10/9/08 image prompt, a poem, and marcia abigail ryder

We’ll call this painting this week’s image prompt. I’m in Agua Prieta, Mexico, on the border with Arizona with a group of UWC-USA students who are doing a week-long Border Issues study. Internet is sketchy so while I have it I’ll say a few things, but first a picture and then a poem. More about Border Issues in another post.

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Poem for the Family

What so deeply underlies our baseline conceptions that fathom weights turn in circles and loops, like one who seeks hope in the ocean, swimming in waters far beyond waters we know? What overarches our thinking from such a far distance we can only guess… Maybe…. as above, so below?   What holds us here like the unknown unseeable holds the mosaic total?

Father swings through the trees, he wrestles crocodiles, white men, personal demons. I see a small jewel – green hills and blue ocean – rotating inside the compass of heaven. Fine silver threads in circles and spirals, fractured pinpoints of gold, ruby and emerald hang in a canopy of velvet. The absence of light does not equal darkness, sight shatters on far-away anvils and leaves hammer shards, finally silent.

Through transparent eyelids I watch a sandstorm cover the sun. Twilight rides not on light but whips around from darkness, a rude wind marshaling vast killing wings. Between sight and knowing are clear jelly curtains and outside, the mean blur of teeth. The wind is an iron-framed plow, a rusty, steaming, oil -flecked  stallion with shoes of blue steel, throwing up sand, clacking, spitting and clattering. It is a torn accordion,

wheezing and whistling, entropy compressed and then tortured through ripped leather fittings. The wind hits the dunes with cutting fists of diamond. It is here that my mother nurses her husband. She waits down the wind, the triumph of darkness, the blowing sand peeling skin, carving bones. The wind grinds the rocks down. Mother swings Father onto the wind and leaps on behind him. She seizes a good night not to go

gentle in and leans to the stallion’s ear hissing: is this the worst you can do, evil thing?  A maniac riding a maniac wind, heels hard in his ribcage, fists in his mane, holding a man who is dying. She drives her heels in and spurs the wind on, into the well of souls that they came from. The wind sends it’s unrest, it’s hornets and locusts but nothing remains here to kill or consume except death, and death is dying. Time has unrolled

to its end over nothing and no new myth comes. No milk streams through space from her breasts, no planets or galaxies spring from her forehead or anus and he’s just crazy, with crazy thoughts, like: the son beside the elephant is so small, yet the elephant obeys him. Higher now than she has ever been, she holds her husband through the driest time. The black wings of another wind sweep down around them.

The ground turns upside down and vanishes. The stars take their place in the sand. Silence and stillness replace sound and movement and now the unteaching, in earnest, begins.

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I wrote this poem when my father was dying. I am posting it now because it came to mind as I was thinking about the recent passing of my friend, Marcia Ryder.

Marcia Abigail Ryder, 1952 – 2008.

Marcia was a native of Wellfleet Mass, a ninth generation Cap Codder. She was a painter, a ceramic and enamel artist, a sailor, gardener, art teacher, wife, daughter, sister, friend. She was married to Roger Cole. She died April 1 of this year.

I never thought I would be writing this. I knew Marcia since high school where she was a year behind me and oh so far ahead. I used to check in with her once or twice a year but have been out of touch for these last years and just now when I was looking on the web to see if I could find a current email address I found instead that she had died. This is so sad. Marcia seemed to be made of light. She was a lifelong beacon and inspiration to me and probably to many others.

In high school we had the same tuned-in art teacher, Marcia Sewall, who inspired us to both to careers in the arts. I bumbled my way into mine. Marcia took a more direct route, maybe knowing from the start that she was born to be an artist and a teacher. She taught art in the Kittery, Maine school system for 28 years. She touched and brightened the lives of I don’t know how many kids and teens and grown-ups. I can’t begin to describe her grace and humor, the beauty she radiated and she found in nature and in the people around her.

This picture prompt does not do her justice but it is one of the ones that stands out for me tonight. I hope your week is a good one. Goodnight, Marcia Ryder.