Total eclipse of the moon, freewrite

We watched a total eclipse of the moon from Treasure Island. The moon was like a Oreo cookie. The moon dangled over the Bay bridge, and the shadows nibbled with a dark hunger, until only the Sea of Tranquility was visible. I don’t know if it really is the sea, a swirling land formation at the top of the moon was more visible than normal. Hunters moon, being eaten by its prey and Samhain on its heels.

Time to remember the dead and offer their names up for the end of the year. That tradition got thoroughly bungled and swallowed in the Christian struggle against paganism, it got mired down and mixed up a couple of months. And everybody thinking January is the new year but it’s really November 1, All Saints’ Day. Then the second holiday was needed for all the souls who didn’t quite make it to heaven because they needed more time to work off their sins—as if they were on the moon, swallowed by the light by the shadow. Obscure and unseen. 

The Chinese said the red moon was a Dragon’s blood moon. A baleful red eye in the sky, watching all the people lined up in city canyons to peer through telescopes, as the moon verged on red, as if balancing atop the Transamerica building. Some said the red moon was bad luck, but red is the color of good fortune, the color of brides and the color of wealth.  

The bride of a moon peeking out from behind the earths’s shadow is shedding a wealth of light on us, no red moon of war. Everyone out on the streets is a little bit crazy and pointing at the moon, checking up on it, as if it wasn’t to be believed, or trusted and wondering where the man in the moon went. Full moon over Geary Street and a baleful dragon’s eye, bloodshot and drunk on all the smog.

10/29/04 Writers’ Group

What was in the attic? freewrite

God only knows what was up in the attic. It sounded like chains being dragged across the two by fours, someone shuffling convict chains, but we were far from the south, or the old world. This house is too new for ancient shenanigans a la Lady Rochester. Wrong continent, wrong coast for this sort of thing. An occasional thump punctuated each step as if someone were dragging a body down the back stairs, the head banging on each step. Only thing is, we don’t have a back stairs coming down from the attic, only a trap door, but I kept my eye on it just in case. 

The stove pipe was an echo chamber. I could hear the sporadic barking of a lazy watchdog, who felt obligated to bark a staccato at specific intervals. An owl practiced his calls. There was a faint SSS sound swishing—was it trees or bats or rain falling? A musty, damp smell as if from the grave, but then the attic grew ominously quiet. I didn’t know what was worse the noise, or the silence. 

Grandma told me ghost stories about how the dead preferred glamorous castles to a lone farmhouse in the country. The sound of something coming closer was directly overhead now. What could it be? A raccoon? My grandmother rose from the couch to refill her cup of tea in the kitchen. The ceiling bulged and groaned, and the sheetrock gave way. An avalanche of water and plaster cascaded down onto the couch where she was sitting just minutes before.

10/29/2004 Writers’ Group

Indiana Review Collaboration/Collage project Elemental Portraits

The Indiana Review
Collaboration/Collage 

Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

THE COLLABORATION/COLLAGE PROCESS:

Poet Maureen Hurley and pianist-composer Kirk Whipple first met during a series of Soviet-American cultural exchange programs in the USSR and the USA. Whipple, who studied at the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, performed in the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, Moscow, U.S.S.R., while Hurley was giving poetry readings and facilitating poetry and art exchanges in Moscow, Leningrad, and Cherkassy, a city near Kiev.

Hurley and Whipple performed together for Sister City cultural events in Sonoma County, California. During a series of benefit concerts, Hurley wrote several poems based on Kirk Whipple’s performances which won several awards and fellowships. Whipple approached Hurley with the idea to collaborate from the ground floor: to create poems as he was developing and composing a series of nocturnes for two pianos, compositions inspired by Chopin’s set of nocturnes for solo piano. Whipple is executive director, and co-founder with wife, Marilyn Morales, of the Unconservatory, Inc. (1988). Each of the individual pieces from Elemental Portraits were inspired by people very close to the composer or who were affiliated with the Unconservatory.

Hurley and Whipple met during 1992-1996 to collaborate on the musical compositions. First, Whipple played a piece in progress and Hurley freewrote to it. She interviewed him where he shared his musical composition book of dreams, conversations, observations, songlines, and musical phrases… She then interviewed the people who inspired each of the eleven Nocturnes. When the pieces were completed, she wove together a collage of the three strands of storyline, observation and impression.

In 1995, Whipple, Morales and Hurley premiered five of the nocturnes. In 1996, during the debut of the complete set of the eleven nocturnes, Hurley was in a serious accident, and was unable to perform, so Whipple and Morales debuted the entire set without her, and later recorded the nocturnes in 1999 at the University of Miami. In 2002, the duo, Whipple, & Morales, released their first commercially available recording of Elemental Portraits. Between 2002 and 2004, the groundwork was laid for a premier performance of the collaboration which took place in Miami, Florida, during May of 2004. A live presentation featuring the spoken poetry and performances of the nocturnes which were performed at concert halls, universities, schools, and television studios throughout southwest Florida. We were featured artists on PBS/WLRN’s “ArtStreet” with Marilyn Porte, which aired in June, 2004.

To Whom it May Concern:
Enclosed please find:
Poems “Elemental Portraits”
by Maureen Hurley

First page of sheet music for each piece
by Kirk Whipple, composer
8035 SW 26th Street
Miami, FL 33155
pianistas2@aol.com
(305) 266-9673

CD Music recording
CD jacket & postcard flyer
of “Elemental Portraits:
Nocturnes for Two Pianos”
performed by Kirk Whipple
and Marilyn Morales, Duo Pianists