards  and certainly mammals and not tadpoles or most sea-creatures or snakes.  I'm not sure if mosquitoes or spiders have ankles, altho they have "TOES" in their name and many humans think of toes and ankles as part of our leg extensions....  Anyway, being a two-mankles being is now my preference, and also is more enjoyable than being one-mankled.  GRATITUDE AND APPRECIATION FOR ANY MANKLES AT ALL IS MY MOTTO.

a sign posted at a bridge going to nowhere  behind our house in the Greenbelt, and some deer posing at dusk.

tuesday,12:42 pm
a gift. an allotment of TIME has been reclaimed into nothingness, 
less responsibility to it's demand - freedom to use or waste or relinquish even it's basic nature, to lounge to breathe one more deep ahhh. your headache has become my gain, not that i wish you to be aching near your eyes, blinking away pain blinking in pain blinking at boredom at whispers at greens at the farm overflowing with abundance of nutrients of beauty of water parched willows. it is my silver lining of your ache that I explore today as I set up my brand new easel, as I paint another sculpturey thing into a white sea.

6:59 pm.  
Mankle is healed.  yesterday i went out without a wheelchair!!  i used an old favorite black cane, well worn and muddled with confused emotions, mostly emotions of FREEDOM....  then after listening to a local artist couple give a talk, which was good, and so was their work, i even went out to dinner...  holy moses wild woman me!  so it is that i am feeling tall, and bold, and unafraid.  i have been spending lots of time in my studio, and now that i become busier with the everydayness of life i will look for some more minutes to be with me.  i am working on 2 big paintings, leaning into ugliness crossed with beauty, going in the spiral between what is good and what is bad, where the rules become invisible, where i am allowed to get totally lost, where there is silence beyond quiet, where the light shines below, so brightly yet that quiet insistence that beauty can become more infinite than what i can ever imbue into a painting... or trying to remember the depth that we have come from.
____________________here i post this new book work just finished and photographed.

saturday  1:49 pm

Well today is different. Mankle bones have fused with graft. I learn walking again, I am now robin two step. Some weeks or months will go by while I spend time learning what most of you already know, aha... and the amazing grace that I have been ordained to always remember, a new gracious way.