All in how you look at it...

While we were in New England last month we stopped off in Middlebury, VT, to visit a gallery that sometimes carries my work.  The waters around the state were still pretty high from Hurricane Irene, so this waterfall in the center of town was definitely roiling.  Not dangerous at all, but the way the picture looks kind of suggests it might be...

We also passed through Hanover, NH, and stopped off to pay a brief visit to my ex-husband, who teaches music at Dartmouth.  He mentioned he'd played in a benefit for Hurricane Irene victims with Aerosmith guitar great Joe Perry, so when his sister posted clips of the concert on Facebook I decided to check it out -- after all, I haven't seen the man play in probably 30 years.

That's one of the odd things about a divorce, isn't it -- that some parts of your life just disappear?  I used to be a total jazz groupie, and spent most of my spare time listening to him play music in all the various venues -- with local bands, with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, with Ray Charles and Stan Kenton...  But these days I rarely listen to live music; the jazz concert we went to Friday night (a performance by the daughter of a dear friend whose husband often played bass with my ex) was the first live jazz I've heard in years...

Anyway (get to the point, girl!) I listened to these clips, which included Joe Perry singing Bob Dylan's Man of Peace, and realized I was pretty hard on myself (and, indirectly, my Baptist grandmother) for that poem I wrote yesterday (I'm leaving it in the sidebar on the left in case you don't remember it).  Because when I went back and read it after listening to the Dylan song, it could just have easily been a blues tune as a hymn.  Maybe it's time to stop flagellating myself for the way rhythm tends to take over my poetry, and think of the poems as songs, instead... After all, with a musician mom and a musician ex-husband, it shouldn't be surprising that the music still hums in me.

Speaking of Facebook, I posted a picture this morning of my daughters, and the younger one untagged herself because she hated how her face looked.  Which is weird, because I LOVE that photo, and love her energy in it.  I guess -- like the suggestion of floodwaters in the above photo, and the is-it-a-hymn-or-the-blues of that poem -- it's all in how you look at it.

Here, by the way, is the Dylan/Joe Perry clip; that's my ex on the sax: