I read my work in Milwaukee
on Saturday night. I concentrated on pieces which were middlewestern, local as hell. My host told me about a country song which had a semi trailer load of art from New York bound for the art-starved middle west turning over on an interstate highway in Nebraska. He got the joke, I got the joke. We don't need your stinkin' art, we don't need no stinkin' badges. We got art of our own. We just need to celebrate it. He was concerned that money - capitalism - is driving out art which does not sell. I told him I believe money is irrelevant - the heart shall create what the heart needs to create. If we wait for money before we do it, it's not art in the first place. I'm not asking that we be starving artists, especially those of us laboring here in the middlewest out of the limelight, but I am saying that if the heart has something to say, something good and true, it will speak. We might have to get up at 4:00 a.m. before we go to our paying jobs, but the heart shall be heard.
No frost on the wind shield this morning. A glass surface, again, to the pond. Blue sky. The moon was just in the west. I can see my breath.
It's the kind of day to take joy. Poplar leaves are turned up and silver; they've not yet come off the trees. Long shadows. My other name would be Running Long Shadow.
North out of Fairwater, just past the Sina pig farm, the strong smell of pig manure. It hangs in my nostrils this morning, acrid but good.
Running Long Shadow falls into emptiness the rest of the drive to work. He dreams the play of dark and light, sun and shadow, today and tomorrow. Then he goes into work. He has sun in his eyes.
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