And life goes on

Our newest grandchild.
Welcome, Sofia!

In Memoriam

John Marshall Lake

11-19-1925 -

08-10-2007

Welcome to the extended family!

Blue was born to Justin and Nikki Berenguel on July 20 and Will was born to Phoebe Moore and her husband on July 14.

Our Newest Denizens

Satire

For wonderful satire, check out Paul Rudnick's columns in "Shouts and Murmurs" on the New Yorker site. Here's a spoof on Intelligent Design:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/26/050926sh_shouts

Exquisite Corpse, Installment 3

Your Fetish is Not Worth Talking About

Delicately I sit, dismembering the peel-off labels.
Did I write grocery lists with such malice?
At times I can’t seem to find my legs. In fact,
they were amputated, though lace veils their absence.
Beneath the serene preoccupation, I bleed.
The others cannot see the gashes
--they’re hidden by the cloth.
But a man of the cloth might peer under
the slippery skirts, scrying so succinctly.

~ASC, JLSC, DLB, LLC

Exquisite Corpse, Installment 2

Where the Truth Lies

The makeup artist worked his magic to hide
rude fact. These three women have been
scraped beautiful and told to look like family,
the oldest kept wrinkled to maintain the illusion
of wisdom and benevolence. But behind
their stretched lips
pulled back in rictus imitation smile, each
line of straight teeth morphs at night
into sharpened fangs,
drinking away years of good deeds:
life on the rocks. The glass is empty, but
the smiles will never reveal the truth.

~LLC, ASC, JLSC, DLB

Exquisite Corpse, Installment 1

Construct Your Own Self-DefenseHe thinks you're a prowler in his summer home
So he paddles in the serene dawn, blind to hidden currents,
unaware that below the glassy surface
an alligator lurks to claim his prey.
Hold back his teeth to keep him away
from the cataract, the lethal fangs of rocks, the certain
pull and force of inevitable falls, just beyond
the grinning hippos and furious rapids, past
the staircase that you used to call home.

~DLB, LLC, ASC, JLSC, 06-03-07

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

c. 1912

to see stunning photographs, visit

http://raabeonline.net/

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon,
at the red branch
of the slow autumn
at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
on the wrinkled body
of the log,
everything carries me to you.
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
towards those isles of yours
that wait for me…

From If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-bio.html

Requiescat In Pacem

GCC, 03-29-11~03-13-07

Dearth

His absence sounds
not like silence
but tremor: final
fugal harmony suspended
in sanctuary's high air

tangible: polished space
on the oak table
where yesterday
a lamp stood

tang that lingers
on the tongue, bitter-
sweet and sharp, when
the plate is empty

no movement in the room,
though the eye's corner sees
dust motes twirl, stirred
by graceful sweep of arm
beyond our perceiving

http://www.legacy.com/Record-Journal/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=86792167

why write?

"One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent."

Stephen Dobyns, in Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

photo (c)raabeonline.net

Lotus Eaters?

Most cats will be sybarites if they have the chance, but these two have raised the tendency to perfection.

http://www.geocities.com/cleospost/poems.htm

Look Beyond

Even hitting a brick wall doesn't mean there's no hope left.




Image courtesy of raabeonline.net (c)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_bvT-DGcWw

At the Gate of Mystery

My cat Sherlock died in April
his twilight-hued pelt stained red,
his gentle length crushed
under the wheels of a silver van.

I saw him last night: perfect,
dream-whole. His fur sleek, he perched
above me on a high hill’s crest.
Behind him, rich September sky,
a low red pine cone-heavy at his side.

He watched a Saint Bernard scrabble
up the steep talus slope, entreating.
Though my ears discerned no purr,
Sherlock’s gaze encompassed dog and me,
his benevolent face promised welcome.

The Cat Who Loved a Tree

Christmas Tree Decoration c.2006

(alias one who stalks decorations)

Forty years ago

Sonnet 1
Through green and gold of woods, a summer’s day,
through stillness broken by a bird in song,
through gentle streamlets, rippling on their way
we loved to walk; the wonder held us long.
On windy hilltops, waiting for the night
we watched the sun go down in fiery skies.
The stars appeared, the full moon came up bright.
We saw all this: its glory filled our eyes.
We climbed the dunes beside the crashing sea
and waded in the waves and dug sand-holes.
The seabirds flying o’er us, proud and free,
sustained the sense of splendor in our souls.
You say we’re blind--God’s far from him and me.
If God is not in beauty, where is He?

1965

a lovely blessing for a writer

…Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

from Jane Hirshfield’s poem “The Poet"

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/563

from "Being Peace" by Thich Nhat Hanh

...The situation of the world is still like this: People completely identify with one side, one ideology. To understand the suffering and the fear of a citizen of the Soviet Union, we have to become one with him or her. To do so is dangerous - we will be suspected by both sides. But if we don't do it, if we align ourselves with one side or the other, we will lose our chance to work for peace. Reconciliation is to understand both sides, to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then to go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side. Doing only that will be a great help for peace… Can the peace movement talk in loving speech, showing the way for peace? I think that will depend on whether the people in the peace movement can be peace. Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people to smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.

http://www.seaox.com/thich.html

Lupine Lessons

My Great-aunt Alice, Miss Rumphius, is very old now. Her hair is very white. Every year there are more and more lupines. Now they call her the Lupine Lady. Sometimes my friends stand with me outside her gate, curious to see the old, old lady who planted the fields of lupines. When she invites us in, they come slowly. They think she is the oldest woman in the world. Often she tells us stories of faraway places.
“When I grow up,” I tell her, “I too will go to faraway places and come home to live by the sea.
“That is all very well, little Alice,” says my aunt, “But there is a third thing you must do.” “What is that?” I ask.
“You must do something to make the world more beautiful."

http://www.barbaracooney.com/

Thinking about Beauty

Regularity [of features] without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing—and indeed repulsive—than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy. It was more disappointing because it promised something that was not there: it should engage the soul, but it did not. It was shallow and meretricious. So Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with her weepy eyes and her lined face, was infinitely more beautiful than…the current icons of feminine beauty?...Of course Mother Teresa was more beautiful—infinitely so. Only a culture with a thoroughly upside-down sense of values could think otherwise.
--Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street

http://www.mccallsmith.com/

New Musical Terms

(with thanks to MusDent for the email containing these gems)
Some new additions to your music dictionaries

ALLREGRETTO When you're 16 measures into the piece and realize you took too fast a tempo
ANGUS DEI To play with a divinely beefy tone
A PATELLA Accompanied by knee-slapping
APPOLOGGIATURA A composition that you regret playing
APPROXIMATURA A series of notes not intended by the composer, yet played with an "I meant to do that" attitude
APPROXIMENTO A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch
CACOPHANY A composition incorporating many people with chest colds
CORAL SYMPHONY A large, multi-movement work from Beethoven's Caribbean Period
DILL PICCOLINI An exceedingly small wind instrument that plays only sour notes
FERMANTRA A note held over and over and over and over and . . .
FERMOOTA A note of dubious value held for indefinite length
FIDDLER CRABS Grumpy string players
FLUTE FLIES Those tiny mosquitos that bother musicians on outdoor gigs
FRUGALHORN A sensible and inexpensive brass instrument
GAUL BLATTER A French horn player
GREGORIAN CHAMP The title bestowed upon the monk who can hold a note the longest
GROUND HOG Someone who takes control of the repeated bass line and won't let anyone else play it
PLACEBO DOMINGO A faux tenor
SCHMALZANDO A sudden burst of music from the Guy Lombardo band
THE RIGHT OF STRINGS Manifesto of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Violists
SPRITZICATO An indication to string instruments to produce a bright and bubbly sound
TEMPO TANTRUM What an elementary school orchestra is having when it's not following the conductor
TROUBLE CLEF Any clef one can't read: e.g., alto clef for pianists
VESUVIOSO An indication to build up to a fiery conclusion
VIBRATTO Child prodigy son of the concertmaster

The kitten eats his words. (Fuzzle, a/k/a Kuri, a/k/a Fizzgig, a/k/a The Crown Prince, opines that Wordtickets are in good taste.)

...new critters counterbalance losses. Welcome, kitties!

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Elizabeth Bishop. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/bishop.htm

Treasures

“And so the woman Dikeledi began phase three of a life that had been ashen in its loneliness and unhappiness. And yet she had always found gold amidst the ash, deep loves that had joined her heart to the hearts of others. She smiled tenderly at Kebonye because she knew already that she had found another such love. She was the collector of such treasures.”

From Bessie Head: The Collector of Treasures and other Botswana Village Tales. Oxford, England: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1977.

http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/bhead.htm

Flatland

Photos from free time during the Computers and Writing conference in Lubbock, Texas
(we couldn't capture the prairie dogs and jackrabbits with the camera, but there's a bison).
http://albeaudin.blogspot.com/2006/05/out-and-about-in-lubbock.html

Jewelry for a Cause

For lovely gemstone and freshwater pearl jewelry, try this site and the others linked to it. You choose where part of your purchase goes: to support breast cancer research, animal shelters, literacy, the fight against hunger, or rainforests.


http://shop.theliteracysite.com/store/category.do;jsessionid=679FB80963D284F9A437DC908BC63CCC.prod02?categoryId=252&link=Store_LIT_LeftNav_252&siteId=2001

"I am Joy, and I have come to stay."
~The Mountain that Loved a Bird (Mayne/Carle)




(photo by JBR)

http://aeoe.org/resources/books/reviewed/mountainthatlovedabird.html

R. I. P. Stanley Kunitz

Poet Stanley Kunitz, who turned 100 last July, died yesterday. He was named Poet Laureate at age 95.

Requiescat in pacem.

This npr link has an interview and a copy of his poem The Long Boat. Look also for his poem The Layers.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4776898

Photo by Tina Fineberg from the NPR article.

PAX

Check Mike Reynolds' blog for links to interesting political commentary, notably May 4 and February 2.
http://mike-reynolds.blogspot.com/

The Peace Takes Courage site highlights the efforts of a 15-year-old girls to make a difference in the world. If it takes a moment to load, it's worth the wait.

http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

Dona Nobis Pacem. Shalom. Peace be unto you.

Received in an email message

PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY DESTROYED BY FLOOD

Crawford, Texas -- A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential bathroom where both of the books were kept. Both books have been lost. A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated, as he had almost finished coloring the second one.

The White House tried to call FEMA, but there was no answer.

Magnolia, 04-16-06

Easter Flowers

The magnolia’s slender white fingers blossomed
bridal-white today, but the unblemished petals
will snow from the branches before many days pass.
The bush was two feet high when
friends planted it to honor
the memory of our daughter. Now
it reaches past the roof, flowering anew
each cruel April. As snowdrops and daffodils
push through warming earth,
so with each new grief arise images
of all my lost ones.
The dust of their passing
blows into my eyes
and tears spring up unbidden.

No plant grows amid the stone pile
and fresh-turned earth of my young cat’s grave
yet, though forsythia above his cairn burst
into full yellow the morning after he died.
Now cut daffodils and hyacinths wilt
across the stones. Before the magnolia’s white petals
rust and fall, I will plant hydrangea
by the forsythia, and surround the bushes
with rosemary.

LLC, 04-16-06, ed. 05-20-06

Specific enough?

Is it really fine to litter?

(photo by JBR)

No what?

Be specific.

















(photo by JBR)

Visit These

If you like wordplay, children's books, or writing, you might like this website:
http://gottabook.blogspot.com/
and if you like Middle English, here's one for you:
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/

Easter/Passover/springtime greetings,
LLC

Requiescat in Pacem

William Sloane Coffin was “the conscience of the country,” says Cora Weiss, peace activist. “He questioned authority before that phrase came into vogue.” In an interview with NPR in 1994, Rev. Coffin said,

Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart is full of hope you can be persistent even if you are not optimistic. I keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing does the evidence have any chance of changing.

Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., civil activist who opposed nuclear arms, poverty, anti-Semitism and championed civil rights, died on April 12, 2006 at age 81.

In Memoriam: Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

~Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

~The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.


Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
requiescat in pacem

http://www.pbs.org/now/society/coffin.html

...and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful...


~e.e.cummings

http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/anthology/cummings/InJust.htm

(from) be of love(a little)

…remember love by frequent
anguish(imagine
Her least never with most
memory)give entirely each
Forever its freedom

~e. e. cummings
from Collected Poems. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1938

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/156

photo by JBR

VITAL

Tired tonight, so
just one
sip of simile
before sleep.

Late,
thirsting awake
I plunge
both hands
elbow-deep
into poems
like bowls
of fresh water
brimming
with sounds
bring
cupped hands
to mouth
dripping
syllables
and greedily
swallow
refreshing
draughts.

At last:
throat
and soul
are
soothed.

~LLC

Proverb: the cat with many names is well-loved.
Mr. Pluff, Puppycat, Lionman, Teddy Bear, Watson's Twin, Woolly Mammoth, Bunnyfeet, Saint Bernard Kitten, Lovecat, Sherlock.

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

The late Sherlock, d. 04-02-06.
We will miss the dear cat.

The Sherlock half of Sherlock-and-Watson

from The Unsayable Said

Donald Hall, in his essay The Unsayable Said, writes, "Poetry is not talk. It sounds like talk...but poetry is talk altered into art, speech slowed down and attended to, words arranged for the reader who contracts to read them for their whole heft of association and noise...Reading with care, so that a wholeness of language engages a wholeness of reading body and mind, we absorb poetry not with our eyes only nor with our ears at a reading. We read with our mouths that chew on vowel and consonant; we read with our limbed muscles that enact the dance of the poem's rhythm; we read alert to history and the context of words...The poets we honor most are those who--by studious imagination, by continuoous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language--publish in their work the unsayable said."

(c) Donald Hall, Coffee Canyon Press, 1993
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html

VII

What need of a lamp
when day lightens us,
what need to bind love
when love stands
with such radiant wings over us?

What need--
yet to sing love,
love must first shatter us.

-HD
(from "Eros," Miscellaneous Poems 1914-1917)

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry.
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

http://audensociety.org/poems.html

On the Farther Wall, Marc Chagall

One eye without a head to wear it
Sits on the pathway, and a chicken,
Pursued perhaps by astral ferret,
Flees, while the plot begins to thicken.
Two lovers kiss. Their hair is kelp.
Nor are the titles any help.

by Phyllis McGinley

Marc Chagall: "Birthday" (1915)

http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/chagall.html

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

A poem should not mean
But be.


by Archibald MacLeish

art on a large scale (photo by Joshua S. Lake)

Sherlock feeling wild 

In case you need a laugh today...

HOW TO GIVE A CAT A PILL
1) Pick cat up and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby. Position right forefinger and thumb on either side of cat's mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill in right hand. As cat opens mouth pop pill into mouth. Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.
2) Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa. Cradle cat in left arm and repeat process.
3) Retrieve cat from bedroom, and throw soggy pill away.
4) Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm holding rear paws tightly with left hand. Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for a count of ten.
5) Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe. Call spouse from garden.
6) Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, hold front and rear paws. Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into mouth. Drop pill down ruler and rub cat's throat vigorously.
7) Retrieve cat from curtain rail, get another pill from foil wrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep shattered figurines and vases from hearth and set to side for gluing later.
8) Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on cat with head just visible from below armpit. Put pill in end of drinking straw, force mouth open with pencil and blow down drinking straw.
9) Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans. Drink 1 beer to take taste away. Apply Band-Aid to spouse's forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.
10) Retrieve cat from neighbor's shed. Get another pill. Open another beer. Place cat in cupboard and close door onto neck to leave head showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with elastic band.
11) Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on hinges. Drink beer. Fetch bottle of scotch. Pour shot; drink. Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Apply whiskey compress to cheek to disinfect. Toss back another shot. Throw T-shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.
12) Call Fire Department to retrieve the f***ing cat from tree across the road. Apologize to neighbor who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat. Take last pill from foil-wrap.
13) Tie the little bastard's front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table, find heavy duty pruning gloves from shed. Push pill into mouth followed by large piece of filet steak. Be rough about it. Hold head vertically and pour 2 pints of water down throat to wash pill down.
14) Consume remainder of Scotch. Get spouse to drive you to the emergency room. Sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearm and removes pill remnants from right eye. Call furniture shop on way home to order new table.
15) Place "Free mutant cat from hell" ad in local newspaper and ring local pet shop to see if they have any bunnies.
HOW TO GIVE A DOG A PILL
1) Wrap it in bacon

(author unknown)

"How to Write Good "

Avoid alliteration. Always.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
Avoid clichés like the plague.
Employ the vernacular and eschew obfuscation.
Eschew, as well, ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
Contractions aren’t necessary.
Foreign words and phrases are not a propos or de rigueur.
One should never generalize.
Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. ”
Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
Be more or less specific.
Understatement is always best.
One-word sentences? Eliminate.
Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
The passive voice is to be avoided.
Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

by Sally Bulford

Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway

think no more of what will come to pass 

BLUE GIRLS

Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a woman with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not so long
Since she was lovelier than all of you.

--John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birds

Not to Sleep

Not to sleep all night long, for pure joy,
Counting no sheep and careless of chimes,
Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birds, her children, who discuss idly
Fanciful details of the promised coming--
Will she be wearing red, or russet, or blue,
Or pure white?--whatever she wears, glorious;
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
This is given to few but at last to me,
So that when I laugh and stretch and leap from bed
I shall glide downstairs, my feet brushing the carpet
In courtesy to civilized progression,
Though, did I wish, I could soar through the open window
And perch on a branch above, acceptable ally
Of the birds still alert, grumbling gently together.

by Robert Graves
from Man Does, Woman Is. Doubleday, 1964.

great-grands 

from KINDNESS

...Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes
any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Ten Poems to Open Your Heart,
ed. Roger Housden

gratitude

thankfulness, appreciation.

Middle English, from Old French, probably from Late Latin grātitūdō, from Latin grātus, pleasing.]

Family tree, c. 1995

UNLEARNING

Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist…The ability to see things fresh and new and in eternity, rather than in time, can be lost—and for the writer to lose it and not find it again is fatal. It is our unlearning we share in our writing whether for children or grownups, that unlearning which gives us the courage to open ourselves to the sinister as well as the dexterous part of our creativity. Thus we will be able to work to our fullest, to allow the characters that people our stories to lead us in directions we never anticipated. We don’t need to settle for the limited selves we can control and manipulate.

From Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life. Compiled by Carole F. Chase. Colorado Springs: WaterBook Press, 2001.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

From Intimations of Immortality
by William Wordsworth, 1770-1850

Mowzer, summer 2005 

POEM WITH TWO ENDINGS

Say “death” and the whole room freezes—
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it,
hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.


(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)


By Jane Hirshfield
From Given Sugar, Given Salt. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

VMEC, Italy, March 2005 

And I Think It Yours

That place
where a fold of hillside
scoops sun and shelter
from a mountain wind

or that
where a clear spring
pours out refreshment
never holding back

or that
where a steep track
veers unexpectedly
then opens on a crest
from where a traveller may see
far out beyond
and know his way
which road is his to take--

all these
and all such places
have their names
but in the language of the heart
only one name


And I Think It Yours
by Gael Turnbull
---from From the Language of the Heart, Mariscat Press 1983

from the Mass in B Minor by J. S. Bach

"Gloria in Excelsis

The Stillness of the World Before Bach

By Lars Gustafsson
Norway

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A Minor Partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love turned round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters’ axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child’s ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater’s stillness before Bach.

by Pieter Breughel 

Cobalt

From The Silence Afterwards
by Rolf Jacobsen
translated from the Norwegian by Roger Greenwald
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985

Colors are words’ little sisters. They can’t become soldiers.
I’ve loved them secretly for a long time.
They have to stay home and hang up the sheer curtains
in our ordinary bedroom, kitchen, and alcove.

I’m very close to young Crimson, and brown Sienna
but even closer to thoughtful Cobalt with her distant eyes and
untrampled spirit.
We walk in dew.
The night sky and the southern oceans
are her possessions
and a tear-shaped pendant on her forehead:
the pearls of Cassiopeia.
We walk in dew on late nights.

But the others.
Meet them on a June morning at four o’clock
when they come rushing toward you,
on your way to a morning swim in the green cove’s spray.
Then you can sunbathe with them on the smooth rocks.
--Which one will you make yours?

Photo taken by VMEC in an ink shop in Florence, 3/05  

Thinking about language

The concept of an absolute and unwavering, presumably God-given standard of linguistic correctness (sometimes confused with “purity”) is widespread, even among the educated…To talk about “correctness” in language implies that there is some abstract, absolute standard by which words and grammar can be judged; something is either “correct” or “incorrect,” and that’s all there is to that. But the facts of language are not so clean-cut. Consequently many students of usage today prefer to talk instead about acceptability, that is, the degree to which users of a language will judge an expression as OK or will let its use pass without noticing anything out of the ordinary…Acceptability is not absolute, but a matter of degree; one expression may be more or less acceptable than another….Moreover, acceptability is not abstract, but is related to some group of people whose response it reflects…Acceptability is part of the convention of language use; in talking about it, we must always keep in mind “How acceptable?” and “To whom?”

From The Origins and Development of the English Language, Fifth Edition.Thomas Pyles and John Algeo. Boston: Thompson Wadsworth, 2005.

Rouen Cathedral 

Monet Refuses the Operation

by Lisel Mueller
From Alive Together

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

From Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen. New York: Random House, 1974.
 

Little Elegy with Books and Beasts

in memory of Martin Provensen (1916-1987)
by Nancy Willard
From Water Walker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

I
Winters when the gosling froze to its nest
he’d warm it and carry it into the house praising
its finely engraved wings and ridiculous beak—
or sit all night by the roan mare, wrapping
her bruised leg, rinsing the cloths while his wife
read aloud from Don Quixote, and darkness hung
on the cold steam of her breath—
or spend five days laying a ladder for the hen
to walk dryshod into the barn.

Now the black cat broods on the porch.
Now the spotted hound meeting visitors, greets none.
Nestler, nurse, mender of wounded things,
he said he didn’t believe in the body.
He lost the gander—elder of all their beasts
(not as wise as the cat but more beloved)—
the night of the first frost, the wild geese
calling—last seen waddling south
on the highway, beating his clipped wings.

II
He stepped outside through the usual door
and saw for the last time his bare maples
scrawling their cold script on the low hills
and the sycamore mottled as old stone
and the willows slurred into gold by the spring light,
and he noticed the boy clearing the dead brush—
old boughs that broke free under the cover of snow,
and he raised his hand, and a door in the air opened,
and what was left of him stumbled and fell
and lay at rest on the earth like a clay lamp
still warm whose flame was not nipped or blown
but lifted out by the one who lit it
and carried alive over the meadow—
that light by which we read, while he was here,
the chapter called Joy in the Book of Creation.

From one of my children's childhood favorites: Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen. New York: Random House, 1974. 

by JBR, again 

DOING POETRY

DOING POETRY
by Jack Gilbert
From Refusing Heaven. New York: Knopf, 2005

Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough
that I embarrass myself working so hard
to get it right even a little,
and that little grudging and awkward.
Bit it’s afterward I resent, when
the sweet sure should hold me like
a trout in the bright summer stream.
There should be at least briefly
access to your glamour and tenderness.
But there’s always this same old
dissatisfaction instead.

College Essay

Is someone in your family approaching, in, or just through the college application process? This essay fron the New Yorker ("College Essay" by Christopher Buckley) will make you smile.
http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/articles/051128sh_shouts

Odd

The tame squirrel on a leash
is offered for sale
to jostling crowds in
a teeming open-air market.
Three shaggy black goats
nibble thorns in
an argania tree’s topmost branches:
prospects unfamiliar in America.

And to Moroccan eyes, alien:
the snow-burdened maple branches
leaf out in vibrant emerald, mid-May.
A good ol’ boy cruises,
in his shiny red pickup,
moves his hand from his girlfriend’s
tan leg just long enough
to toss a crushed can
out the open window
and grab another beer
from the six-pack.

Odd.

odd 

Alive Together

by Lisel Mueller, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize,
from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been
the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name,
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a
totem pole
to appease a vindictive god,
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend.
I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds
against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who---but for endless ifs---
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

...and colors and summers and mornings... 

The questions for yesteray's answers

7. What do you call the magazine for naval astronomers?

8. …for farmers who raise real pigs?

9. …for fundamentalist Christian adolescents?

10….for citrus farmers?

11. …for beermakers?

12….published by people who want to annoy readers on the weekend?

There is only one race: the human race 

January 16, 2006: In Memoriam

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

From Martin Luther King's ”Letter from Birmingham Jail”
The entire letter is at http://www.politicalinternetservices.com/MLK_Birmingham.asphttp://www.politicalinternetservices.com/MLK_Birmingham.asp

Here are the answers: what are the questions?

7. Sky and Periscope
8. The True Porker
9. Heaventeen
10. Lime Magazine
11. Brewsweek
12. Saturday Evening Pest

(Stay tuned)

A dozen years ago in Brux 

I've liked this poem for a long while

Evening Music
by May Sarton

We enter this evening as we enter a quartet
Listening again for its particular note
The interval where all seems possible,
Order within time when action is suspended
And we are pure in heart, perfect in will.
We enter the evening whole and well-defended
But at the quick of self, intense detachment
That is a point of burning far from passion—
And this, we know, is what we always meant
And even love must learn it in some fashion,
To move like formal music through the heart,
To be achieved like some high difficult art.

We enter the evening as we enter a quartet
Listening again for its particular note
Which is your note, perhaps, your special gift,
A detached joy that flowers and makes bloom
The longest silence in the silent room—
And there would be no music if you left.

From Selected Poems of May Sarton.
New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

The Freedom of the Moon by Robert Frost

I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

From West-Running Brook
http://www.ketzle.com/frost/freedomo.htm

photo by Josiah B. Raabe 

SHAKESPEARE is the SOURCE

From The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare, “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked, or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort, or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and the short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then—by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts—it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

~~Bernard Levin, English journalist

These words--accommodation, assassination, dexterously, dislocate, indistinguishable, obscene, pedant, premeditated, reliance, submerged, allurement, armada, antipathy, critical, demonstrate, dire, emphasis, emulate, horrid, initiate, meditate, modest, prodigious, and vast—were all new to English in the sixteenth century. They made their first appearance in the Folio, coined or at least codified by (to use his phrase) a “man of fire-new words,” William Shakespeare.

Even familiar sights become interesting when regarded from a new angle. 

A trip through heavy rains to this lovely campus, to leave one dear girl (a bit anxious and quite eager). Back home tonight, wet but safe. 

If you like wordplay, you'll love Bloom's Bouquet of Imaginary Words by Jeffrey and Carole Bloom. Examples: Exxonerate = To relieve an oil company of responsibility for a spill. Punktuation = Grammatical marks used in transcribing rock lyrics. Enjoy!

Contemplation is good for the soul 

Quonochontaug is part of Charlestown, RI.
 

Head-on meteors destroy dark world 

Wordticket sentences

Wordtickets are an expanded form of magnetic poetry: "Admit One" tickets, each with a word cut from a magazine or flyer taped to the back. Susan G. Wooldridge's book poemcrazy inspired me to assemble our batch of over two thousand wordtickets.

Wordtickets can make nonsense announcements like
Obsessed pirates respect soft-eared rat affair,
Nothing shivers like prehistoric Egyptians, and
Accidental partners shampoo forever.

Wordtickets also make odd slogans and ads for nonexistent products:
Demand free earthworms!
Sudden head-on meteors exterminate fat spiritual artists: consider positive survival journey guide.

They can also make evocative sentences:
The quiet sky edged casually toward the teal mount, imitating diamonds.
and
The last loud shadow of ignorance is clad in care, standing on the dream.

Try playing wordtickets: you can
SCULPT SERIOUS JOY!

Word 2

The correct definition for the 01-11-05 word, salp, is (c).

Try another: which definition sounds most likely to you?
nummular
a) n., a nullity
b) adj., of or pertaining to numbers
c) adj., of or relating to ruined tumulus mounds
d) adj., slang popular in the 1990s in Great Britain, implying dull and boring
e) adj., oval or circular; shaped like a coin
f) n., a sprayable numbing agent used on accident victims

Twenty-four ways to say "I Love You," designed as a Valentine card for Allan over twenty years ago. I have since put it on notecards, T-shirts, and tote bags. ~LLC 

Sherlock and Watson sleep through our wordplay 

Dictionary Game, Round 1

Can you guess the real definitions of the following word? Feel free add your own definition(s).

Salp
a) n., wooden bucket used for collecting sap from the sugar maple, mapulatum cretetum
b) n., small rounded rowboat resembling a coracle, used mainly in Shropshire, England, since the Middle Ages
c) n., any of two varieties of free-swimming tunicates of warm seas, having flattened, keglike bodies
d) v., to skim the surface of casks of fermenting hops; also, to ingest the same with inebriating effect
e) n., military slang for saltpeter, an ingredient in gunpowder
f) n., cloth used to clean a scalpel after surgery

A wordticket "poem" 

You call the periodicals...

1. Vague
2. Atlantis Monthly
3. Ports Illustrated
4. London Illustrated Mews
5. Mother Bones
6. Brother Loans

What do you call the periodical...

1. … for readers who are habitually overmedicated?

2. … with a circulation solely among imaginary worlds?

3. …for artistic sailors?

4. …for British cats?

5. …for very liberal skeletons?

6. …for monastic lending institutions?

Very Punny

Did you know that genealogists in search of ancestors are on the Appellation Trail?

And witches, to encourage each other, say "hag in there."

: )