Tag Archives: Daily Prompt

Clothes Make the Man, but Women Make the Clothes

8 Replies

Click on first photo to enlarge all.

Clothes Make the Man but Women Make the Clothes

In matters of both clothes and hair
we profit from the use of flair.
A scarf, a pin, a tilted hat
reveal that we are more than what

we choose to put upon our heads
or bodies, for our hats or threads
too often conceal  form or hair,
not showing what is under there.

Sometimes it’s an improvement, true:
our hair dyed an unfortunate hue
or bodies altered by midnight trips
kitchenward that spread our hips.

This gown I wear is brilliant red,
It spreads around me in my bed—
ankle-length and numinous,
free-flowing and voluminous .

I obscure my  trunk and limbs in it.
My zaftig form just swims in it.
It makes me feel petite and small.
Inside, I’m hardly there at all!

When I awaken, I’m not alert,
throw off the covers, unwind the skirt
from where it’s twisted round my legs,
I yawn and blink to expunge the dregs

of sleep from everywhere it tries
to prolong my dreams and clot my eyes.
It’s in the bathroom where I see
 I’ve made this gown uniquely me.

My reflection in the bathroom glass
shows its brilliant red en masse.
Its designer’s plan I clearly flout,
for I wear it inside out.

 

Want more hats?  Look HERE.

Again, I’ve gone shopping in my poetry closet. This one repeated from three years ago. The prompt today is blink.

Blink

9 Replies

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Blink

I don’t really need ESP to know what you are thinking,
for when I ask, “Should I wear this?” your left eyelid starts blinking
like it does whenever you tell a little fib;
and I can tell your “It looks great!” sounds a little glib.
That’s how I know without a doubt you’re spinning a fine yarn;
and that, in fact, in this dress I must look wide as a barn.

If you say this dish is great but feed most to the dogs—
if you say I’m clever but you rarely read my blogs—
if you “want” to get together but we rarely do—
I’ve already read the clues to ascertain your view.
Yet, still I have the option to see the other side
and find a way to look at it that will preserve my pride.

Your eye might blink because a gnat got caught in it just now,
and so I do not really look as broad as any cow.
He just has a small appetite. Her eyesight might be failing.
She might be out of town and when she gets home from her sailing,
she’ll call me up and we will meet and have a laugh or two.
Without this ESP I really get to choose my view
of believing what I want to in spite of what I’ve guessed.
When it comes to friendship, less clarity is best!

 

Not many of you were around four years ago when I first wrote this poem so here it is again, out for review. The daily prompt word is blink.

Shock!!!

1 Reply

If you’d like to read how I shocked every souk owner on my block when I lived in Ethiopia in 1973/74, read this old post from three years ago:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/10/10/coffee-with-no-ceremony/

The prompt today is shock.

Poetry Pie (A Recipe)

19 Replies

DSC00172

Poetry Pie

Pick an armful of fresh words from the poet tree.
Trim off dry leaves. Dispose of the ordinary or over-ripe.
Choose words that flower when juxtaposed.
Choose tiny clinging bees that sting.
Choose pollen-dusted blossoms that make you sneeze.
Choose agile leaves that swing when you breathe on them.
Staunch stalks that do not budge.
Throw them in a vase so that they fall where they want to go,
then rearrange to suit your fancy.

Admire your arrangement
as you bring a stock to boil.
This stock consists of honey and vinegar,
water to float the theme,
lightly peppered with adjectives
and salted with strong verbs.

When the water boils, break nouns from your bouquet.
Tender stalks may be sliced to syllables, but leave the flowers whole.
Do not cook too long lest they be too weak to chew upon.

Scoop with a wire ladle and lay on parchment to drain.
Arrange on a bed of crushed hopes pre-baked with future expectations.
Pile to the plate rim, then sift through and remove most of what you’ve put there.
Fill up to the top and beyond with whipped dreams. Careful, not too sweet.

Put on the shelf to gel.
The crust will grow crustier.
The whipped cream will not fall,
but some of the words will rise to the top and blow away.
Others will sink to the bottom and become so mired in crust
that they will stick to the cheeks and teeth of all who sample your pie,
and this is what you want.

This pie will not be to the taste of all
and there may not be enough of it to satisfy the taste of others,
but it will be a pie that satisfies you,
and others may become addicted enough
to order it now and then
in spite of that shelf
of so many delectable pies.
Perhaps because it is tenacious.
Perhaps because it suits their idiosyncratic taste.
Perhaps because of its placement, front and center,
so it meets the eye.

Whatever the reason, whether to the taste of many or few,
it will be there for so long as the cook holds out
and the poet tree stands and keeps blooming.

Poet Pie.  Special this week.
Comes with a big napkin and no fork
so you’ll need to eat it with you hands
and suck it from your fingers.

It will run down your arms
and cause your elbows to stick to the table,
drip from your chin onto your shirtfront,
adorning you like splatters down the fronts
of old ladies in voile dresses.
It will adorn the beards of the hirsute,
hide the pimples of preteens,
make ruby red the lips
of little girls too young for lipstick,
cause the drying lips of old women
to swell as though Botoxed.

It will cause tongues to wag
and fingers to write poetry of their own
in the air or on paper or perhaps
merely in minds
infected by the addictive
nature of poet pie.
You can both smell and taste it.
Feel on your fingers.  Hear its
tender branches crunch between
your teeth–those parts of the poem
that hold the whole together.

That poem that perhaps holds your life together
for the minutes you consume it
and further moments when you try to wash it from your beard
or fingers or chin or shirtfront,
and fail.  So a part of the poem goes with you.
Some may notice it and try to scrub it from your chin.
Others may not be able to resist,
and in wiping off its sweetness from where it has streaked your arm,
may put their fingers to their mouths to taste it themselves
and may be suffused with a yearning for a piece of their own.

Or, say, perhaps, “Not to my taste,”
which leaves more poetry pie for you.

 

Look familiar? If you were around three years ago, perhaps you read it before. Let me know if you found it worth reading again and made it this far. The prompt today is agile.

Loophole

2 Replies

IMG_4380
Loophole

Although he was the man for her—the one that she adored,
there was a loophole in their love affair, a clause in their accord.
So while into their union all her energies she poured,
feathering her true love’s nest, he wandered and explored.

She scraped windows with razor blades and scoured the kitchen floor
as he was off adventuring, in search of fresh amor.
It seemed for him their love affair was simply a temporal
exercise of pleasure genitalial and clitoral.

So as she labored, scrubbing at their tabletops and flooring,
he was engaged in other tasks of nightclubbing and whoring.
Their end was as you might predict. Her life became a bore,
so she exercised her loophole and threw him out the door!

The prompt today was loophole.

Wood, Paper, Stone

35 Replies

daily life color048 Version 2

Lately, several people have asked to see what I as doing before I moved to Mexico and started making retablos and writing this blog.  When I searched for the word “study,” today’s prompt word, in my blog files, this blog published four years ago was one of the posts that came up and since it fulfills both purposes, I’m going to run it again.

My story begins in 1985 when I went to a coffee house in Santa Monica, CA for a poetry reading. It was an interesting situation–a dual reading between a local poet I’d never heard read before and his ex-girlfriend who also happened to be pregnant with his child.  Although they had broken up and she had gone back to her estranged husband, the two of them were reading love poetry they had written to each other!!!  Need I mention that it was a packed house?  At any rate, if you’ve read my book, you know that it was love at first sight on my part.  I not only thought he was gorgeous,but his poetry was smart and funny and real and I felt I knew him from the first time I saw him.

A year and a few months later, we were married and moved to northern California where the living was cheaper and where I intended to get a teaching job to augment his early retirement (from teaching) income so he could finally become the full time artist he’d always wanted to be. Prior to moving northwards and actually prior to our marriage, when I experienced writer’s block, the man whose poetry workshop we both attended had suggested that my problem was that I “knew” too much about writing. (I had been teaching literature and writing for 10 years prior to moving to CA to write myself.)  He said the  cure would be to try an artistic discipline other than writing that I knew nothing about–in my case, art.  But I couldn’t draw or paint, I protested. So, he suggested I go to the dime store and buy a bunch of “stuff” and just play around with collage.

So, this is what I did, assembling a half dozen or so collages out of the most unlikely  materials–rubber mice, cut up thin metal jam and butter lids I’d collected on a European vacation, confetti,  paper sculptures I’d cut out of pages of old poems.  I know. Weird.  I remember one of the titles was, “Party mouse wants to come out to play, but can’t.”

Jack, our writing guru, had said to bring my results to show him at the next workshop, but I was embarrassed and so left my collages in the car when I came up to class. When it was my turn to present, he asked if I’d done as he instructed and I admitted I’d left them into the car. “Go and get them,” he directed and because he was our God and because no one ever didn’t mind Jack, I went to get them.  They were well-received, to my great surprise, and one woman who worked in a downtown L.A. gallery even offered  to exhibit them.  No, way, I protested, but I have  continued to do art of one sort or another ever since.

After we moved to the Santa Cruz area, Bob did art full time until his death 14 years later.  I never did get that teaching job.  Instead I studied metal smithing and became a jewelry maker and paper maker.  We made our living doing arts and crafts shows for the next 13 years, each doing our own thing–me, jewelry and him sculpture and ikebana vases–but in addition, we collaborated on art lamps that were constructed from river stones, bamboo, willow, basket making materials and my handmade washi paper.  Bob did the wood and stone work. I made the paper from mulberry bark and applied it and in some cases designed and constructed the entire lamp of liana, bamboo, my handmade paper and various natural materials. Some of those lamps are pictured below:

lamps 1

We sold hundreds of these lamps, each one totally unique and although we sold every one we ever made, they were extremely time-consuming and hard to transport. We were not becoming rich, but we were doing exactly what we wanted to and making art exactly according to our own esthetic, not catering to fashion or what would sell. Eventually, I started to make my own lamps as well as doing all of the paper and application of paper for his and continuing to design and make jewelry.

At one show, a man actually came in and bought our entire booth.  Every lamp, ikebana vase and every piece of jewelry!!  That, I must say, was the highlight of our joint careers.

When Bob died and I moved to Mexico, it was the end of my lamp building career. I let each of his kids choose a lamp and sculpture, I saved two lamps for myself, sold the rest, and went on to the next stage of my life.  But, since we did so many  shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco, I developed this very strange compulsion which consisted of looking for our lamps in every TV show and movie that I’ve watched since then.  I had this feeling that one day I would see one of our lamps as part of the set for a movie.

Bob died in 2001, but, still, my eyes sweep the background of each movie scene.  I must admit I do the same with magazines, and actually, thirteen years ago when I thumbed through an issue of House and Garden that had a friend’s garden on the cover, I suddenly had an overwhelming sense that one of our lamps was inside.  I looked and looked.  Nothing.  Then, I concentrated on a many-page spread of the gardens surrounding a house outside of Santa Fe and when I looked closer, I realized it was the house of the man who had bought out our entire booth in Tucson–so although they didn’t show, the house pictured as the backdrop of the gardens actually was filled with our lamps!!!  I know.  Stretching it, but still.

Anyway, we are about to come to the end of this very wandering tale.  Last night I watched a movie I’ve been putting off seeing for years.  My friend and I had just spent two hours trying unsuccessfully to link my MacBook Air and my Samsung Smart TV.  I was exhausted and decided to just watch Netflix on my computer. Not feeling like scrolling through a hundred different films, I  clicked on “Life of Crime” with Jennifer Aniston.  The movie was actually rather engaging and not the slapstick comedy I had envisioned, and I stayed the course.  And it was in the very last scene that it happened.  As the antagonist female was heading for the bathroom, there on the back wall was what looked like –ONE OF MY LAMPS!!!  Four different times, I got glimpses of it.  When the movie ended (great ending by the way) I replayed the last 5 minutes.  Tried to freeze frame.  Scrunched my eyes up.  Yes!  I was so sure it was one of my own small lamps–not one we’d collaborated on, but one of the first I’d done where I’d done my own design, execution and even the wiring.

Of course, I told Forgottenman, who happens to live 1500 miles away but whom I talk to at length via Skype each day.  A few minutes later, he Skyped, “Is it this one?” with a perfect screen shot of the  lamp.  Yes, indeed it was.  I remembered thinking I should cover the cord up with something.  I remembered hand drying the paper with a hairdryer so it would shrink over the willow branches.  I remembered binding it tightly with wax linen and spraying it with fire retardant.  I remember making the handmade label and where I tied it on–at the bottom where the willow branches joined.

So, though I may have flaked out and quit the actor’s studio I attended while I was in L.A. studying film production and film writing—retreating  with my tail between my legs as soon as casting directors actually started coming to see what we were up to—there was one of my lamps, bravely rising to the occasion–hanging securely on the wall and facing up to the camera like the star I knew it would one day be. Like a proud parent, I bask in its reflected glory.

It is one of my humble little lamps, non-assuming and plain, but here it is below, for all the world to see:    

Version 2imgo (1)

As well as a few  more elaborate lamps by Bob Brown & Judy Dykstra-Brown made of Stone, wood, handmade washi paper, waxed linen and willow.

daily life color056 daily life color053 daily life color052 daily life color051

The prompt word today is study.

In the Blood (Entertainment?)

7 Replies

In the Blood!!!

Don’t you just love football—the running and the tackling?
The sounds of hamstrings pulling and the crunch of femurs crackling?
We sit up in the bleachers eating hot dogs, drinking beer,
comfortably viewing blood sport—the kind we hold so dear.

Aren’t dogfights lovely–the growling and the whining?
Too bad they aren’t more elite, so we could watch while dining.
So amusing watching canines being dished their due.
Dying is so entertaining when it isn’t you!

Better still are bullfights, though they’re few and far between.
The bull so lithe and dangerous, the matador so lean.
The best part of the sport is that the dying is so slow.
I feel its thrill suffuse me from my head down to my toe.

We adore big game hunting in such exotic lands–
our chance to prove our manliness with our own two hands–
handing over money to those trackers in the know
who guarantee an easy kill with rifle or with bow.

Easy on the hunter, but not the animal,
for just because he’s hit the prey’s not guaranteed to fall.
We get more for our money if he’s hard to track,
and war games are more pleasant when one’s foe doesn’t shoot back!

All these minor titillations just a prelude to
the main event and the most major way of counting coup.
Once all the good old boys are finding life is just a bore,
they round up all the younger men and send them off to war.

See how the valiant struggle, see their stripes and purple hearts–
apt pay for missing arms and legs and other blown off parts.
Lucky to be home at last and lucky to be living–
the products of that blood sport that just somehow keeps on giving

Repost of a poem from 3 1/2  years ago.  Crocodile photo new!  More to follow. The prompt today is entertain.

Staying Afloat

5 Replies

Enlarge all photos by clicking on any photo.

Staying Afloat

The days my life is not erratic
are the days it is too static.
I need an leavening in life—
a lessening of loss and strife—
that doesn’t store me in the attic.

Retirement is not intended
to designate a life as ended.
I’d like some fun and some pizazz
aside from knitting and Shiraz.
I’d like my salad days extended.

Turn off the news. Turn up the notes.
I prefer hearing what emotes.
There is coverage enough
of Donald Trump and other stuff.
I’m tired of inane Twitter quotes!

Bring in the band and serve the drinks.
One’s only as old as she thinks.
I’ll move my body, move my mind.
(True, my brain  more than my behind.)
For what is static is what sinks.

The prompt today is static.

An Evocation

2 Replies

(Enlarge all photos by clicking on any photo.)

An Evocation

Your life catches in its static house.
Nothing but the lightest footfall betrays its presence.
The door to escape, the ocean’s edge,
tempts you to leave yourself and enter.
This echo of the ocean is the dove in you
that carries the message that you want to fly.

Motionless dove, I want to flush you
to the crack of sunrise—to its flower.
Forget your lone compulsions.
Leave your comfort.
Desert the logic that has frozen you.

If you could let this sick time pass,
you might grow less diverted as your distance from it grows.
Time’s ricochet might drive you to the canyon’s rim,
revealing to you that you no longer fear the fall.

The stress of guilt slows down and if you choose to let it, lags behind.
You will pass and repass it on your round journey,
until its memories finally fall away.

Time will devour your guilt, no matter how grand its scale,
revoke its sentence and set the guilty free.


This poem, much edited since I first wrote it five years ago, is a “distilled poem.” The distilled poem can have any  line length or meter, rhymed or unrhymed. The only “rule” is that each stanza must have one less line than the stanza before it.  If you want to play along, send me a link to your poem.

The prompt word today is evoke.

for the dVerse Poets Pub

Carve

10 Replies

I’m at the beach and my friend Rachel is leaving soon so we need to go to breakfast, since I turned the fridge up too high and it froze everything–eggs, milk, butter. With no time to do a new post right now, this is a reblog of a piece from three years ago that is appropriate for the prompt today, which is carve.

Cast in Potato Salad, Carved in Stone

daily life color083 (2)
Cast in Potato Salad, Carved in Stone

The last thing I ever thought I would do would be to pose for a nude sculpture, but when I married a sculptor, I guess it was inevitable.  Since I never had children, this probably marked the longest period in my life that I ever lay nude being observed by a second party.  I remembered having no reservations about doing so, in spite of the fact that I am really rather modest–that is about revealing myself physically. Words are another matter all together.

My husband first sculpted me in plasticine clay. (No, not the ubiquitous Sculpey, but a very dense artist’s clay used to make the originals for bronze casting.) He then made a plaster mold followed by a rubber reverse mold that would enable him to make further plaster molds once he destroyed the plasticine original so he could reuse the plasticine.  After mastering the intricacies of wood carving, bronze casting, welding, clay, sandblasting, paper making and stone carving, he was in a difficult spot.  A tool junkie, he had already purchased or made every tool necessary for working in these media. How could he justify buying any more tools or building another studio addition to add to the seven studios he had already set up?

The answer came when our artist friend Diana moved to town.  Her medium was cast glass and Bob soon became fascinated with the process.  Of course, this necessitated the purchase of dozens of large jars of different colored glass casting pellets as well as books, chemicals and other supplies necessary for the process. Unfortunately, we already owned a large kiln, so he couldn’t justify buying a new pristine kiln to be used only for the melting of glass.  True, some molecules of clay might permeate the glass castings, but he decided at least for his first project, to use our existing kiln.

I can’t remember what his first few castings were, but after a few experiments, he decided that his first large glass project would be–ta da–a glass casting of his recumbent nude wife!

The thing was, this necessitated ordering a good deal more glass, and in the meantime, he had this wonderful rubber mold just sitting there unused!  He tried to busy himself with carving stone and wood, but meanwhile that mold beckoned!  Enter fate in the guise of the next show at the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center, where we were both members.  And the next show was—Edible Art!  In addition to food-centered art themes, there was to be a cookbook of artists’ favorite recipes and the piece de resistance was an edible category, to be consumed at the reception!!!  Thus it was that I came to be cast in potato salad–first molded in “the” well-washed and disinfected rubber mold  and then fine-sculpted by Bob’s hands.

I must admit I felt some trepidation about first being viewed nude, then being consumed by my fellow artists and friends.  This smacked of the Donner party or some sort of sixties orgy, but how we suffer for our art.  I requested Bob not reveal who his model was and all went well.  Later, the judge told us that he would have won first place for edible art if I had not forgotten and used some of the water I used to boil the eggs to add moisture to the potato salad. I had forgotten that I always put a half cup of salt in the water to seal the eggs in case they cracked during the boiling process and that addition made the potato salad totally inedible.  The judges could do nothing but award his sculpture fourth place prize in place of first, right ahead of a jellybean mosaic in the Byzantine style, but behind my third place for my “Garden of Earthly delights!”

Yes, the glass grains did arrive and yes he cast the sculpture, but what happened during the further fiasco of my chain of nude effigies must be left to another time and post lest this one grow too long for certain (unnamed) friends to read.    Suffice it to say that once cast in potato salad, twice in glass, it seems only appropriate that my grave be marked by my magnificent if inedible body rendered into stone!!!  It will be the sensation of my little town, I can promise you.
daily life color084 (4)Version 2(photos and copy above taken from the Valley Press)