Voice

I love opera. In fact I admire anyone who can sing. The other night our band had me sing a song on stage and I was not completely certain that furniture wouldn't fly out of my mouth instead of notes.

Sky

Joey's puppy is named Bobo and I ask him "How's Bobo?" every time I see him. One day I was in the park and I could see off in the distance Joey's father leaning way out of the 5th floor tenement window bellowing to the puppy below. The man was trying to walk his dog from the sky.

Last week Joey told me his missing cat, named Coffee, was finally found, dead. He said "Now it's buried in the park under a shirt. Do you want to see it?" "No thanks," I said. "It's frozen in the snow," his buddy told me. Yesterday walking Lily I couldn't pass through the path behind the park - it was blocked by a huge muddy snow pile. So I went around and ducked through a hole in the tall evergreen shrubs. There I saw the dead cream-colored cat curled up on the ground, its spirit in the sky.

Whirlpool

That night I empty the washer,
throw the damp clothes in the dryer.
For half an hour my wife's blouses
wrestle with my shirts
in a hot and whirling ecstasy,

- from Whirlpool, by George Bilgere

Poet George Bilgere

Laundry

My mother stands in this black
And white arrangement of shadows
In the sunny backyard of her marriage,
Struggling to pin the white ghosts
Of her family on the line.
I watch from my blanket on the grass
As my mother's blouses lift and billow,
Bursting with the day.
My father's white work shirts
Wave their empty sleeves at me,
And my own little shirts and pants
Flap and exult like flags
In the immaculate light.

It is mid-century, and the future lies
Just beyond the white borders
Of this snapshot; soon that wind
Will get the better of her
And her marriage. Soon the future
I live in will break
Through those borders and make
A photograph of her - but

For now the shirts and blouses
Are joyous with her in the yard
As she stands with a wooden clothespin
In her mouth, struggling to keep
The bed sheets from blowing away.

-George Bilgere from The Good Kiss.

Unwise Purchases

Unwise Purchases

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned
whether the suave American
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they're happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and Cézanne, while they fence delicately
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.

-George Bilgere

Painting Thoughts

When painting, I like to be working on multiple pictures at once. I fear that I will run out of ideas although mostly what I fear is running out of courage. With regular painting sessions and different pieces going I'll suddenly have a solution for one, or the courage to make sweeping changes or new commitments in another. Multiple paintings begin to speak to each other!

I had given up on one of my paintings that actually made me feel vertigo when I looked at it. I had made three figures and a checkered floor that was at a weird angle. I had struggled with it a while back and decided to turn it against the wall for many months. This week I looked at it and was not precious about any of it and painted over the nausea-inducing checkered floor and I muted the irritating colors, taking it back down to bare bones. Surprisingly I turned it around. It wanted to be a stark painting!

This week I painted over nearly everything in another painting, trying to make it go in a particular direction. What a depressing mess! But I had to try to stay engaged and fluid to keep my courage. Then the next day, still terrified, I dove into one that was an old tentative sketch on canvas that I had never developed, and now it has me very excited. My painting week was full of drama which is probably why I try to maintain a stable and calm life. I had to keep the radio news off too because it was making me so upset.

Too often I fall in love with the drawing stage on a painting and lose courage for the painting part. There's an energy in the drawing stage that is exciting, and I fear that I can't carry it over into the finish. But if I can chip away, the courage follows me in like a loyal cat. Sometimes I'll leave the painting as an alive and breathing underpainting for a while. It is good to have a few underpaintings that you are in love with kicking around.

Many times making a painting feels like a game of chess.

I love to see any artistic work in progress (including musical and theatrical rehearsals). I find it refreshing and inspiring to see the sketchbooks or underpaintings of an artist I admire. When looking at photographs of artists at work in their studios I am always peeking to catch a glimpse of their paintings-in-progress.

I find that painting for me elicits a myriad of quirky mental and physical energies. I can sometimes have laser-beam focus for 90 minutes. Sometimes I am completely exhausted and fall asleep on my studio couch. I try not to judge myself too harshly and try to show up and make things happen. I want my painting studio to be an approachable place even though it is terrifying at times.

Writing Dream

In my dream this morning I was looking for a pencil to write these lines:
I imagined walking back into the house where I had once lived and finding my poetry book, my wool shoulder bag, and my orange teacup exactly where I had left them.

Frank O'Hara Poem

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

-Frank O'Hara

Blue Spaghetti

I dreamt I was in a pet store asking if they sold blue spaghetti. No we don't, they said. I wanted to buy blue spaghetti so my supper would match the blue chew toy my dog enjoys.

Precious Paws

I walked Lily to Precious Blood Cemetery today. The mild weather has brought out all the smells, and I could see she was excited, and eager to run, especially since yesterday we missed out on our big walk. I decided to continue to Turbesi Park so she could have her run. When we got into the fenced-in baseball field she tucked her tail down and bolted like a rocket, sprinting across the icy slushy snow. She ran and ran. It was rewarding to see her so happy to run.

I noticed a red spot in one of her paw prints, and I tried to corral her to check her paws but she kept running. She stopped to lick something disgusting in the leaves along the fence and ran off as I approached. Then I saw a splotch of bright red blood about the size of a quarter in the paw print along the fence. I panicked. She must have sliced herself on the ice. I kept calling and following her, looking down at her paw prints and seeing tiny dots of blood. When I finally caught up to her I examined her paws. Her front left paw pad had been punctured. I felt around to see if I could gauge the size of it, getting blood on my fingers. I wiped my hands on the snow - I felt like I was at a crime scene. It looked like a small cut, though. I thought if we were lucky and careful maybe it would clot on the long walk home, and thankfully that is exactly what happened.

Distracted

In the summer of 1973, when I was 12, I was sent to a wilderness camp for girls in Vermont. We were encouraged to swim in the nude. On the first day of swim class I was surprised that the teacher was also stark naked. She was standing on the dock in front of us gesturing the back stroke with her very skinny arms, tiny dark-nippled breasts, and bright orange pubic hair which matched the hair on her head. I was a bit distracted. I had no idea pubic hair came in different colors! Or that teaching in the nude was considered perfectly normal.

Lifetime Subscription

My grandfather loved to tell us he had a lifetime subscription to National Geographic. It did make me worry about one thing: if Grandpa lived a long time, would the magazine decide to come to his door and shoot him so they wouldn't lose money?

Trio

I have posted three new paintings on my painting blog. Have a peek!

Click here to go to Emily Lisker Paintings.

Magic Ball

Today on my walk with Lily I saw a smashed up acoustic guitar in the snow in front of Savini's restaurant. What was the story? Was it a disgruntled performer or audience member? I walked through the snowy cemetery admiring the bare trees in the distance outlined by the snow and the expanse of stones catching the sunshine. I kept on walking to the reservoir. When I got there I spotted an adult and small child way out on the ice walking across the frozen surface. They looked like they were only a few inches tall. On the way home Lily and I stopped at the baseball field for a free run in the snow. Lily found something against the fence and was digging like mad to get it. I went to pull her away, assuming it was something disgusting she was getting her mouth on, and I saw a frozen baseball stuck under the chain link fence. I was able to free it by pushing it out to the other side. Then Lily and I had a few rounds of fetch. She was so delighted she pranced like a pony with the ball in her mouth. After enough runs I decided to pocket the magic ball for another day.

Hardware Stores

This morning I woke thinking about how much I love hardware stores with their green coiled hoses, leather work gloves, rakes, racks of spring seed packets, pillows of fertilizer, shiny shovels, short spades, nuts, bolts, buckets, mops, mowers, mildew cleaners, mulch, bird feeders, and bird seed. There's a lot of faith in what they carry; they are churches of the Earth.

Signs of Life

Today Lily and I walked to the reservoir, it's been a while since I walked out there. I noticed behind one house snow had been shoveled off the frozen pond in a big rectangle, for skating. Further out on the ice I saw a round hole that was probably made for ice fishing. I saw a man in his yard chopping wood with an axe, and he told me he had a splitter but loved to do it by hand. I told him I loved the sound of the axe hitting the wood. The sun was out and the air was fresh. I took the long way home, stopping at Turbesi Park so Lily could run in big circles in the fenced-in baseball field. When I got home I had hot cereal and a hot cup of tea.

Paper Dress

When I was seven my parents had an outdoor party one summer evening on their terrace. My mother wore an orange-and-shocking-pink mini-dress. You couldn't tell, but it was made of paper. The plan was that my parents would stage a fight, and my father would rip her dress off in front of all of their guests. Maybe that's why they called it shocking pink.

Red Scarf

One day, when I was in fifth grade, I was riding my bicycle home after school wearing an extra long red scarf my Grandma knitted especially for me. As I was coasting down the hill my scarf got caught and tangled in the back wheel of my bike, choking me. The bike skidded to a halt and I tried to pull the scarf away from my throat. Two twelve-year-old boys were walking on the sidewalk nearby, and they helped me. Then they walked me home with my frozen-up bicycle.

That night someone told me the story of Isadora Duncan. I'm not sure I remember the story correctly, but I have a vivid picture of the dancer with a very long white scarf stepping into a yellow taxi cab. Her scarf gets caught in the door, enough trailing into the street to wind around the back wheel.

The next morning I went into the garage and looked at my red scarf wrapped around the back wheel of my turquoise bicycle. I couldn't believe how lucky I was that those boys freed me at that moment. Thank you, boys who saved my life, wherever you are today. I won't tell Grandma what happened.

Mysterious Olympian

When I was seven Mark Spitz won the Olympic gold medal for being the fastest swimmer in the world. I wondered at the time if there might be faster swimmers nobody knew about. Maybe Mrs Ross the old lady next door was a faster swimmer, undiscovered. It's true that she was never seen except on Halloween when she came to the door with red apples on a silver tray. We were too scared to take them fearing razor blades hidden inside. One year, as we walked away, Joey DeMarco from the neighborhood shouted she's a witch! We believed it. One day when Mrs Ross' LIFE magazine was accidentally delivered to our house, my mother asked me to take it over to her. I knew my mother was too scared to do it. I was too, and the magazine rotted in our garage. Mrs. Ross' house was surrounded by tall thick evergreen bushes and a six-foot chain link fence. We never saw lights on in her house at night except one yellow light that shone through a diamond-paned window. Our neighbor the doctor said that in the thirty years his family lived opposite her, she never threw out any trash. I remember she always phoned the police and complained of noise when she heard us playing with our friends in the doctor's swimming pool. I guess the sound of kids having fun was just too much for her to bear. Years later after she died they found her cellar full of empty wine bottles. Poor Mrs Ross. She was an Olympian swimming in wine.

Dog's Dream

This morning I was walking Lily to Cass Park and when I got to the top of the hill on Elm Street I looked down and saw a fully cooked chicken in the snow on the side of the road. I spotted it just before my dog got her mouth on it. Did a couple have an argument and toss their dinner out the window? For a moment I felt that I was living in my dog's fantasy: a fully cooked chicken sitting in the street, a dream come true!