Something I'll do for a while then not

Every morning and evening I read a few pages from Teju Cole's remarkable book, Blind Spot. I suspect when I finish it, I'll reread it, probably not page to page but just open it here and there.

I'm not someone who rereads books or rewatches movies (with the exception of Apocalypse Now and Badlands), though there are plenty of poems I read and reread. And I'm not someone who has much of a daily practice except for making the commitment to spend some part of the day writing and several times a week (once it was daily, now less often) take a photograph. If you are not familiar with Bind Spot, it looks like this.

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 So you can see (literally) why it appeals to me. I don't think anyone has made better use of short pieces of writing than Cole. Here is the opening passage from "Brooklyn" (pictured above). "One of the common uses of the word 'shadow' was as a synonym for 'photograph.' This was the sense in which Sojourner Truth used it when she wrote, on the 1864 photographic postcard bearing her image, 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.'"

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And just now writing this, I see that shadow behind the photograph (a scan of my grandmother's garden scissors) which inspired the following poem, published by Best Friends Feminist Collective in Albuquerque in the early 70s.

SHEARS
 
Those long silver scissors
            shears you call them
            sit in your kitchen
            like you long your hands long
                        like the shimmer of
                                    vodka
            sliding down your lean throat
 
The garden scissors
            snap the heads
            of roses and mums
            that sit in coffee cans
            in your kitchen
We see them when we visit you
The scissors next to your hand
 
In San Francisco passing over
the Hills Bros. plant
I thought of you
The beach in Carmel
            Waves breaking silver
            I thought of you
In your kitchen
            thinking of me
 
Honeymooning
            your granddaughter
            a bride
            married on your back porch
            surrounded by mums
            and roses
your scissors had been to work
            for me
 
You stayed outside most of that day
            to greet guests
But you longed for the kitchen
            champagne did not satisfy
The silver of the kitchen longed also


What I planned to do:

• write something about reading Cole
  
• take photographs of his book

What I hadn't planned to do:

• think about shadow
  
• post an old poem

Resonance: that is how Blind Spot is working on me. And why, for now, it is so valuable.