watching the flowers wither today. They are here, in my face, on the table. Letting go of their original selves. And i see the Beauty of this….around the glass, fallen petals….still in the glass, petals that are becoming dry and thin and i think about my friend Dora. Back in the day, when we took the drawing classes from Kay, Kay Gould Caskey, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, once the classes were in Dora's apartment. There would always be bouquets. In all their forms…new, intermediate and then fading fading fading into paper thin. Dora and i loved the paper thin. These we would spend hours drawing…pencil.
i've written about Dora before. I think way back when there was the blogspot blog, which is gone now. Dora was a small woman. Her hair was White with always some kind of elegant comb to hold it up and in place. She often wore her Tai Chi things…that she brought back from trips to Japan. So…two memories of Dora are emblematic. One, our love of drawing flowers as they dried and faded into such delicate and paper thin, less than paper thin….. and then one night when i was waiting with her, i forget for what, but we were waiting in a large room. It was at a church i think?, but large. Empty room. With a great wall of windows. Dark outside. Lit softly. And to pass the time of waiting, Dora did her Forms. Her Tai Chi forms. Small woman, white hair, pined with a silver comb, indigo design jacket and pants, her forms. Her forearm had numbers tatooed…from the camp in Germany. Watching her, forgetting to breathe, forgetting to swallow so that a slender thread of saliva hung down my chin and on to my chest.
windthread 
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