Works Presented

I Met God Last Night		Carvings of the Heart
Cycles		tool making
The Fabric of My Life

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I met God last night. I am sure it was God, or maybe Fate, or Destiny or maybe whatever you want to call it. They say when you meet God, He looks like just what you expect Him to look like. And maybe I did expect to meet Charleton Heston in flowing robes of radiant white, only maybe not quite so Anglo-Saxon blond. And maybe I did expect to hear some combination of James Earl Jones and John Huston in his voice. But He didn't sound like that and He didn't look like that and He wasn't even a he.

You know the Ancient Greeks believed the Fates were three sisters, were spinners An ancient mother, a young girl, and a woman of middle years One gathered the stuff of life into a thread and one turned the bobbin, winding up the thread and one stood between with scissors waiting to cut life off.

But I was talking about God. You ever see an old Black woman sitting at bus stop. She's not even Black or brown anymore, but kind of gray. And she's sitting there like a caricature, Like "Oprah Winfrey in a Halloween costume" -old. And she's wearing an old faded dress of some sort of blue-green neither blue nor green in sort of swirls or splotches on a background that used to be white. It's supposed to be a shirt-waist dress Like Donna Reed used to wear. And maybe the old woman used to be fat, heavier Like maybe she has been sick or something and lost weight or maybe the dress used to belong to someone who was heavier Because it just hangs on her now, way too big and its worse because she lost the belt a long time ago and just sort of lets the dress hang. And she's wearing a white sweater--sort of white, and a string of dime store pearls with the finish chipped, and one of those hats that used to be in fashion in the fifties, the ones that have felt covered wire to make them stand up on top of your head, the sort of hat that used to have a nylon veil, but that's gone and the pink starched flowers started looking sad two decades ago. And she's wearing white nurses shoes because they are comfortable her feet with their thick ankles that seem as wide at the knee as they are all the way down stuck in white shoes. The children make fun of her legs. They call her elephant legs because they sort of look like that. And they probably got thick from standing too much at kitchen sinks, from kneeling too much on hard floors when she washed them, from the way gravity draws everything down to the bottom. 'Just wait until you get old.' And her eyes are pink. Not because she's been crying or sad Because she's not sad at all and besides she's cried all the tears she could own, ever would own over the injustice of life and ignorance of people that should have known better. Her eyes are just pink where they should be white and runny with liquid and some days they hurt her a bit.

You know Ghandi spun the thread to make his own clothes. He used an old-fashioned spinning wheel and would sit by the hour turning the thread. I've seen pictures. He said it was mind clearing to spin the thread. I don't remember ever seeing him sitting at a loom though.

Okay, so that's what God looked like. She was sitting at a sewing machine. Her large flat hands, pink showing with more skin than they needed resting on the fabric she was guiding through the sewing machine And the needle going up and down, here fast, here slow, but in even stitches, stitches all the same and the machine humming and the wheels turning the way sewing machines do.

And God was making sort of a patchwork cover. It was made of patches of cloth of all kinds, like Joseph's cloak only all one expanse of cloth. And I didn't really like looking at some of the patches because the fabric seemed way too familiar. And God said to me: "Your life aint finished yet, chil' I'm still sewin' on it." And she kept right on piecing and sewing as she spoke. And her voice sounded like that lady Florida from the old TV show Maude, or like Maya Angelou, kind of flowing and soft and liquid, a voice that drags you into its rhythm and pitch with the kindness that means mother unconditional. And I put my arms around her shoulders and I gave her a hug, and I said: "Please don't hurry."

Anyway, that's what it was like meeting God last night.

(Written: October 18, 1999)

AngelPie_Mouse (J.B) © Copyright, 1999; All Rights Reserved

The line is drawn upon my skin, near where I connected to the past, near where I drew sustainance and nurture-- though this is gone now. I will feed no more. The knife, not the fine blade of the surgeon, but the pointed awl of the kitchen drawer scores me deeply, penetrating to my heart, and working round in jagged stabs sunders the last vestage of my parent limb. My heart is now exposed.

An eager hand reaches in. My inner most self, torn, ripped... My entrails are pulled out between cruel fingers, lurging and kneading my marrow to imcomprehensible matter. The sinew and fibre of my inner being are removed and deposited in a bowl for disposal or other darker purpose. I cry, but no one hears me. "Oh, my children seed, lost."

The pain continues. When I have been scraped to the depth of my interior pink rind, my smooth and polished surface shall be cut I shall be forced to wear some silly, broken smile, glowing in the night; to become kin to "hills like white elephants" and of such unflowering potency.

(Written: October 25, 1999)

AngelPie_Mouse (J.B) © Copyright, 1999; All Rights Reserved

The Hoop of the Nations is round-- like the earth is round, like the bowl of the sky is round, like the seasons turn round. What goes around, comes around; All things touch upon each other.

No room for a linear equation. Geometry is meaningless without angles.

We could blame it on Pythagorus. Two thousand years of building boxes, Of figuring the angles-- approximating dimensions finer and finer, lopping off what doesn't fit the square. PI and tripod, compass and rule and clocks. We'll make measures to fit the occassion or make the occassion fit the measures. We calculate and plot and replot all we touch. We know how many angels dance upon the pinhead. We know the hour the earth began, the minute, the second. We know the number of particles of salt in the sea. We are the particles of salt in the sea.

The Hoop of the Nations is round-- like the earth is round, like the bowl of the sky is round, like the seasons turn round. What goes around, comes around. It doesn't have an end unless we make it fit a linear equation.

AngelPie_Mouse (J.B) © Copyright, 1999; All Rights Reserved