Drawing

my favorite one

.It’s four in the morning again. Both dogs woke from a sound sleep and started barking half an hour ago. Must be a bear out there. I’d be writing now, if I were still writing. Crazy hours to be awake were always fruitful. Instead, I drank some orange juice, smoked a cigarette and grabbed my box of color. My paper. A piece of cardboard. I haven’t been able to write, so I started to draw. I don’t know how to draw.

I make the same things over and over. Green leafy trees and flowering trees and dead trees and sometimes there’s sky and grass. I draw strange creatures made of whatever my hand does when it does what it wants to. A mother creature, and her child, both with long beaks, which are touching in an ersatz kiss. Or a human mother holding her child’s hand, made of what look to me like puzzle pieces. The same things over and over. Once, a child holding an umbrella, beautiful crystally things falling out of the sky. I like them, because luckily I am fond of imperfection. But I’m in a rut. I want the next thing to turn up, the way it does with writing. Wait! I keep forgetting. There’s a big branch in a corner of the kitchen that looks like antlers. Willie was burning leaves and fallen branches when I noticed the shape, and he pulled it out of the fire for me. Months ago. I do want to draw that. Or try to, at least. I have to bring a chair over to sit next to it.

I miss writing. I have no new fixations to explore. Words dry up as soon as they arrive, or they come in the blur of a cyclone. Maybe I’ve dried up. The part of my mind that roams around doesn’t do that anymore. It is hung up on the way this country is being run. Run is the wrong word, stolen from us is more accurate. Made war on it, made war with it.

Dogs are sleeping now. I’ll lie down again. Start on the antlers tomorrow