Nature Obstreperous: plants and other things that sprout

Paradiso

There is no way not to be excited
When what you have been disillusioned by raises its head
From its arms and seems to want to talk to you again.
You forget home and family
And set off on foot or in your automobile
And go to where you believe this form of reality
May dwell. Not finding it there, you refuse
Any further contact
Until you are back again trying to forget
The only thing that moved you (it seems) and gave what you forever will
have
But in the form of a disillusion.
Yet often, looking toward the horizon
There—inimical to you?—is that something you have never found
And that, without those who came before you, you could never have
imagined.
How could you have thought there was one person who could make you
Happy and that happiness was not the uneven
Phenomenon you have known it to be? Why do you keep believing in this
Reality so dependent on the time allowed it
That it has less to do with your exile from the age you are
Than from everything else life promised that you could do?

Kenneth Koch

Oh, shoot (as we say in Mayberry)! I misspelled the misspelled word again. (I did it before, two threads back.) It should of course have been plnats, not the pedestrian plants.

This means, of course, that we need lots of posts, and lots of photos that slow down the loading action, and lotsa recipes, poems, book sitings, anecdotes, snide asides, weather reports, bird sightings, to-kill-or-not-kill defenseless animals debates, dogs and cats (naturally), grits and eggs (or not), time zone confusion, preemptively deleted messages (we should extensively discuss this phenomenon): all the things, in other words, at which we specialize, so we can get to the next nature thread toot sweet in order to rectify the plnat problem.

And music too. How could I forget music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzgjiPBCsss

There is little weather here, but off to the northwest there is some weather which may come here dissipating on the way.

Robert

Piero, I am beginning to suspect that you make some small error on purpose every time, so that we post a lot to cover it up. Dear ♥, you don't need to beat around the bush in devious ways. Just tell us to post a lot, and we will obey.

I could assume that persona: a guy who only makes purposeful mistakes, who cannot possibly err. But I'd hate myself in the morning.

Do you mean a person who makes only purposeful mistakes?

Robert

Is there a difference between that and making mistakes on purpose? Or is that a trick question, Robert? Did I misspell purposeful?

I sold and shipped my first book today online. I made between six and seven dollars! I'm in the money. Call me bookseller!

Peter, it has to do with the scope of 'only,' a matter I was taught in elementary school and had reinforced in high school French. I have also had reasonably expressive people dismiss the matter as effete. If I only make purposeful mistakes I do not make pancakes. If I make only purposeful mistakes the scope of only moves to purposeful; I make mistakes, but only purposeful ones.

Robert

Loved the Manu Chao! Those merely early middle-aged among us may recall his former band's U.S. hit King Kong Five.\

Also top notch and more authentically Mexican was their Mala Vida.

Its raining cats and dogs here. Mr. Durick is under-reporting the weather.

>11 slickdpdx:. Hard to say since Robert aka Mr. Durick is at an undisclosed location. Maybe, where he is, the weather is indeed always understated.

>9 absurdeist:. You gonna tell us the name of the historic book you sold, Henri?

Congratulations! I totally glossed over that. For shame.

I glossed over it, too, but now it's completely flat.

Too tired to type in a poem.
http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipling_if.htm

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg

Snow, snow, snow... unending snow. Highs coming up early next week 27.

Since we haven't heard from Steven in the suburbs of Denver recently--where they might have gotten snow too--your winter-type report is the first, Tani.

Before we switched threads, I expected you to say something about Pfundamentals, the store that once was and might still be in Bend. Where you been, anyway?

In Portland it was rain, rain, rain yesterday. Downtown it was just normal rain but up in N. Portland it was really pelting us. I was actually thinking yesterday as I ran from the car to the house, "I bet it is snowing up in the Cascades! I bet Tani is in her house drinking hot chocolate or spiced cider..." I have this picture of Tani's house all made of big logs with a huge roaring fireplace or woodstove. Tani, don't spoil it by telling me you live in a condo. :)

When I came out onto my porch this morning there was no weather overhead. The satellite picture showed weather moving from the northwest into the area, but the cloudtops were not as cold as the were when they were farther away. The radar picture showed water in the sky to the immediate northwest; I turned and could see its leading edge. Three hours later the sky was obscured by bright cloud, but there was still no rain. Any changes will be reported.

I hope I am not still under-reporting the weather.

Robert

Slick seems to have been commenting while rain pelted him in the Pacific Northwest, and you and I both know you don't live there. Don't we?

I have officially been sucked back into the genealogy vortex. I had a distant cousin send me information I did not have and it sent me on a wild ride this past week. I can now tell you that I am related to George Washington, his mother, Mary Ball, was 1/2 sister to my ggggggggrandmother, Esther Ball. Their father was Col. Joseph Ball. I am 12 generations descended from Thomas De Cheyne of 1610ish England. And I now know that my ancestors were colonists, tobacco farmers and slave owners. Oy ve. :- (this means, I'm speechless, Wilson)

Haha! Sorry, Anna, the log house is next door. I will post a pic for you to daydream with. ;-) But, you have the whole cocoa/spiced cider thing close... I start with an iced mocha every morning (year round) and then move to hot tea in the afternoon/evenings, da Mama and Papa do the hot cocoa thing. Now, add some Peppermint Schnapps or Creme de Menthe to that and I'm with ya! ;-) (you know... York's peppermint patty / Andes mints) Dang, that sounds really good right about now.

It is absolutely gorgeous today. White, green, brown and intermittent sunshine. Next wave tonight should be a good one. The wind the last few days has been atrocious. 3 trees down around the neighborhood and a top broke off about 40 feet up, across the street. I think it was a 70 footer. The wind also took down both of Papa's American and USMC flags Monday night, ripped one off with the bracket. Me, I didn't hear a thing. I love this house. It's the best insulated home I have lived in, ever. We have an 18.5' ceiling in the living room with two rows of windows facing south, so the view can be quite spectacular at times.

edited for Wilson's translation.

Oh, Pfundamentals... sorry, distracted it seems. I have not heard of it myself as I tend to avoid touristy places like downtown Bend or Sunriver, if I can help it. Having lived on the mountain next to a destination resort for 12 years, two in the middle of the golf resort, I avoid 'em like the plague. That's why I love it up here. I am five miles from the nearest convenience store, 10 miles to town and 30ish from civilization. But, I digress... Anyway, it seems to have closed back in 2007.

Really? You're related to Gene? Whatta coincidence!

But seriously, my extensive map collection tells me that circa 1992 or so the only bookstore in your region was in Sunriver. Tourist trap though it might be. So I guess you go to the library, then, huh?

And what, exactly, did you edit out in order for me to better understand you? (Careful, now. I know when you were born, down to the minute, so don't try to bullshit me.)

Bwahahahaha! Was raised by a bullshitter... its inbred.

Seriously, I did not alter anything except adding the explanation for this emoticon -> :- (me speechless)

;p

Gene's related to GW? Hey, Cuz!

oops, missed another one... I go to the library.

Ok, Peter, ya can't keep a good man down. I'm back the saddle again. (with chaps and spurs to boot) The weather this weekend is like our mutual friend in La Pine: Gorgeous! Sunny and 60's both Sat. and Sun. Big changes a-comin next week.

My 12 year old nephew, who is a child actor in Minneapolis, tried out for the Hollywood movie: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last Monday in Minneapolis. I've been told the movie will star Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. My sister said the audition went great. Our fingers are crossed. He has been in a number of leading roles at local community theaters. This was his first 'big time' audition. I have not read the book but it sounds good by the reviews -a real tear jerker.

Tani, been reading short stories from Benjamin Percy. He grew up just down the road from you. He currently teaches English at Univ. of Wisc., Stevens Point. I know your not a short story lady (prefering them long =) but his writing is first class. His current collection is put out by Grey Wolf Press in Minneapolis. It's entitled Refresh, Refresh. Be sure to check him out.

My big yellow stallion, Swede, is gettin a bit restless. Wants to ride. We'll be seen ya.

Variations at Home and Abroad

It takes a lot of a person's life
To be French, or English, or American
Or Italian. And to be at any age. To live at any certain time.
The Polish-born resident of Manhattan is not merely a representative of general humanity
And neither is this Sicilian fisherman stringing his bait
Or to be any gender, born where or when
Betty holding a big plate
Karen crossing her post-World War Two legs
And smiling across the table
These three Italian boys age about twenty gesturing and talking
And laughing after they get off the train
Seem fifty percent Italian and the rest percent just plain
Human race.
O mystery of growing up! O history of going to school!
O lovers O enchantments!

The subject is not over because the photograph is over.
The photographer sits down. Murnau makes the movie.
Everything is a little bit off, but has a nationality.
The oysters won't help the refugees off the boats,
Only other human creatures will. The phone rings and the Albanian nationalist sits down.
When he gets up he hasn't become a Russian émigré or a German circus clown
A woman is carrying a basket—a beautiful sight! She is in and of
Madagascar.
The uniformed Malay policeman sniffs the beer barrel that the brothers of
Ludwig are bringing close to him.
All humanity likes to get drunk! Are differences then all on the surface?
But even every surface gets hot
In the sun. It may be that the surface is where we are all alike!
But man and woman show that this isn't true.
We will get by, though. The train is puffing at the station
But the station isn't puffing at the train. This difference allows for a sense of community
As when people feel really glad to have cats and dogs
And some even a few mice in the chimney. We are not alone
In the universe, and the diversity causes comfort as well as difficulty.
To be Italian takes at least half the day. To be Chinese seven-eighths of it.
Only at evening when Chang Ho, repast over, sits down to smoke
Is he exclusively human, in the way the train is exclusively itself when it is in motion
But that's to say it wrongly. His being human is also his being seven-eighths
Chinese.
Falling in love one may get, say, twenty percent back
Toward universality, though that is probably all. Then when love's gone
One's Nigerianness increases, or one's quality of being of Nepal.
An American may start out wishing
To be everybody or that everybody were the same
Which makes him or her at least eighty percent American. Dixit Charles
Peguy, circa 1912,
"The good Lord created the French so that certain aspects of His creation
Wouldn't go unnoticed." Like the taste of wheat, sirrah! Or the Japanese.
So that someplace on earth there would be people who were
Writing haiku. But think of the human body with its arms
Its nose, its eyes, its brain often subject to alarms
Think how much energy, work, and time have gone into it,
To give us such a variegated kind of humanity!
It takes fifteen seconds this morning to be a man,
Twenty to be an old one, four to be an American,
Two to be a college graduate and four or five hours to write.
And what's more, I love you! half of every hour for weeks or months for this;
Nine hundred seconds to be an admirer of Italian Renaissance painting,
Sixteen hours to be someone awake.
One is recognizably American, male, and of a certain generation. Nothing
takes these markers away.

Even if I live in Indonesia as a native in a hut, someone coming through there
Will certainly gasp and say Why you're an American!
My optimism, my openness, my lack of a sense of history,
My distinctive facial muscles ready to look angry or sad or sympathetic
In a moment and not quite know where to go from there;
My assuming that anything is possible, my deep sense of superiority
And inferiority at the same time; my lack of culture,
Except for the bookish kind; my way of acting with the dog, come here
Spotty! God damn!
All these and hundreds more declare me to be what I am.
It's burdensome but also inevitable. I think so.
Expatriates have had some success with the plastic surgery
Of absence and departure. But it is never absolute. And then they must bear
the new identity as well.

Irish or Russian, the individuality in them is often mistaken for nationality.
The Russian finding a soul in the army officer, the Irishman finding in him
someone with whom he can drink.
Consider the Volga boatman? One can only guess
But probably about ninety percent Russian, eighty percent man, and thirty
percent boatman, Russian, man, and boatman,
A good person for the job, a Russian man of the river.
This dog is two-fifths wolf and less than one-thousandth a husband or father.
Dogs resist nationality by being breeds. This one is simply Alsatian.
Though he may father forth a puppy
Who seems totally something else if for example he (the Alsatian) is attracted
To a poodle with powerful DNA. The puppy runs up to the Italian boys
who smile
Thinking it would be fun to take it to Taormina
Where they work in the hotel and to teach it tricks.
A Frenchwoman marvels at this scene.
The woman bends down to the dog and speaks to it in French.
This is hopeful and funny. To the dog all human languages are a perfumed fog.
He wags and rises on his back legs. One Italian boy praises him, "Bravo! canino!"
Underneath there is the rumble of the metro train. The boy looks at the woman.
Life offers them these entangling moments as—who?—on a bicycle goes past.
It is a Congolese with the savannah on his shoulders
And the sky in his heart, but his words as he passes are in French—
"Bonjour, m'sieu dames," and goes speeding off with his identity,
His Congolese, millennial selfhood unchanging and changing place.

Kenneth Koch

Where did you get the idea I was related to GW? My family from the beginning have been bounders and no-goods. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the closest any of my family came to GW would have been on the other side of the Whiskey Rebellion.

Kenneth Koch is like Ogden Nash only it does not rhyme. :)

Hey, Cowboy! He's a homeboy alright! Eugene, Tumalo and Sunriver... God's Country.

Trust me, Gene, GW's uncle Rawliegh was a cad. There's even an article about how he treated her in the William and Mary Quarterly published back in the 30s. "The Unhappy life of Esther Ball, half sister to Mary Ball, and wife to Rawleigh C****, Gent." Their wills are fascinating too.

And! Now, I also know that my rebellious tendencies are English not just Viking or Irish. Ha! It's Papa's fault! Two out of those 3 lines are his... ;p

If we're talking ancestry, get this - according to family legend, one of my ancestors on my mother's side was a Pirate of Penzance. And on my father's side there is a convict, who was transported here for stealing a greatcoat.

Blood tells, me hearties, so don't cross me.

Convicts? Transported to Australia? Say it ain't so, Sheila. Why, the next thing they'll be telling us is that convicts were transported to our own Georgia.

Well, if you hadn't said that, I wouldn't have looked it up, and then I probably would never have known that convicts were ever transported to Georgia. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWy5FiLGeFU

Btw, this whole conversation is based on a misconception, a bad pun. I have no idea whether Gene is related to George Washington. It was Gene-eology that brought him to mind.

I'm pretty sure Gene is related to a convict, which is what I inferred the Muse was commenting on in 35: that since Gene was transported, so to speak, to a house by a pond in GA, that his heritage is felonious.

Auden described himself as a wedding cake left out in the rain. The pernickety Alfred Leslie Rowse was Felix Unger to Auden's Oscar Madison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZqftCZD2NI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_a-eXIoyYA&feature=related

AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_a-eXIoyYA&feature=related

Brueghels Icarus
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/newleaf/images/1558_brueghel_icarus.jpg

A brief spell of rain came finally and sounded beautiful. My cat came to my lap with water droplets scattered across his fur. I am hoping for more.

Robert

Driving is one of my passions. Some people hate to get into my car, and others look forward to it; on the Thruway, and particularly on New York City Streets. I regret that among the numerous gigs I've had, I never drove a taxicab.

I first encountered the so-called roundabout in France, which, according to the foillowing article, has 30,000 of them. I love the roundabout. They built one next to the Thruway entrance to Kingston a few years ago. At first everyone hated it, and now that they've grown up (as drivers), they probably can't remember why.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19roundabouts.html?nl=todaysheadlines&e...

In honor of the low temps in my neighborhood... a fine foto from Wilson's collection via our Southern Correspondent:

A Totem in Chile

It was 17° when I got up at 8am. No new snow, but more on the way with highs next week in the high 20s/low 30s.

It was in the low 40s this a.m. when we emerged from our house. Clear and beautiful, but it clouded over almost right after sunrise.

Anna, here is the log house next door through my kitchen window. I will get a more aesthetic one for you to daydream with later... ;-)

http://www.librarything.com/topic/88286#1902250

Augh! Tani, you made me open the neverending thread!

*boop de doop*
*ten minutes later*

Oh, nice picture!

So to counter Kenneth Koch I am posting some silly Ogden Nash. Because as he once very wisely said, Candy is Dandy....

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as,
in a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don't bother your head about the sins of commission because
however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be
committing them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you really get painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you haven't added up
the stubs of and the appointments you haven't kept and the bills you
haven't paid and the letters you haven't written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every
time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round
of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the
unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of
sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

>41 highdesertlady:. Photo credit to our South American correspondent, actually.

>45 anna_in_pdx:. 'Bout time someone countered Kenneth Koch ...

... but when it comes to humor, Billy Collins is my guy:

For Bartleby the Scrivener

"Every time we get a big gale around here
some people just refuse to batten down."

we estimate that

ice skating into a sixty
mile an hour wind, fully exerting
the legs and swinging arms

you will be pushed backward
an inch every twenty minutes.

in a few days, depending on
the size of the lake,
the backs of your skates
will touch land.

you will then fall on your ass
and be blown into the forest.

if you gather enough speed
by flapping your arms
and keeping your skates pointed

you will catch up to other
flying people who refused to batten down.
you will exchange knowing waves
as you ride the great wind north.

Billy Collins

#46 - Ooops! I knew that.

Sorry, Anna...

Here is a better one of the 'cabin' next door...

And this one's from Wilson:

Manhattan at twilight as seen from a car on the Queensboro Bridge

Quite a contrast, Tani. You enhanced both of our photos. And thanks again for posting my pictures. You've embarrassed me to make a birthday resolution to transcend my aversion to Internet technology and learn how to post them myself.

Memory's Genesis

How few through Memory’s dreamy scope,
However resolute of hope,
Can view the backward scene where first
Their youth rejoiced—for ever crost—
And not bewail as Adam erst
The Eden they have lost!
Nor feel, alas! with it compared,
The Present but a lengthening wild
Whereon young Passion never fared,
Young Beauty never smiled!
Yet ’tis a melancholy pleasure
To sit by moon-struck Memory’s side,
And hear her wild lyre oft remeasure
The story of our youthful pride!
Hours recalling, ah! how rife
With emotions lavished wide
Through the Garden of our Life
Ere all its spring-time roses died,
And (like day’s splendours when the sun
Remits in his decline from weaving
A robe of beauty for the Ev’ning)
Fancy’s Elysiums, one by one,
Had paled away as the long night came on!

Yes! ’tis a melancholy sweet,
And thus let Memory oft repeat
Life’s first tale, that to the core
Retempered by such generous lore,
Our hard’ning spirits, as ’tis meet,
May pity the cold world—the world we trust no more!

Charles Harpur

Clara! Where'd you go?

Wilson, dear... No need to be embarrassed, you can always ask me to post pictures... always. ;-) ♥

I am making chili and cornbread today for the Oregon State/USC game tonight (if ABC allows us to watch it, the stingy guts!) and in honor of the snow that is falling, however lightly, at the time of this post.

The cabin next door kills me because the garage is pretty much the same square footage as the cabin itself! They have a lot of toys. I am hoping to go snowmobiling with them at some point this season. It's beautiful inside, but I would not want the wall dusting duties. They just finished the inside this past summer and have not fully made the transition from the valley yet. I am glad that we were not here when they started building it, though. Neighbors were forever saying "sorry, about your view" when we first moved in. Thankfully, I don't know the difference.

Beautiful images all!

I'd like to share some unbeautiful images with you all, if you don't mind too much, and if you'll pardon this amateur poet's stab at a piece of poetry:

Nuclear Family

~ for my grandfather, Edwin, still kickin' it at ninety-six

When Gramma plunged kamikaze-like half-a-century ago
And her prized pristine parlor, and then her Victorian entire
Listed fatally from the profound impact unending
No one saw the mushroom clouds who felt the long fallout
Her daughters were too young
Her husband on a gunship

Was it Hitler or Hirohito who lit her fragile fuse?
And once ignited: steady shakes and midnight quakes
"Wake up girls!" as candle wax pooled on her trembling hand
"Can't you see all these snakes hissing up the walls!"
Candlelight danced dangerously upon once tranquil faces
Every night in this now single story house
Undergone some reptilian renovations
Window dressings of discarded skins
"Can't you see them!"
Forked tongue mirrors reflecting scales and wails
The endless slithering and constant quivering
The hammer indentations pocked all over the hard wood floors

The War abroad ended and the Hero returned home
Having killed too many enemy men in combat
Whether bloody hand-to-hand, or with his steadfast carbine
He'd never witnessed any human carnage like this
His wife clutching a butcher knife in one jittery hand
And his daughters crying "Daddy!" by the other
Attempting to hack her own mind in two
Who knew?

Stitched up
The white suits soon hosed her off with shots
And shocks
And lots of pills
But Gramma sensed by the Holy Spirit their slanted evil stares
And knew the no-good blond haired men were "god damn Japs
or I'm not from Mizzurah!"
Who were conspiring to have her killed

Pretending catatonia one overcast day
When the psych-techs switched shifts
Yukking it up with their incoming colleagues
Gramma ... escaped
Just like Enola Gay high up over Hiroshima that day
She rode the bus home from the institution still ablaze
Tipped the bus driver a dime
"Thanks for the timely lift!"
And since flames spread fast
Set her family on fire
They cried but didn't complain

Come Christmas
You could witness generations of charred flesh
Well done up pretty for the season's greetings
Maybe too well done
A bit crispy
Especially poor Aunt Betty
Forever fearful she'd exit the oven like her mother
Like Gramma
The spitting image of the woman she indeed became
Corroborated by the wall-sized happy family portrait above the mantel
Lost an eye when she once tried violently vacating her attic coop forever
Her glass eye glints in every photograph she rarely smiles in
She still remembers that day she cried "Daddy" with her sister
And shudders

Betty
Burned bone deep by Gramma
Every nerve perversely exposed at our nuclear family conflagrations
Prone to point above the crackling fireplace and proclaim
"That's a picture there tells a thousand lies"

~ EnriqueMasFreeque

;- I have no words...

(and for those of us who love words... or need to find just the right one... http://www.savethewords.org/ borrowed from a post in the bookmooching group)

It looks like you used a tag cloud, and filled in the blanks. Do tell...

The story about your uncle on your blog, and now the poem about your grandma (which isn't half bad, imo), with assorted husbands and sisters and brothers ... the photo of your grandpa the basketball player in Missouri, presumably reprised in the poem ... the numerous profile pix of your children ... even the missus, appearing around the edges now and then: You've blown your cover Henri. (Or should I say Brent?) You are a family man.

Speaking of which, welcome to the thread, thebeadden. You might not be ready to reveal your inner self just yet, but at least tell us where you live. It's one of our requirements; conspicuous in its absence when it comes to Mr. Durick and Clarabel, but even they might eventually come around.

Hey! Trojan boy!

Somebody called me?

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Ouch! my sides hurt!

57> I no family man. I Enrique. What you say I no comprendo. You must be, how you say, on LST? When I grow up in Colombia on my papa's cocaine farm, he say to me, you are my son, Enrique, go now, and blest America with our harvest. So I come to America to geeve it's persons cocaine, so they can live full potential and be happiness.

Bwahahahahahahahahaha! *snort* (I love a good belly laugh)

Je suis une table

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,

that I dumbly inhabit
a density; in language,
there is nothing to stop it,
for nothing retains an edge.

Simple ignorance presents,
later, words for a function,
but it is common pretense
of speech, by a convention,

and there is nothing at all
but inner silence, nothing
to relieve on principle
now this intense thickening.

Donald Hall

Ich bin ein chrome-dinette
Du bist ein sofa

Watashi wa hon desu.

Robert

Chinatown, Sydney

Propelled to an intimate table
outside, in a crammed and faintly neon night
Hot tang of smoke, spice, city
and the unyielding weight of noise
above which
small talk confusedly resembles argument.

I attempt sophistication, and chopsticks
hurriedly abandoning both soon after; although
being myself is never quite enough I tumble back
into the worn groove of my own small space.

ChocolateMuse, 2004

That small space sounds like an apology to me, Sheila. One thing I've discovered about the Chinese and chopsticks (among other things): it's impossible to make a fool of yourself, since they don't give a shit.

I was 20 when I wrote it Piero. Call it teenage angst :)

It's lovely, Sheila, but it might well have sounded snarky. And perhaps racist, which was not what I had in mind. Being from a very different ethnic background, I like that about the Chinese: that they mind their own business.

Hang on. Do you mean you sound racist, or me?

The temperatures did not rise above 28° today, snow falling intermittently, icy cold breezes keeping all but the hardiest of my neighbors inside.

The valley news station reports that PDX is preparing for the possibility of snow on the valley floor. (Huge doings in PDX largely due to the fact that most of the folks who live there can't handle 2-3" of snow) In defense of their winter weather angst and having lived there most of my 50 years, It's not the snow so much as the ice and/or freezing rain that comes along with it, the hills and those lacking winter driving skills.

Our 7 day forecast for Bend/Redmond. Keeping in mind that I live 700 feet up from there check out the lows for Tues/Wed. We typically are anywhere from 7-10° colder in the winter.

>70 ChocolateMuse:. Me, Sheila. I was rebutting a racist charge made against me by my imagination.

>71 highdesertlady:. Quite ordinary here. About 25 at night, up to 50 or so during the day. I'm with you on the snow, Tani. It's the ice that's scary, and other drivers.

I miss 50° already. I don't expect to see it again until March/April, if we're lucky.

Hm. Time to gloat. I did a conversion for your benefit: it's 72 degrees F here today. Fluffy clouds are floating in a perfect sky. We've had a wet spring, and the world is green and soft. The sunshine feels like the healing of the nations. There are small green tomatoes on my tomato plants - I think I'll be eating them by Christmas. Serenity reigns.

Hard to imagine, no?

I've been storing up this gloat since MY winter set in. Allow me the pleasure of it. :)

LOL! Of course, dearest Rena! ♥! hmmm 72°... I shall imagine having fresh tomatoes from your vines at Christmas.

Around here there are two concerns this time of year, one of which has already been resolved: that the first snow or ice storm will hit before the leaves have all fallen, thus knocking down overly burdened limbs, felling power lines and knocking out the electricity, as well as closing roads until the clean-up crews can deal with it.

But the second, and last, batch of leaves is still on the ground, and if they're not cleared before that first snowfall, they'll be there, under snowcover that will stick around until April. Spring raking is a drag when the grass beneath the leaves is soldered to the leaves. Everyone hates that. If we can get through Thanksgiving without snow, all be fine and that first snowfall in December will actually be a pleasant if not magical occurrence.

How was the commute this morning, Anna? I don't get valley news until 5pm.

There was no snow. However the buses planned for there to be snow. So they all had chains on and needed to take them off, ran on the snow schedule, and were crowded and late.

Strangely warm here today. Got two things prepared for Thanksgiving last night and will knock out two more tonight. Can't wait!!

I kinda figured as much... PDX stations tend to get overly excited at the prospect. ;-)

More weather news from the Northwest: My daughter called this morning from Seattle, where she teaches in a high school (Brandon Roy's alma mater, and the school Jimi Hendrix fled). She told me they cancelled classes and sent everyone home because of the snow.

We only have about 6-8 inches right now, but it has been snowing steady since last night. With the bitterly cold, dry air coming tomorrow through the rest of the week, it should be an interesting Thanksgiving. I fear I will have to shop in La Pine though. Not too excited about going over Lava Butte to Bend. Last year, I spun out, really bad, early on Black Friday morning. Course, I didn't have my snow tires then. We have tentative plans to go to friends on Thursday, but may just stay home and do our own. Either way, I have a fresh bird on order to pick up on Wednesday.

The snow is heavier this afternoon and one of our kind neighbors used his snowblower on the driveway and front walkway a couple of hours ago.

Wow, that's so strange.

;p (♥)

When I was in sixth grade, we had a school excursion to The Snow. It's the only time I've seen it 'live'. I lost my beanie. Then I lost my sunnies. Then, while "skiing" downhill, I discovered that the only way to avoid crashing into a line of people waiting for the ski-lift was to fall down at their feet, which I did, and they all laughed.

I haven't been back since. (poor li'l me)

It must be very strange to have snow in everyday places like that.

A similar thing happened to me, Sheila. I went on a college weekend to a resort hotel, busloads of horny men and women, drinking, carousing, going to the late night show, prowling the halls looking to get laid.

The next the day we all went to the ski slopes. It's what you did, after all. I went up on the lift for the intermediate slope, thinking, How difficult can it be? and halfway down, flying over the ice-covered surface, it struck me: I could die! I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and here I was ripping along at sixty miles an hour, totally out of control, the scenery around me a blur.

It's amazing, the stupid things we do when we're young.

Muse,

"I'm dreaming of a White Christmas" probably doesn't mean much to Australians, eh? Is Christmas much of a celebrated holiday Down Under? I just can't imagine, being such a Northern Hemispherean myself, how Christmas can possibly occur two weeks into summer.

Chocolate just be thankful it was only snow and not a "Picnic at Hanging Rock". You might never have come back.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the coldest November 23 ever in Vancouver! -6 degrees Celsius. Right now it is icy and beautiful.

Rique, I could write reams about how weird Christmas is in the southern hemisphere. I've never known it any other way, and it's still weird... because Christmas is a Northern Hemisphere creation, and we down here just can't be original. It goes something like this:

Fake snow sprayed onto shop windows. Santa Claus sweating under all his winter paraphenalia. Plastic blow-up snowmen on green front yards. All the Christmas lights can't be turned on until it finally gets dark at around 8:30pm. Red-faced mothers and screaming children sweating over baking hot carparks to do their xmas shopping. The yearly decisions - large heavy hot meal to be "traditional", or sensible salads and BBQ by the pool? (latter often wins, thankfully). The good old evergreen xmas tree, which, when you think about it, is completely pointless.

Would you be interested in photos over the next few weeks? I've contemplated doing a blog about it in past years, but was discouraged at the thought that no one would probably look at it. Here might be a good place? Yes? No?

Most definitely! I can't imagine Christmas in the Summer.

When I was thirteen, I received skis, boots, bibs and a new ski jacket for Christmas. My brothers and Papa were avid skiiers and I wanted to try. We were over here at Mt Bachelor (back then they actually called it what it is; Bachelor Butte). Well, I got all my new gear on and was taught how to turn around, quite the funny sight, how to fall, how to side step up a slope and how to 'snowplow'. My first run was on the 'bunny' hill. I'm at the top of the slope with Papa and notice there is a group of people lined up to take the tow rope up. I'm pretty confident, after all I have these new boots, skis, fancy yellow bib overalls, new jacket and, by gawd, I'm Norwegian! So, I take off down the hill snowplowing along just fine, looking good in my new gear and realize that there is a left turn to the run. NO ONE TAUGHT ME HOW TO TURN OR STOP! I realize that I'm in trouble, start yelling for Papa (who is behind me laughing his ass off) head straight into the trees, straddled a 4 footer and came to a full stop on my back with my skis stuck underneath me. I think that was the first time I cussed him out. The second time was also skiing, but on Mt Hood, which was the last time I went skiing with him, ever.

My 13-year-old self thinks Bachelor Butte is HILARIOUS!! Even my 26-year-old self is amused.

And yes, that not knowing how to stop was exactly my problem too, poor Tani. Still, funny in hindsight.

Apropos Christmas in Australia in what I suppose is now late spring, and Henri's remark about how strange it must be--only in degree, Henri. Thanksgiving in California is no less odd for a New York transplant. Turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce--leaves that don't change color--it just didn't seem right. The weather too, though nowadays it wouldn't be a shock if it hit 70 degrees in late November here, and in fact it reached 60 today.

It was hilarious! Then, not so much.

Yeah, Mt Bachelor is a butte (help me out, here, guys & gals... how does one phonetically spell butte?) part of a volcanic chain, not a mountain, just south of the Three Sisters, which are truemountains. They changed the name to attract more skiers. Who wants to travel all the way to Central Oregon to ski on a butte?

Snow Update: We now have about 12" and it's still coming down... hard. I will post the results in the morning if I still have satellite. I think the wind is keeping the snow from accumulating on my dish. (thank gawd!) We even have TV! I'm not particularly excited about the prospects of going out to brush both dishes. They say the snow should stop in the morning. Yay! But the temps will plummet. Our high tomorrow in La Pine is supposed to be 15°, lows tonight -10°. The high today was about 25°.

Oh yeah! That is Mt Bachelor behind the 7 day forecast above.

Yes yes yes, Muse, either start an xmas down under photo spread thread or post 'em here, as long as Piero approves.

93> Mt. Hood is dangerous.

95> Now, maybe Thanksgiving/Christmas in the SoCal lowlands ain't too traditionally sweet (I hear you) but Thanksgiving in Big Bear? Or Julian? Or Idyllwild? We've family in Big Bear (elev. 6,700 ft.) and it can be postcard perfect with icicles on the eaves, snowmen, snow draped over incense cedars and juniper pines, snow on the ground knee deep sometimes. The lake partway frozen over. But yeah, I've done 80-degree Christmasses at the beach many times too

Hoodie is dangerous, indeed, Mr Freeque! The second most climbed mountain in the world, if my memory serves. And she kills almost every year.

My first memories of Christmas are snowy, but last many have been celebrated in San Diego where it might be 75 or 49 and rainy. At almost 62 I think Christmas is about the youngsters. Why does it matter what we think of it - we old timers?

Lorena: the new improved policy on this thread is to post as many pix as possible, the rationale for which is to outrace misspelled words. So go head. Post your pix.

I have posted this before, but in the interest of outracing the misspelled words...

The description for this photo is 'Deadly Mt Hood'



(this one oughtta slow things down, Wilson)

Wow. Take out the ski-lift thingie, and you've got a set for Lord of the Rings. That's awesome, in the literal, old-fashioned sense of the word.

I know, idn't gorgeous? Now, THAT's a mountain.

Here is one of Bachelor Butte ;p

Now, here is one of my favorite photos of Mt Hood... (this one is better suited to LOTR) It is looking towards Crater Rock from above Illumination Rock (lower, right side of pic)

Then there is this one that is taken from the South Sister (Charity) looking north:

Another great poem from Yeats' MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER (1921)

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Yeats.prayer.html

The Poet young and old
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/full/coburn/coburn_yeats.jpg
http://ccwe.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/william_butler_yeats.jpg

Audio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v19aVYVPQmU

fabulous pics, Tani, is that where you live?

Thanksgiving

The man who stands above the bird, his knife
Sharp as a Turkish scimitar, first removes
A thigh and leg, half the support
On which the turkey used to stand. This
Leg and thigh he sets on an extra
Plate. All his weight now on
One leg, he lunges for the wing, the wing
On the same side of the bird from which
He has just removed the leg and thigh.
He frees the wing enough to expose
The breast, the wing not severed but
Collapsed down to the platter. One hand
Holding the fork, piercing the turkey
Anywhere, he now beings to slice the breast,
Afflicted by small pains in his chest,
A kind of heartburn for which there is no
Cure. He serves the hostess breast, her
Own breast rising and falling. And so on,
Till all the guests are served, the turkey
Now a wreck, the carver exhausted, a
Mere carcass of his former self. Everyone
Says thanks to the turkey carver and begins
To eat, thankful for the cold turkey
And the Republic for which it stands.

Mac Hammond

#107 - Murrushka, I live in Central Oregon, just southeast of the last photo above and 2 years ago just below Mt Hood on the western slopes for 11 years.

I am going to run guys! I will post pics of the results from last night's storm when I get back. Going to the besties house to help with her genealogy project.

We now have about 15 inches on the ground and it's supposed to stop snowing sometime this morning. Then the cold blast really sets in. The high today will be 15° today in La Pine. I think it was about 8° when I got up.

From Wilson's gallery (actually from the South American Correspondent):

Man in a room in Argentina

Before there was Julia Child, there was Elizabeth David. (having recently aquired a first American edition of Classics: Mediterranean, French and Summer Cooking)

"For the ideal picnic there has to be water, and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, that it is rare not to be able to find some delicious spot where you can sit by the water, watch dragonflies and listen to the birds or to the beguiling sound of a fast-flowing stream. As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant. During one golden September in the valleys of the Corrèze, the Dordogne and the Lot, I enjoyed just such picnics, day after blazing day. The tomatoes that year and in that region were so rich and ripe and fragrant that I shall forever remember their savour. Then, one day in a pastry shop in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, we bought a tarte aux mirabelles made with yeast pastry. Those little round golden plums of early autumn on their light brioche-like base made an unexpected and memorable end to our outdoor feast. Another year it was Normandy, early autumn again, and daily picnics in the magnificent forests of Mortagne, Brotonne and Bellême, in clearings where foxgloves grew high amid the bracken, and water was always within sight. Once or twice we sat by the banks of the Seine, looking at landscapes and riverscapes which Corot had surely painted."

-- Elizabeth David.

Read more of this snippet here : http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/elizabethdavid#ixzz168ulYGMF

One of the things I most like to do is daydream about being in France, Steven, so thanks for that. The best tomato I ever et, btw, was in Province, in a town just south of Avignon.

>109 highdesertlady:. Hey, Tani. When you get back from figuring out who you're related to, please reduce the size of the pix in messages 101 to 110, will ya? It's okay on my supercomputer, but on the ordinary one it throws everything out of whack.

Glad you like. Have you watched the slide show of images taken by Rimbaud at Open Culture? I think you will enjoy the old France: http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/rimbaud_a_life_in_slideshow.html

Terrific old photos, and the ambient background wasn't bad either.

From the sublime to the ridiculous:



I took this one last year, while there was still a drought. The grass and flowers are dying because of harsh baking beat and strict water restrictions, not cold-related.

P.S. NOT MY HOUSE!

Better?

S'good. We're in Sagittarius now, Firecracker. Time for us to spark(le).

Tomorrow we go to Bermuda. 5 days of tournament action and exploration of one of the oldest English colonies on this side of the world.
Chilly here in San Diego. Lots of winter cloud formations, though clouds without water. We are having Turkeyday today. And rhubarb pie from Julian. And it's almost dinner time so i will mozieonoverifyoudon'tmind.

Tomorrow we go to Bermuda. 5 days of tournament action and exploration of one of the oldest English colonies on this side of the world.
Chilly here in San Diego. Lots of winter cloud formations, though clouds without water. We are having Turkeyday today. And rhubarb pie from Julian. And it's almost dinner time so i will mozieonoverifyoudon'tmind.

Bermuda, eh?

Bermuda, eh?

Say hi to Mychal Thompson.

Say hi to Mychal Thompson.

>113 eugenegant: Fabulous!!!!!! Thank you for posting that!

Be Kind

we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.

one is asked
to view
their total error
their life-waste
with
kindliness,
especially if they are
aged.

but age is the total of
our doing.
they have aged
badly
because they have
lived
out of focus,
they have refused to
see.

not their fault?

whose fault?
mine?

I am asked to hide
my viewpoint
from them
for fear of their
fear.

age is no crime

but the shame
of a deliberately
wasted
life

among so many
deliberately
wasted
lives

is.

Charles Bukowski

And W.H. Auden also had something to say on the subject of Age:

Old Peoples Home

All are limitory, but each has her own

nuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves,

are ambulant with a single stick, adroit

to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of

easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very

carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent

of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious

to a glum beyond tears.) Then come those on wheels, the average

majority, who endure T.V. and, led by

lenient therapists, do community-singing, then

the loners, muttering in Limbo, and last

the terminally incompetent, as improvident,

unspeakable, impeccable as the plants

they parody. (Plants may sweat profusely but never

sully themselves.) One tie, though, unites them: all

appeared when the world, though much was awry there, was more

spacious, more comely to look at, it's Old Ones

with an audience and secular station. Then a child,

in dismay with Mamma, could refuge with Gran

to be revalued and told a story. As of now,

we all know what to expect, but their generation

is the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned

to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience

as unpopular luggage.

As I ride the subway

to spend half-an-hour with one, I revisage

who she was in the pomp and sumpture of her hey-day,

when week-end visits were a presumptive joy,

not a good work. Am I cold to wish for a speedy

painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays,

that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?

Oh god, I really identify right now with my co-worker who has plans to off herself on her 70th birthday.

The angst of coming into this world often exemplifies itself on the way out. The goodness often comes from the creamy filling in the middle. And sometimes a few nuts add to the experience. =)

Books I have so far gotten for my birthday:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth
Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Journey Into the Past, Stefan Zweig
The Post Office Girl, Stefan Zweig

And a couple of DVDs, the second season of Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane.

Happy Birthday, Wilson! ;-)

My wife and I took our honeymoon in Bermuda. Lovely place, but don't drink a gallon of Swizzlers and follow it up with a large ice cream chaser.

Happy birthday, Peter.

Enjoy your birthday P.

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
- Franz Kafka

You know, Piero, anybody can wish you happy birthday. But I think it takes someone special to wish you an unhappy birthday.

Unhappy Birthday, Piero! -- courtesy of The Smiths.

115 - Christmas in Louisiana isn't too different save that its cool. It snowed one year (1/2" with ice) - most amazing thing I've ever seen.

To contrast Tani's gorgeous photos, here is one I took in Louisiana:



That's sugarcane, one of our main crops. It's been a while since I'd been down in the fall when they burn the fields (cane is like mint in that it sends out shooter roots). Very terrible smell.

I have a couple much more attractive shots (plantations and old oaks and moss). Will try to upload those tonight.

I've read that Louisiana is the largest exporter of rice in the world. This doesn't sound reasonable to me, but there it is. I guess because we are a mostly wheat eating country, we have more rice to export, while Eastern countries such as China, Japan, India and the Indochinese countries grow their rice for domestic consumption.

Anyone else have any light they can share on the Great Rice Export Question?

One thing that's funny is the existence of a line that runs through the heart of Afghanistan, to the west of the line the world eats wheat, to the east of the line it eats rice. Right around the line, like India and Pakistan you find both, but the further you go from the line, the purer the preference.

The cultivation of wheat I can understand, throw it on the ground, smush it in real good, wait for the rain and let nature do its work. How in the hell did anyone figure out how to cultivate rice?

132 - They do export a ton of rice (not sure if it's the largest exporter though). We had rice with every meal growing up, and it's still a staple for me. In fact, I will eat plain white rice as a snack or for lunch.

Life's Harmonies

Let no man pray that he know not sorrow,
Let no soul ask to be free from pain,
For the gall of to-day is the sweet of to-morrow,
And the moment's loss is the lifetime's gain.

Through want of a thing does its worth redouble,
Through hunger's pangs does the feast content,
And only the heart that has harbored trouble,
Can fully rejoice when joy is sent.

Let no man shrink from the bitter tonics
Of grief, and yearning, and need, and strife,
For the rarest chords in the soul's harmonies,
Are found in the minor strains of life.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

That's beautiful! Happy Thanksgiving everyone! ♥

There's no weather, but I can smell my neighbors' holiday dinners. I will be off to church to eat and wash dishes in a moment.

Merry Thanksgiving,

Robert

Something you can be thankful for, Robert: that you didn't have to change the cat litter before the guests showed up.

Obesity

With belly like a poisoned pup
Said I: "I must give bacon up:
And also, I profanely fear,
I must abandon bread and beer
That make for portliness they say;
Yet of them copiously today
I ate with an increasingly sense
Of grievous corpulence.

I like a lot of things I like.
Too bad that I must go on strike
Against pork sausages and mash,
Spaghetti and fried corn-beef hash.
I deem he is a lucky soul
Who has no need of girth control;
For in the old of age: 'Il faut
Souffrir pour etre bean.'

Yet let me not be unconsoled:
So many greybeards I behold,
Distinguished in affairs of state,
In culture counted with the Great,
Have tummies with a shameless bulge,
And so I think I'll still indulge
In eats I like without a qualm,
And damn my diaphragm!"

Robert William Service

How apropos... I trust you were fed well yesterday?

Stuffed like a turkey, and still waddling around.

I dunno about any of the other cooks in this group but I didn't eat yesterday until dinner at 3:30. And surprisingly, I didn't stuff myself. Had pie a few hours later and a 1/2 turkey sandwich later. Now, da Mama, on the other hand, had a blood sugar over 200. *sigh* It's gonna be a long weekend.

We had to eat in shifts, there was only room for 8 or 9 at the table & the real little ones sat on Mommy or Daddy's lap. All day long, rain kept falling. I stepped outside with my youngest daughter so she could smoke. The rain had softened into a mist and I looked at the cars parked in the driveway & in front of the house. 5 pick-up trucks (one was mine) and 3 cars. I connected the cars with the people they belonged to & realized they were all my descendents. Well, me and my husband. It's the wave of great-grandchildren that makes us such a crowd. Sometimes I think: What if I never happened? Or became the hermit I considered being, or married someone else or divorced? All these people, and my oldest daughter & her family in California. Is this how the world got over-populated? Such small
beginnings that grow & spread? People who just don't want to be lonely?

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost

In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Stephen Crane

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

On Mark Strand, and links to more of his poems:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mark-strand

That's a great article on Strand, Piero. Thanks for that.

Back when the L.A. Times Book Review published weekly poems and actually reviewed poetry (era long since passed), the ones that reverberated in my brain for whatever reason, I'd cut out and after several years had a nice collection of poem clippings. The one by Strand always stood out: so many layers, so much depth, yet so few words.

Well I'll be darned! Just opened the L.A. Times Book Review "section" (don't get me started on how a once magnificent twenty-plus page stand alone section has eroded into a six page snippet combined with "The Arts").

But, there's a book review of poetry! Here: New Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winner for Lit., I gather, in '96.

Here's an excerpt apropos of this thread, from a poem, "The Day After -- Without Us":

"The morning is expected to be cool and foggy.
Rainclouds
will move in from the west.
Poor visibility.
Slick highways....
those still living
should bring umbrellas."

Thanks for that, Henri. It sent me browsing for more, one of which (not from her latest collection) is here:

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Wislawa Szymborska

That's a fantastic poem of hers. I especially like the line about for every thousand conversations, it (the soul) participates in one, if even that.

Wonder if Por-Man is back from the Bermuda Triangle? Dangerous area he ventured into, full of strange time-travel vortexes.

Here's another by Wislawa, which I'll dedicate to our friend Peter:

Some Like Poetry

Some--
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like--
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry--
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don't know and don't know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

Wislawa Szymborska

A WINTER EDEN
A winter garden in an alder swamp,
Where conies now com out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year's berries shining scarlet red.

It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feast
Or some wild apple tree's young tender bark,
What well my prove the year's high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock,
This Eden day is done at two o'clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life's while to wake and sport.

Robert Frost

Back in So. Cal. What a delightful week away in the middle of the Atlantic. I will make my way back at some point.

Oh my gawd, who are you and what did you do with Porius? The Porius I know doesn't use touchstones... hmmm, Bermuda, eh?

Let's brighten up a chilly, rainy day with some colorful book art.



"Stacks" by Penelope Davis

I quite like the colorful book art. My world looks like the Stay Puff man puked.

A good Bermuda Triangle, it appears. Thanks for the colors, Jane. My world doesn't quite look puked, Tani, but dreary. Is there such a thing as a Thanksgiving letdown, or is it just me?

It must be tryptophan withdrawal.

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Countée Cullen

Discovered this poem--and Countee Cullen--in high school. He has remained one of my favorites.

Well then, here's another from this elegant poet, Thea:

Fruit of the Flower

My father is a quiet man
With sober, steady ways;
For simile, a folded fan;
His nights are like his days.

My mother's life is puritan,
No hint of cavalier,
A pool so calm you're sure it can
Have little depth to fear.

And yet my father's eyes can boast
How full his life has been;
There haunts them yet the languid ghost
Of some still sacred sin.

And though my mother chants of God,
And of the mystic river,
I've seen a bit of checkered sod
Set all her flesh aquiver.

Why should he deem it pure mischance
A son of his is fain
To do a naked tribal dance
Each time he hears the rain?

Why should she think it devil's art
That all my songs should be
Of love and lovers, broken heart,
And wild sweet agony?

Who plants a seed begets a bud,
Extract of that same root;
Why marvel at the hectic blood
That flushes this wild fruit?

Countée Cullen

A link, for those who want to know more about Countée Cullen:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/55

CC is an elegant poet indeed. Coldish here in So. Cal. Brilliant sunset last night, almost Las Vegas red. Work finished early I shuffled down to PB and had a few sips as the fire-y red ball sunk into the Pacific. Then to Shake-speare's Pub for S.'s trivia night. I was the only one who could answer that Samuel Johnson skipped Davy Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in favor of a carriage ride in the country with, say, Flora MacDonald. The rains pretty much spolied Davy's extravaganza, though Bozzy showed up resplendent in Southern duds. Read about it in Christian Deelman's THE GREAT SHAKESPEARE JUBILEE.

to the Diaspora

you did not know you were Afrika

When you set out for Afrika
you did not know you were going.
Because
you did not know you were Afrika.
You did not know the Black continent
that had to be reached
was you.

I could not have told you then that some sun
would come,
somewhere over the road,
would come evoking the diamonds
of you, the Black continent--
somewhere over the road.
You would not have believed my mouth.

When I told you, meeting you somewhere close
to the heat and youth of the road,
liking my loyalty, liking belief,
you smiled and you thanked me but very little believed me.

Here is some sun. Some.
Now off into the places rough to reach.
Though dry, though drowsy, all unwillingly a-wobble,
into the dissonant and dangerous crescendo.
Your work, that was done, to be done to be done to be done.

Gwendolyn Brooks

>160 copyedit52: that is glorious. Makes me miss my parents and the rainforest. Thanks.

The Harlem Renaissance:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5657

A pity we lost Hulme during WWI:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173696
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173697

Well, it turns out that this is the laptop revamp from HELL. I will be sharing da Mama's computer for awhile. meh. And I am being herded away from it as I write this.

Ciao!

Rilke's birthday today.

Fire's Reflection

Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection
on some piece of gleaming furniture
that the child remembers so much later
like a revelation.

And if in his later life, one day
wounds him like so many others,
it's because he mistook some risk
or other for a promise.

Let's not forget the music, either,
that soon had hauled him
toward absence complicated
by an overflowing heart....

Rainer Maria Rilke

must he die before he wakes up?
http://www.youtube.com/user/idriesshah999?gl=GB&hl=en-GB#p/a/u/1/voB4P7jTMq8
or Mother should I build a wall?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBkTUzKAiXQ
clutching forks & knives to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKggq6EsqIU&feature=related
this is excellent stuff
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Poetry2

Ahhhhh... that's better. back on my own computer and my blood pressure is down. I really hate it when something so easy turns into a complicated drawn out ordeal. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to reload everything.

The Night Game

Some of us believe
We would have conceived romantic
Love out of our own passions
With no precedents,
Without songs and poetry--
Or have invented poetry and music
As a comb of cells for the honey.

Shaped by ignorance,
A succession of new worlds,
Congruities improvised by
Immigrants or children.

I once thought most people were Italian,
Jewish or Colored.
To be white and called
Something like Ed Ford
Seemed aristocratic,
A rare distinction.

Possibly I believed only gentiles
And blonds could be left-handed.

Already famous
After one year in the majors,
Whitey Ford was drafted by the Army
To play ball in the flannels
Of the Signal Corps, stationed
In Long Branch, New Jersey.

A night game, the silver potion
Of the lights, his pink skin
Shining like a burn.

Never a player
I liked or hated: a Yankee,
A mere success.

But white the chalked-off lines
In the grass, white and green
The immaculate uniform,
And white the unpigmented
Halo of his hair
When he shifted his cap:

So ordinary and distinct,
So close up, that I felt
As if I could have made him up,
Imagined him as I imagined

The ball, a scintilla
High in the black backdrop
Of the sky. Tight red stitches.
Rawlings. The bleached

Horsehide white: the color
Of nothing. Color of the past
And of the future, of the movie
screen
At rest and of blank paper.

"I could have." The mind. The black
Backdrop, the white
Fly picked out by the towering
Lights. A few years later

On a blanket in the grass
By the same river
A girl and I came into
Being together
To the faint muttering
Of unthinkable
Troubadours and radios
.

The emerald
Theater, the night.
Another time,
I devised a left-hander
Even more gifted
Than Whitey Ford: A Dodger.
People were amazed by him.
Once, when he was young,
He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur.

Robert Pinsky

What a fine effort, I love Pinsky!

In certain villages, especially in small towns whose chief industry is fishing, it is not uncommon to see a rowboat or a deep-sea dory on some well-kept lawn. There, instead of being filled with fish, it is full of flowers.

The picture is incongruous and, at the same time, commonplace. But the poet does more than show its queerness, its combination of the strange and familiar. He extends the vision of a flower-filled boat and the fantasy of one more journey into the unknown.
Louis Untermeyer

THE FLOWER BOAT
The fisherman's swapping a yarn for a yarn
Under the hand of the village barber,
And here in the angle of house and barn
His deep-sea dory has found a harbor.

At anchor she rides the sunny sod
As full to the gunnel of flowers growing
As ever she turned her home with cod
From George's bank when winds were blowing.

And I judge from that Elysian freight
That all they ask is rougher weather,
And dory and master will sail by fate
To seek for the Happy Isles together.

Robert Lee Frost

The nights are cold enough now, the mid-twenties, and it's chilly during the day. But like most around here, I'm still walking around in vest and flannel shirt.

Woodstock, New York, highs and lows:

Today: 36° / 25°
Tomorrow: 34° / 25° snow flurries
Monday: 34° / 25°

According to Porius, yesterday wasn't Rilke's birthday, today is:

The Future

The future: time's excuse
to frighten us; too vast
a project, too large a morsel
for the heart's mouth.

Future, who won't wait for you?
Everyone is going there.
It suffices you to deepen
the absence that we are.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I think we got up to, maybe, 27 today. A few, very light, snow showers. More of the same tomorrow and the possibility of reaching the 40s on Monday? I believes it when I sees it.

A Frost poem about a bird unseen and unheard. Merely pictorial to the unimaginative but listen closely for music and expect meaning from the mute scene.

LOOKING FOR A SUNSET BIRD IN WINTER
The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place
I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now,
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
And gilt to gold that wouldn't show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke
Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to north across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.

Robert Frost

A Frost double-header

A drumlin is a ridge or narrow hill made by a glacier pushing its way through prehistoric land. It forms a fine retreat, the very sort of rocky burrow favored by the woodchuck, or a ground hog.
In a set of half-humorous, half-symbolic lines the poet identifies himself with the shrewd woodchuck: an animal which, unlike the beaver, has nothing to do with wood, but it is so called because that is the way the pioneers heard the original American Indians name 'wejack.'

A DRUMLIN WOODCHUCK
One thing has a shelving bank,
Another a rotting plank,
To give it cozier skies
And make up for its lack of size.

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack
As one who shrewdly pretends
That he and the world are friends.

All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give,
And flash, at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm.

We allow some time for guile
And don't come out for a while
Either to eat or drink.
We take occasion to think.

And if the hunt goes past
And the double-barrelled blast
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

Robert Frost

I got to go 'out west' on the weekend, meaning leaving the east coast and driving a few hours inland to the wheat belt of NSW. The poor farmers out there have had their first bumper crop after ten years of drought, and now, just when it's time to harvest, they're getting ceaseless rain, so they can't take the crop off, and a lot of it is sprouting on the stalk.

But it's amazing out there. Creeks breaking their banks, parts of roads underwater, dams spreading out across paddocks... I've been going out there for years, and I always remember it bare, brown, and the creeks just stagnant puddles in patches. Even the farmers can't really despair, this rain is just so miraculous.

Gettin’ cold out there at night in some places, but with a nod toward Sheila in Australia, who has not yet been at the top of the heap, we’ll list the predicted temps for selected locales, Monday, December 6, from high to low:

Sydney 75-66
Taipei 72-59
San Diego 64-53
Los Angeles 64-50
New Orleans 52-32
Denver 48-25
Little Rock 47-22
Portland, Oregon 44-38
Atlanta 44 21
Greenville, S. Carolina 42-23
Vancouver, Canada 40-36
New York City 38-30
La Pine, Oregon 38-27
Bethany, Conn. 37-26
Ghent, Belgium 34-27
Woodstock, N.Y. 31-23
Sandusky, Ohio 28-23
Edmonton, Canada 19-3

I WIN!!!! TAKE THAAAAT!

How do you do the fahrenheit-celsius conversion for subzero temperatures? Like, my dad always said "double it and add thirty", which if applied in reverse means about 3 to 5 degrees in Vancouver right now--feels about right. But then for Edmonton, 19 - 30 = -11, doubled is -22. And that's fucking cold. 3 - 30 is -27, doubled is -54, and if it were that cold in Edmonton I'm sure it'd be on the news and suchlike.

Oh, oops! Ha ha, guess who almost failed math three years running? I would subtract 30 and the HALVE it--so 19 - 30 is -11, cut in half and rounded up is -6. A few degrees below freezing. And 3 -30 is -27, cut/rounded is -14. Totally reasonable. Here's something for y'all:

MON PAYS C'EST L'HIVER

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Dans la blanche cérémonie
Où la neige au vent se marie
Dans ce pays de poudrerie
Mon père a fait bâtir maison
Et je m'en vais être fidèle
À sa manière, à son modèle
La chambre d'amis sera telle
Qu'on viendra des autres saisons
Pour se bâtir à côté d'elle
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon refrain ce n'est pas un refrain, c'est rafale
Ma maison ce n'est pas ma maison, c'est froidure
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Dans mon grand pays solitaire
Je crie avant que de me taire
À tous les hommes de la terre
Ma maison c'est votre maison
Entre mes quatre murs de glace
Je mets mon temps et mon espace
À préparer le feu, la place
Pour les humains de l'horizon
Et les humains sont de ma race
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'envers
D'un pays qui n'était ni pays ni patrie
Ma chanson ce n'est pas une chanson, c'est ma vie
C'est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers

MY COUNTRY, IT IS WINTER

My country is not a country, it's winter
My garden is not a garden, it's a plain
My road is not a road, it's snow
My country is not a country, it's winter
In the white ceremony
In which the wind to snow marries
In this country of powdery
My father had his house built
And I am going to be faithful
To his way, to his model
The friends room will be such
That we will come from the other seasons
To build next to it
My country is not a country, it's winter
My chorus is not a chorus, it's a gust
My house is not a house, it's the cold
My country is not a country, it's winter
In my great solitary country
I scream before I shut myself up
To all men of the Earth
My house is your house
Between these four falls of ice
I take my time and my space
To make the fire and the place
For all the humans at the horizon
And humans are of my race
My country is not a country, it's winter
My garden is not a garden, it's a plain
My road is not a road, it's snow
My country is not a country, it's winter
My country is not a country, it's the other side
Of a country that was nor country nor homeland
My song is not a song, it's my life
It's for you that I want to posess my winters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH_R6D7mU7M

-Gilles Vigneault

Go, Edmonton! Whoot! I was feeling a little chilly here--we wrapped the fig tree in burlap this afternoon and this evening the dogs were in accordance with the decision to cut the walk short.

There's a comedy routine from my Canadian past--Bob and Doug MacKenzie explaining metric conversion as double it and add 32. This was especially heartening when it came to speed limits and beer purchases.

Beauty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsgVspgy184

>182 Porius:. "How to Stuff a Mouse into a Beer Bottle without Breaking It." Nice to see those two guys again.

On temperature conversion, Martin, Alison, if you don't like mathematics, you can use this:

http://www.csgnetwork.com/tempconvjava.html

And with the click of a mouse it's clear:

In Celsius, the predicted high today for Edmonton is: -7
The predicted low is: -16

We're having Edmonton's predicted high as our low and it's pretty cold, eh?

That brought back so much! Thanks, Porius. I even went and ordered an Oilers hat for my brother's Christmas present just now.

Why are poems better in French? Except Emilly Dickinson.

Ah, fresh blood on our thirsty, aging thread, and from a Mid-Atlantic state, no less, which is more than underrepresented. Today's high, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, by the way, will be 36 (or so they say), and the overnight low 26.

But to citygirl's question: Why is everything better in French, except Emily Dickinson. Well, no, that's not what she asked, is it? My American anti-exceptionalism is showing. Why is poetry better in French? Anyone want to tackle that one? How about you, Henri, mon frere? Or you, Martin, notre homme de l'hiver? (Or should it be d'hiver?)

Thesmellersthefeller, no?

Yeah, it's cold here. And the wind is brutal, but not as bad as spending Winter from October 08 to May 09 in Winnipeg. No kidding. That's how long winter lasted.

And it's d'hiver.

Me no habla francais today. I go look for poem now.

>183 copyedit52: ha! Ask a copyeditor, right? Thanks:) I note that the double-and-30 method did provide a good approximation, within a couple degrees at least.

>186 copyedit52: great question. Like most Canadians east of Winnipeg, I am a drooling semiliterate where it comes to French (although one of the joys of French for English speakers is how much easier it is to read than speak), but I would venture to wonder whether we're talking about poetry read silently or spoken aloud. Because French has a number of phonological features that I could imagine would make it conducive to recitation--the resonance of the nasalized vowels; the final-syllable stress, which I think is invariable and which strikes me as a much more powerful prosody to which to set verse than the iambic da-DA-da-DA rhythms of English. I feel like there are other things. Maybe this is a question for Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue?

Maybe the words are just prettier, and yes, they are lovely to read aloud. Isn't

c'est l'hiver
Dans la blanche cérémonie
Où la neige au vent se marie
Dans ce pays de poudrerie

just nicer? "la blanche cérémonie"..."ce pays de poudrerie"

And to be clear, je ne suis pas canadienne! (not that there's anything worng with that ;-)

149> a few more words on the soul from dear Ezra:

"...Souls be the water-nymphs of Porphyrius..."

~ from canto 91

******

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives --
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

~Philip Larkin

from High Windows, 1974

a collection that also features the poem "This Be The Verse" that Anna_in_pdx posted over in a Dostoyevski thread ...

190> Martini, if you haven't posted that question over in tomcat's group, I think it'd be great if you did ...

>192 absurdeist:. Good'un, Henri, but phooey on asking us to traipse over to faux St. Petersburg to find a poem we can just as well find ourselves:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

>191 citygirl: yeah, but the question is what makes them prettier, right? Is it their phonetic qualities? Their prosodic shape? The way they look on the page and the sound-aesthetics and meaning-associations those words bring up for an English speaker (by sound-aesthetics, I'm thinking of the way most English-speakers might judge the made-up word amarathea to be prettier than the made-up word skogbort, and by "meaning-associations" I'm thinking of the way we see e.g. "blanche" and it conjures up a whole world of associations with the white skin of a thirteenth-century princess and the Deep South and blanched almonds, which is something unavailable to most of us if we're trying to read a poem in e.g. Turkish; or even the way the word "hiver" for me, even though they're pronounced differently, conjures up a sleepy hive of bees hibernating through the winter, to wake up again when the air brings the promise of spring. Whereas "winter", since I grew up with German, ties in strongly with German "Winter", and the Teutonic North and Norse gods, and is an entirely colder and more fearsome prospect, to me, than cozy "hiver".

Or maybe it's just the cultural associations we have with French, that it's beautiful and cultivated.

>193 absurdeist: good call! I shall.

I do like that kind of noodling, Martin. Like a while ago, instead of toasting my stale, leftover baguette, I slathered on some of Bonne Maman's cherry jam, which comes in a ten-sided glass jar, produit de France, because, much as I like toasted (stale) bread with melted butter, I wanted a little je ne sais quoi on a fine cold morning.

Oh, damn. You want me to think. *big sigh* I'll try.

and I'll look for the question on tomcat's thread. Anyone point me in the right direction?

Hey Piero, that's two poems in a row posted with some variation of the word "fuck" included. Can we keep the "fuck" streak going for a third and maybe fourth poem in a row with it, you think?

Por-Man, did Robert Frost ever use "fuck" in one of his poems? If so, please post it here.

Je ne sais pas, Henri, mais aujourd'hui je suis Pierre, s'il vous plait. (Regardez poste #196.)

LOL

>191 citygirl: ukhgh, also, there is plenty wrong with being Canadian today. Stephen Harper is our prime minister, and over here in BC Carole James, our opposition leader, an incredibly bright and compassionate woman (which isn't just spin; I went to school with her daughter and Carole is so nice), was forced to step down today because she's "unelectable" because she's "not tough enough" and we apparently want all our politicians to be codpiece warlords, even in Canada in almost 2011. Who are these people that won't vote for somebody unless they're "tough"? It's the same problem your man Obama has (sorry if there's an unofficial ban on politics in the nature thread:)--he can't get on with the business of trying to run a fractious nation the way he was elected to do--as a compromiser--because everyone thinks he's weak if he's not destroying the Republicans with his massive pelvic thrusts.

down/ pour

rain shines everywhere, slicks

the surface of things:

a man unfolding a woman



into an ambulance, a rainbow

unspooling from a white crucifix

a traffic light swaggering



above to a blue sign that says

hospital › & a green sign

that says skiing ‹ . a chair scrapes,



a woman coughs, a dead

branch stretches, like an arm

across the window. the loops



& os of her name slop

across the dotted line as if

into a wound



i’m not sorry she says do you

believe me? sirens splash

& a frog sings back.



from shadow into sun,

the man smokes & paces, paces

& smokes. turn & turn again



a man breathing in & out,

like a tree, not yet

recognizing this as the story



of our life, the one we do not

want to hear but will do anything

to listen to. the present



tense unfolds then refolds

like a paper crane preparing

for flight, or tungsten





in a Christmas bulb just before

the oxygen rushes in, igniting

everything, spelling hope all in caps



all in white, while rainspit

hangs in the air, while here

women are dying & women



are giving birth, & a man thrusts

his weight inside the cementblock

that is St. Paul’s



from sun into shadow

thinking: step over & step lightly

& step into the fact

-Emily Carr

Bah. Carole would have been a great premier. Here is a poem about how unfriendly and strange Vancouver can feel on a rainy winter's day. Today it is 5 degrees C--that's 41 in American--cloudy, but luminous.

Paris, France:

High 2
Low: -1

Light snow

>196 copyedit52:, 201 and as such, time for a baguette.

Need it be said? Today, clearly, is French Appreciation and Misapprehension Day:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/104011

Kudos to Martin (pronounced "Mar-tan" today), and a footnote to citygirl for somewhat facetiously planting today's sprout.

The Tree

Oh to be free of myself,
With nothing left to remember,
To have my heart as bare
As a tree in December;

Resting, as a tree rests
After its leaves are gone,
Waiting no more for a rain at night
Nor for the red at dawn;

But still, oh so still
While the winds come and go,
With no more fear of the hard frost
Or the bright burden of snow;

And heedless, heedless
If anyone pass and see
On the white page of the sky
Its thin black tracery.

Sarah Teasdale

I am Piero again today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGRFDA3JTiU&feature=related

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner

BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon there selves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth make them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust -
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged o the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows -
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out to soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. he always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from the earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to get better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
TOWARD heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Lee Frost

Kick off your shoes and relax. One spiced cider coming up!

Pour 2oz of Sailor Jerry spiced rum into an 8oz. glass of hot apple cider.
Mix with cinnamon stick and enjoy!

At night the salmon move
out from the river and into the town.
They avoid places with names
like Foster's Freeze, A&W, Smiley's,
but swim close to the tract
homes on Wright Avenue where sometimes
in the early morning hours
you can hear them trying doorknobs
or bumping against Cable TV lines.
We wait up for them.
We leave our back windows open
and call out when we hear a splash.
Mornings are a disappointment.
~Raymond Carver

Hmm. Just so happens I'm into apple cider at the moment. It has usurped my former defaults drinks: V8 and ruby grapefruit juice. But I got work to do, Steven. No rum for me. And I prefer it cold. And I'm not much for cinnamon. Other than that, we could be drinking the same thing.

Made my first fire since March today. Split some fat chunks of wood in the driveway, gathered twigs and branches from the twig and branch bin in back, some old New York Timeses, to help get it going, and arranged these materials in the woodstove in my time-honored fashion. Made the small back room, which otherwise gets no heat, the toastiest room in the house.

V8 (low sodium) is my morning ritual, right after the coffee to get me going. Nothing like grapefruit juice in the late sleeping hours when one wakes up parched and dry. I would have to say, they are my top three drinks -edging out a cold hoppy ale ever so slightly.

Raymond Carver! Ummm. Better known for his stories than his poetry, of course, but a solid poetic voice nevertheless. Here's, probably, not completely sure, my favorite of his:

Drinking While Driving

It's August and I have not
read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat From Moscow
by Caulaincourt.
Nevertheless, I am happy
riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road.
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.

******

And since there seems to be a tree leitmotif today on the thread, why not another of Philip Larkin's from High Windows -- a book that was in David Foster Wallace's library, fwiw.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Drinking While Driving. Good one! Don't try this at home unless it's a god-forsaken, never-ending, stretch of pot-marked asphalt somewhere (mistaken for nowhere) in Wyoming where you can also pull off the shoulder, get out, undress, change cloths, (perhaps take care of business), get back in the car and take another drink.

God bless the great American west!

MOWING is a sonnet that reads like a lyric. One of F.'s early poems, but the tone is already mature, and the spirit is of the later work. The poet as laborer identifies himself with his scythe; and as the man and his instrument perform their task, their 'earnest love' brings them to a simple and profound truth:

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows

BIRCHES assured the reader that 'Earth's the right place for love.' 'For love - and labor, too,' adds the scythe, whispering to the ground.

MOWING
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps about the lack of sound -
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Robert Frost

"Nature" is what we see

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Emily Dickinson

An encore for Emily:

This Consciousness that is aware

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

Emily Dickinson

Wolves are coming into town looking for food in a small southwestern village in Alaska. http://tinyurl.com/248ww3q

In the end, will it be their demise or ours?

The Last Wolf

The last wolf hurried toward me
through the ruined city
and I heard his baying echoes
down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past
the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing
their lighted elevators useless

Passing the flicking red and green
of traffic signals
baying his way eastward
in the mystery of his wild loping gait
closer the sounds in the deadly night
through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks
I hear his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched

He trotted across the floor
he laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered

Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.

~Alaska Writer & Poet, Mary TallMountain

Contradiction is the strength of Frost's MENDING WALL. 2 great lines oppose each other:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

But too:

Good fences make good neighbors.

Contradiction logical, opposing statements arise from 2 quite different voters - and both are right. Man cannot live without walls, boundaries, limits, and particularly self-limitations; yet he abhors all bounds and is cheered at the demise of any barrier. In MENDING WALL the lines of demarcation are bootless.

There where it is we do not need the wall.

And, to hammer home the point, the speaker adds jestfully:

He is all pine and I am all apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Some readers have found some far-reaching implications in this poem.
They have found that it states one of the greatest problems of our time: whether national walls should be made stronger for our protection, or whether they should be let down, since they cramp our progress toward understanding and eventual brotherhood. Some readers have read MW as a symbolic poem. In the voices of the 2 men - the younger, whimsical, 'new-fashioned speaker and the 'old-fashioned farmer who replies with his one determined sentence, his inherited maxim - some readers hear the clash of 2 forces: the spirit of revolt, which challenges tradition, and the spirit of restraint, which insists that conventions must be upheld, built up and continually rebuilt, as a matter of principle.
The poet himself frowns upon such symbolic interpretations. He denies that the poem says anything more than it seems to say. The contradiction is the heart of the poem. It answers itself in the paradox of people, in neighbors and competitors, in the contradictory nature of man.
Louis Untermeyer

MENDING WALL
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But a spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are till are backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need a wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'WHY do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Robert Frost

there's something so wonderfully workaday about Frost's poetry. It's always about things he's doing, but he imbues that doing with reflections. you get the feeling he never sits at his desk composing, but writes poetry in his head while he's actively doing other work, being busy with life. I hadn't really appreciated him before I met you, Por and you started posting so much Frost. It's really great stuff.

Southern weather: "Georgians are freezing their peaches off."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/us/09georgia.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a...

We have an impending serious cold front bringing lots of rain and some thunderstorms. The sky ahead of it is already overcast. Our breezes are changing direction. I have a run to make to Costco and may have to buy an umbrella while I am there.

Robert

As you and no doubt a few others know, Robert, I've been trying to figure out where you live for about eight months and twelve nature threads now, and I thought I knew. But now you've just flat out confused me. There's nowhere in the Northeast or the Midwest, or even the Mid-Atlantic states--from what I can see on the weather map--where there's a cold front coming (it's cold enough as it is) or impending precipitation would bring rain instead of snow; no place where thunderstorms make any sense at all. So I figure you're just making up a fictional weather condition (to throw me off the track) or you live hundreds of miles from where I assumed. Perhaps somewhere in Florida.

My report is no more fictional than any other National Weather Service (a clue) forecast; that is to say it might not happen, but there is evidence that it will. I look daily at the satellite picture and the radar depiction of the area, but I cannot make my own forecasts from the big picture as I more or less could when I lived in the Far East. Usually a cold front is the long tail of a low pressure center, but I don't see that center or, even closer to where it should be, a tail like weather system.

Have you never seen thunderstorms in winter?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to our weather, but I hope it won't interfere with the Metropolitan Opera's transmission of Don Carlo on Saturday.

Robert

Mr Durick... you are a complete and utter tease. Poor Wilson.

It still looks like the Stay Puff man regurgitated, but is actually 40° today. I went out with my normal 3 layers on this morning to take da Mama into town, and sweltered the whole time. They say we could actually get near 50ish in Bend over the next day or so, but I doubt that up here. We might even be able to unstick the pickup.

>220 QuentinTom: Murr, thank you. Things about Frost just fell into place when I read that.

Piero, I feel that 'Piero' is now outdated, and it feels too formal to call you copyedit or Peter. I need a new name for you. Wilson belongs to Tani only.

But anyway, if you want rain, it's all here. This is the town in which I grew up, about 2:30 hrs south of Sydney: http://dft.ba/-qbn-flood and this is my state in general: http://dft.ba/-nsw.

And this fascinated me - a news video about my home town: http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/12/09/3089524.htm

Here in Sydney we're getting lots of light rain, making everything green and humid, but no disasters.

Yikes, Rena! Are your folks affected by all that?

Not directly Tani, thanks for asking. They live a little way out of town. My dad couldn't get home from work last night, and had to stay with my sister. But their houses are okay.

This is coming on top of a ten-year drought. I've seen that river you see in Queanbeyan almost dry, and it's a tributary of one of the major rivers of NSW. This is amazing stuff to me.

A new name for me? What'd you got in mind, Choco? With such as Queanbeyan and Wagga Wagga in your relative vicinity, I imagine you can come up with something creative to capture my je ne sais quoi.

I was tempted, weatherwise, to post another list of predicted temps, since we here in Woodstock (New York) have been promised an overnight low of 10 degrees (that's -7, to you, Choco), which I thought might put me at the top of the list, with the exception of Edmonton, of course.

I'm going down to NYC tomorrow, to make sure it's still there. (I'm a very empirical fellow.) I'll take the train for a change, following a twenty-five mile drive south to the station in Po-keep-see.

Call em Wiseman for a change, play off his last name. Wiseman. Yeah, that's it.

Hey Wiseman, ya got any frankincense and myrrh?

Yo, Mr Freeque! How far away from Escondido are you? That was some circus today, eh?

Most people around here just call Wagga Wagga Wagga. But they don't call Gol Gol Gol. http://dft.ba/-gol-gol

I just don't know, Mr Weissman. I have no inspiration. I was just flagging that I need to come up with something.

Ah! Wiseman! Like. Will do, at least for now.

(we cross posted, Rique)

>230 absurdeist:. Someday, maybe if I get back from NYC, I'll tell you the etymology and meaning of Weiss and Schwartz--my mother's maiden name--in the Jewish shtetls of the Pale, in what is now Lithuania. But for now: everyone seems to think that Weiss has something to do with wise. It doesn't. It means "white."

See above (#234) before you make a choice, Choco. (Not Whiteman, please. My mother didn't raise me to be a honky.)

I knew that. I called you Piero Blancouomo once, did you never notice? You never did comment on it, and I had thought it was rather clever. :(

Call 'em the White Cracker Man!

231> I have no idea what thou speaketh. Guess I should turn on some news, eh? I live one hour north of Escondido.

>236 ChocolateMuse:. I did miss that, Sheila. Peter White ... what?

>237 absurdeist:. White Cracker Man, Henri? As in the southern putdown? I am merely from the southern part of Brooklyn.

I googled 'Man' in Italian, and Google told me it's Uomo.

Well, that's okay then.

#237 - Well, Papa had FOX on (omg, it was awful) and there was a house in Escondido that this fellow was making bombs in with PETN and other stuff and it was so dangerous, as perceived by TPTB, they had to burn it to the ground. They built a 16 foot wall in between the houses to protect from radiant heat. Shut down I-15 and evacuated 72 homes nearby because they just didn't know what to expect after they lit it. Well, whether it would explode or not. Quite the circus.

Cool!

R

Crazy Southern California looney birds for ya. We are the capital of Crazeeeeee! And I'm proud to be a part of it!

My uncle who lived in Orange called Southern California the land of fruits and nuts.

Well here is the visual of our most recent weather... and now there is a Pineapple Express on the way. Oy, major meltdown issues. *sigh*

But this was fun!

ETA - We are experiencing technical difficulties... we will return you to your regular programming as soon as possible.

Oh hell... I'll try later.

A living poem is one that stays alive because it is rooted in mortal things and deathless emotions. It is felt first and thought out afterwards. 'It begins,' Frost once wrote in a letter, 'with a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found the words.'
Frost's lyrics, more personal than poems about people and events, take the reader with suddenness and surprise. Here, with immediate appeal, 'emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found the words.' Frost, more than most, is versed not only in 'country things.' but in things beyond scrutiny, beyond even the sharpest examination. In the poet's world, vision has been added to observation, and the power of sight has been strengthened by insight.

THE NEED OF BEING VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire,
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing said.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Robert Frost

Writing in the Afterlife

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

Billy Collins

Who says we can't do politics on this thread, Martin? For me, this is personal:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/opinion/10iht-edcohen.html?nl=todaysheadlines&...

>249 MeditationesMartini: yeah. I find it really difficult to comment freely on Jewish affairs, as a result of my horrible right-wing Austrian cousins--and actually that is part of what makes this so complicated; certainly I've heard shitty people allow (acceptable, or pseudo-acceptable) criticism of Israel to stand in for (unacceptable) anti-Semitism. But ... what I found interesting looking at the comments was that most of the people disagreeing with Cohen basically did it from a "you're not qualified to comment, American Jew" (Cohen is British) angle. Which from one perspective is fair enuff, but from another is exactly what we all do every day, certainly what our media exist to do. It's this complicated interplay of Israeli sacrosanctness vs. stealth anti-Semitism, and both concerns are real.

But what I tend to wonder is why the disconnect between the comments and membership in organizations that do not hold Israel sacrosanct. Like, Cohen talks about J Street a little--how come the hardest line anyone's willing to take in the comments is "you don't know how it is on the ground in Israel from over there in New York--trust that we aren't blind to the Palestinians' pain", and yet out in the world the political consensus, and the difficulty of criticism, run the other way. Is it just the difference between New York Times readership and society, or the Jewish community, at large?

I dunno, is it just, as long as there's people out there who actually think Israel shouldn't exist, criticism of its policies needs to be treated differently than criticism of nations whose legitimacy isn't constantly under attack? But then surely that should also apply back to the article--if we're at the point where people's legitimacy as Jews is being attacked, then possibly the main thing that's needed is just a calmer, more inclusive discourse? But how do you ever achieve that?

Feh. Here's a poem, my favourite from the oft-threaded Philip Larkin:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

I'm sure you won't mind that I reposted your offering, Martin. I find rom (as we say in the copyediting biz, as short for roman) easier to read than ital(ics):

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
--The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused--nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear--no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
'The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

Robert Frost

The weather here in So. Cal. is too good to be true. Cool air and warm sun. And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Mid-to-high '80s this weekend, Por-Man. I say we hit the beach!

Love to but for work. We won tourney in that enchanted island. Lost to some 19 year old Aussie touring team, by a couple of points. Play next Saturday in another tourney featuring some good LA schools: Eisenhower, Fairfax, Ingleside, and more. Finally in a national torney with 4 divisions, we are in the second div.
The Aussie kids were all 19 or older is what I meant above.

;p

you thrash those aussies por!

Thrash them thoroughly.

Yes, Minister.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_m5Czneno&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvNw0P5ZMbA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXH3-A8zMI&feature=related
Boogieonreggaewoman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylQMhYqSntk

California Winter

It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what
Rare roses for a banquet or a bride,
So multitudinous that they seem a glut!

A line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn
From the rosebushes to the ivy bed;
An arsenic compound is distributed
For them. The gardener will rake up the shells
And leave in a corner of the patio
The little mound of empty shells, like skulls.

By noon the fog is burnt off by the sun
And the world's immensest sky opens a page
For the exercise of a future age;
Now jet planes draw straight lines, parabolas,
And x's, which the wind, before they're done,
Erases leisurely or pulls to fuzz.

It is winter in the valley of the vine.
The vineyards crucified on stakes suggest
War cemeteries, but the fruit is pressed,
The redwood vats are brimming in the shed,
And on the sidings stand tank cars of wine,
For which bright juice a billion grapes have bled.

And skiers from the snow line driving home
Descend through almond orchards, olive farms.
Fig tree and palm tree - everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
If the walls were older one would think of Rome:
If the land were stonier one would think of Spain.

But this land grows the oldest living things,
Trees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world,
Trees whose new leaves are only just unfurled.
Beautiful they are not; they oppress the heart
With gigantism and with immortal wings;
And yet one feels the sumptuousness of this dirt.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Karl Shapiro

Very nice. That line,

Trees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world

refers more to just your standard Cali Sequoia or ancient Redwood tree, but also to the literally "oldest living thing" on earth, our Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

Even though they look dead, they're alive!

Finally:

http://www.amazon.com/Digging-Deeper-Seventies-Peter-Weissman/dp/190655711X/ref=...

Hearty congratulations, Peter! Chapter one will very soon be available for everyone's reading edification on a certain blog I know ... (patience, patience ...)

Yay, Peter! Good Show.

AWAY is Frost in his most whimsical mood. Although written in his 80's, it is as neatly made and as nimbly fanciful as any of his earlier and most accomplished rhymes. As if in answer to those who may be confused by his paradox of persiflage and profundity. Frost placed a teasing couplet near the end of IN THE CLEARING:

It takes all kinds of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

AWAY
Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town,
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is not one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm-bound-away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.

Robert Frost

Trollius and trellises

of course, I may die in the next ten minutes
and I’m ready for that
but what I’m really worried about is
that my editor-publisher might retire
even though he is ten years younger than
I.
it was just 25 years ago (I was at that ripe
old age of 45)
when we began our unholy alliance to
test the literary waters,
neither of us being much
known.

I think we had some luck and still have some
of same
yet
the odds are pretty fair
that he will opt for warm and pleasant
afternoons
in the garden
long before I.

writing is its own intoxication
while publishing and editing,
attempting to collect bills
carries its own
attrition
which also includes dealing with the
petty bitchings and demands
of many
so-called genius darlings who are
not.

I won’t blame him for getting
out
and hope he sends me photos of his
Rose Lane, his
Gardenia Avenue.

will I have to seek other
promulgators?
that fellow in the Russian
fur hat?
or that beast in the East
with all that hair
in his ears, with those wet and
greasy lips?

or will my editor-publisher
upon exiting for that world of Trollius and
trellis
hand over the
machinery
of his former trade to a
cousin, a
daughter or
some Poundian from Big
Sur?

or will he just pass the legacy on
to the
Shipping Clerk
who will rise like
Lazarus,
fingering new-found
importance?

one can imagine terrible
things:
“Mr. Chinaski, all your work
must now be submitted in
Rondo form
and
typed
triple-spaced on rice
paper.”

power corrupts,
life aborts
and all you
have left
is a
bunch of
warts.

“no, no, Mr. Chinaski:
Rondo form!”

“hey, man,” I’ll ask,
“haven’t you heard of
the thirties?”

“the thirties? what’s
that?”

my present editor-publisher
and I
at times
did discuss the thirties,
the Depression
and
some of the little tricks it
taught us—
like how to endure on almost
nothing
and move forward
anyhow.

well, John, if it happens enjoy your
divertissement to
plant husbandry,
cultivate and aerate
between
bushes, water only in the
early morning, spread
shredding to discourage
weed growth
and
as I do in my writing:
use plenty of
manure.

and thank you
for locating me there at
5124 DeLongpre Avenue
somewhere between
alcoholism and
madness.

together we
laid down the gauntlet
and there are takers
even at this late date
still to be
found
as the fire sings
through the
trees.

Charles Bukowski

Chapter One of Digging Deeper: A Memoir of the Seventies is up for your reading edification:

"Rehabilitation"

Finished up the holiday card this weekend (drawing by my husband). Hope ya'll have a good one!



ETA: I have a longer discussion about this church (which burned down in Nov) on my ClubRead thread.

Beautiful, Jane! Happy Holidays!

Thank you for posting chapter one, Freeque!

Thanks & many thanks EF for posting the chapter & Nelson & Jane for the exquisite card.

Unseasonably warm here in sunny So. Cal. Very little for the Beaufort Scale but I'll make up for it with my own hotwind. Just watched a fine old film from the 40's called the BISHOP'S WIFE with Loretta Young, Cary Grant, David Niven, and Monty Wooley. Seen it a half dozen times, it never stales. The weather: well it's not much like Christmas for an old Mid-Westerner such as myself, what with hot sun and blue skies, but I am off for a couple hours give or take for Gregorian Chant at one of the local houses of prayer. I can't claim to possess the ferver of, say, our own geneg, but I do like the music. I still have fond memories of the church organist from my youth. I'd get there early on a Sunday morning to hear him (Mr. Peters) & Msr. Hickey exchange liturgical snippets. With Mr. P. up in the choir loft & the venerable Msr. standing at the foot of the main alter. It was a quiet time.

I'm HEEEEEERE! I am thinking I might be back.

As to Chicago, it is unseasonably miserable. Blowing snow, temperatures dropping like an anchor and a Lake Shore Flood Warning because the wind is out of the north gusting to 50 MPH and the lake is not frozen. Waves 15 - 20 feet near shore. Even when the boat is not in the water, I focus on the lake. :-) I am glad I don't have to get on Lake Shore Drive tonight.

Pierre, félicitations! I don't know why I should write in French, but I saw up there that you are tired of Italian.

Tani and I were just talking about you, Lisa. Welcome back. Did I see that you were at 3 degrees last night? Or maybe that's tonight's forecast for Chi. In any case, cold. Colder in fact even than Edmonton, Canada, which was recently added to our weather listings after we granted RidgewayGirl from South Carolina dual citizenship with her childhood self. (We also did that for NYC Jane and New Orleans.)

Anyway, concerning Pierre: au contraire. That was a one-day fantasy in which I became French. Perhaps I et too many baguettes. But Piero's back (even if you prefer Pietro), and he thanks you for congratulating him for his most recent book.

Lisa! Are your ears burning, hun? So glad to see you!

We are in the midst of a Pineapple Express in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately, the worst we have going on up here is meltdown though there is more snow on the way later this week How are my Valley folk doing? Anna? Slick? Solla?

Go 19y/o Aussies!! (sorry, a bit late here) Thrash 'im mate!

Sorry Porius, just an emergence of my national pride.

Reason to be Choc. Those 19 yr. old Aussies were splendidious. It was almost A TREAT to lose to them.

Well, Pietro, no, last night it was in the 30's (F) for our non US friends. Tomorrow night--2! The only advantage to this really obscene weather is that when it gets back to "normal" it feels quite balmy. I would like to have dual citizenship right now--perhaps Australia?

Italian is really "prettier" although I understand French better. And yes, I do prefer Pietro. I am most annoying in wanting everything to be just correct. Drives my husband crazy.

Tani, I thought my ears were burning because they were thawing out after I came in from shoveling that awful, blowing white stuff--did not realize it was you and Pietro!

He he... Sorry, but I think we are sending another wave your way this week. Looks like the system we just had will be hitting the mid-west about the time we get our next snow Tuesday & Wednesday.

A BLUE RIBBON AT AMESBURY is not only a poet's tribute but a chicken fancier's poem. Written in deference to the hen which, though handsomely feathered, is not merely decked out for show but might well be the mother of a new and sturdy race; a pullet whose will and shoulders are so strong 'she makes the whole flock move along.' One wonders why the author (as classicist, humorist, and most of all, as hen-lover) did not write the poem in hendecasyllabics! (Take note SWP).
As a matter of fact, another poem in this volume is written entirely in that classical form. FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING, shows an unusual employment of the hendecasyllabic, that difficult line of 11 metrical syllables.

A BLUE RIBBON AT AMESBURY
Such a fine pullet ought to go
All coiffured to a winter show,
And be exhibited, and win.
The answer is this one has been -

And come with all her honors home.
Her golden leg, her coral comb,
Her fluff of plumage, white as chalk,
Her style, were all the fancy's talk.

It seems as if you must have heard.
She scored an almost perfect bird.
In her we make ourselves acquainted
With one a Sewell might have painted.

Here common with the flock again,
At home in her abiding pen,
She lingers feeding at the trough,
The last to let night drive her off.

The one who gave her ankle-band,
Her keeper, empty pail in hand,
He lingers too, averse to slight
His chores for all the wintry night.

He leans against the dusty wall,
Immured almost beyond recall,
A depth past many swinging doors
And many litter-muffled floors.

He meditates the breeders art.
He has a half a mind to start,
With her for Mother Eve a race
That shall all living things displace.

'Tis ritual with her to lay
The full six days, then rest a day;
At which rate barring broodiness
She well may score an egg-success.

The gatherer can always tell
Her well-turned egg's brown sturdy shell,
As safe a vehicle of seed
As is vouchsafed to feathered breed.

No human spectre at the feast
Can scant or hurry her the least.
She takes her time to take her fill.
She whets a sleepy sated bill.

She gropes across the pen alone
To peck herself a precious stone.
She waters at the patent fount.
And so to roost, the last to mount.

The roost is her extent of flight.
Yet once she rises to the height,
She shoulders with a wing so strong
She makes the whole flock move along.

The night is setting in to blow.
It scours the windowpanes with snow,
But barely gets from them or her
For comment a complacent chirr.

The lowly pen is yet a hold
Against the dark and wind and cold
To give a prospect to a plan
And warrant prudence in a man.

Robert Lee Frost

Contraband

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It's toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable--but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn't
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in--as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

Denise Levertov

When the Year grows Old

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old --
October -- November --
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget --
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old --
October -- November --
How she disliked the cold!

~E. Millay

I posted one of her poems, perhaps the same one, Steven, but it certainly bears repeating anyway.

Speaking of cold, and the return of Lisa, the prodigal Chicagoan: so far our new affinity group entry, Edmonton, Canada, the former home of RidgewayGirl, has topped the low temp list. But for tomorrow, here are the predicted lows and highs of those two locales:

Chicago 4/16
Edmonton 5/27

In celsius:

Chicago -16/-9
Edmonton -15/-3

Lookit what I just came across on Google:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-lA_kgAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Peter+Weissman%...

Peter! Hooray!

I am totally confused. They told me December 2011. And 352 pages? The original was 260 pages. Did they add a few chapters?

Penso, dunque chi sono? Memorie di un anno psichedelico

My book. I wish I could pronounce it.

Yay! Write on, Mr Author Man! ;-)

Memorie di un anno psichedelico sounds rather terrifying.

But YAY! May it fly with all speed to best-sellerdom.

Upon further searching, I found this, Wilson... Looks like Feb 2011.

http://www.unilibro.it/find_buy/Scheda/libreria/autore-weissman_peter/isbn-97888...

Ooo and this one with the cover:

http://www.lantanaeditore.com/site/2010/penso-dunque-chi-sono/

282: There are more pages because translating something from English to a romance language will inevitably make it much longer. English has a much richer vocabulary so many English words need to be expressed in romance language phrases.

Take any paragraph in English and run it through an online translator and see the difference.

It seems that your memoir is considered to be in the 'Social Sciences' genre. (according to several of the online bookstores I looked at)

Thanks, Tani, for finding all that stuff about "I Think, so What Do I know?" Just kidding. Apparently it's: I Think, so Who Am I? Like this Google page:

http://www.google.com/search?q=9788897012023&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&...

Since no one got in touch with me, I've had to piece this together with Google evidence. It seems my book publication date is set for February 2011, not December, as I was initially told, and this is prepublicity. I assume they'll send me a translated copy for my okay, as the contract says they're supposed to do. But these people are Italian--not the kind of Italians I know from Brooklyn and New Jersey, but Italian Italians. So who the hell knows?

;-)

Hey Pietro, molto bene! "dunque" means "therefore", so it is just like you wrote it in English. And you really do know how to pronounce it, don't you.

Gli Italiani--chi sa? (Italian shrug here) Forse si, forse no. Does the contract say they have to send it to you before they publish it? Or that they just have to send it to you.

Peter, if they don't do right by you, maybe you can have some of your Italian friends from Brooklyn and Joisey pay them a visit.

I'm still expecting a hand inscribed copy of Digging Deeper(no touchstone yet) in the mail.

>291 geneg:. Everyone, Gene, will get what's coming to them.

>290 LisaCurcio:. Lisa, the contract says I have the right to see the translation and change what I want before publication. Can you read Italian well enough to help do that? Watch out: this is how I roped Gene into help me with Digging Deeper, and why I gladly owe him an inscribed copy. (He's also in the acknowledgments.)

50
Lady, weeping at the crossroads
Would you meet your love
In the twilight with his grayhounds,
And the hawk on his glove?

Bribe the birds then on the branches,
Bribe them to be dumb,
Stare the hot sun out of heaven
That the night may come.

Starless are the nights of travel,
Bleak the winter wind;
Run with terror all before you
And regret behind.

Run until you hear the ocean's
Everlasting cry;
Deep though it may be and bitter
You must drink it dry.

Wear out patience in the lowest
Dungeons of the sea,
Searching through the stranded shipwrecks
For the golden key.

Push on to the world's end, pay the
Dread guard with a kiss;
Cross the rotten bridge that totters
Over the abyss.

There stands the deserted castle
Ready to explore;
Enter, climb the marble staircase
Open the locked door.

Cross the silent empty ballroom,
Doubt and danger past;
Blow the cobwebs from the mirror
See yourself at last.

Put your hand behind the wainscot,
You have done your part;
Find the penknife there and plunge it
Into your false heart.

W.H. Auden 1940

one of his best, that one. nice to see it again.

Alf’s Eighth Bit

Vex not thou the banker's mind
(His what?) with a show of sense,
Vex it not, Willie, his mind,
Or pierce its pretence
On the supposition that it ever
Was other, or that this cheerful giver
Will give, save to the blind.

Come not anear the dark-browed sophist
Who on the so well-paid ground
Will cheerfully tell you a fist is no fist,
Come not here
With 2 and 2 making 4 in reason,
Knowest thou not the truth is never in season
In these quarters or Fleet St.?

In his eye there is death, I mean the banker's,
In his purse there is deceit,
It is he who buys gold-braid for the swankers
And gives you Australian iced rabbits' meat
In place of the roast beef of Britain,
And leaves you a park bench to sit on
If you git off the Embankment.

This is the kind of tone and Solemnity
That used to be used on the young,
My old man got no indemnity
But he swaller'd his tongue.
Like all his class was told to hold it in those days,
To mind their ‘p’s’ and their ‘q’s’ and their ways
An' be thankful for occasional holidays.

I don't quite see the joke any more,
Or why we should stand to attention
And lick the dirt off the floor
In the hope of honourable mention
From a great employer like Selfridge
Or a buyer of space in the papers.
I'm getting too old for such capers.

Ezra Pound

Predicted lows and highs for selected locales, today and tomorrow

Chicago 10/21 22/25
Woodstock, N.Y. 12/18 18/22
Bethany, Conn. 14/22 19/26
Sandusky, Ohio 16/21 14/22
Woodstock, Georgia 16/29 31/39
Gaithersburg, Md. 17/25 20/28
Greenville, S. Car. 17/33 30/39
NYC area 18/26 23/29
Edmonton, Canada 19/22 1/16
La Pine, Oregon 23/27 21/34
Ghent, Belgium 30/32 35/40
Little Rock 31/37 44/51
Vancouver, Canada 36/42 35/40
Portland, Oregon 40/46 40/44
New Orleans 41/52 59/69
Denver 42/64 27/52
San Diego 47/63 46/62
Chino, Cal. 47/79 43/60
Taipei 56/59 53/58
Sydney 67/80 66/73

Taipei is about the same latitude as the Bahamas, I wonder why it is so cold? I haven't been there since the mid seventies; I don't remember it's being a chilly climate. Oh, well.

Robert

Yep, that's about 28 Celcius in sunny Sydney :) We're having our 'other' xmas party at work today, and then I start my holidays woohoo!

I've been remiss with photos of christmas in summer, but I've discovered there really isn't much to show you. There's plenty of hideous stuff, but here in Nature we are an aesthetically oriented bunch of people, and I realise that one photo of cardboard snowmen on a hard-baked lawn is enough. The beauty of suburban Australian christmas only happens when one happens on something that looks a little like a Northern xmas - outdoor lights (though without snow) and indoor decorations.

I did take a photo of a nearby country town's main street with christmas wreaths next to flowering jacarandas. It looked quite lovely, but I had to take the pic through the car windscreen while driving, and the result isn't great.

Yes, warming up a bit in Chicago, but still about 14 degrees (F) below "average". I am starting to think that this is the revenge for one of the nicest summers we have had in eons.

Robert, old chap, we are having a cold front. Normally it's quite warm. Last weekend the temperature was around 23-26 degrees (I don't understand Fahrenheit) and bright and sunny.

This week, we have rain and wind and a cold front moving down from North China. My hills are shrouded in rain.

what were you doing here in the 70s?, if I might ask?

excellent Pound poem, btw, so appropriate for now.

Huh, there was an EF2 tornado in the valley today. Aumsville, a small town between me and Salem.

About 3 new inches early this morning around here, a couple of dry days then solid moisture through next Tuesday. I so don't want to drive over the hill for Christmas. *sigh*

298 - Let me say as someone from a place that never snows that those lovely Christmas snow pictures are a lie. It almost never snows on Christmas anywhere. And snow doesn't stay on the ground all winter! Sorry, this was quite a large revelation for me.

Yes, the Pound effort is excellent.

85
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Who, now, seeing Her so
Happily married,
Housewife, helpmate to Man,

Can imagine the screeching
Virago, the Amazon,
Earth Mother was?

Her jungle growths
Are abated, Her exorbitant
Monsters abashed,

Her soil mumbled,
Where crops, aligned precisely,
Will soon be orient:

Levant or couchant,
Well-daunted thoroughbreds
Graze on mead and pasture,

A church clock subdivides the day,
Up the lane at sundown
Geese podge home.

As for Him:
What has happened to the Brute
Epics and nightmares tell of?

No bishops pursue
Their archdeacons with axes,
In the crumbling lair

Of a robber baron
Sightseers picnic
Who carry no daggers.

I well might think myself
A humanist,
Could I manage not to see

How the autobahn
Thwarts the landscape
In godless Roman arrogance,

The farmer's children
Tiptoe past the shed
Where the gelding knife is kept.

Wystan Hugh Auden
? May 1964

So. Cal. to a T. I was boiling last night and am freezing tonight. Froze my ass watching my niece play soccer tonight. It was 89 yesterday and 59 today. It's probably 40 out there now. Not cold by mid-west standards, but the sudden change has me unprepared. My Michigan blood has thinned considerably over the years. In my younger days I'd be out playing something or another in sub-freezing temps. shirtless. I'd be sweating from head to toe like a soo-chef. These days needless to say I am not nearly as hardy. I shiver and shake like an AMC product of the 80's.

300, tomcat. I was a navy transport pilot. I got into Taipei and Tainan fairly often, especially from '70 to '72, but even so all the way into '76. I thought maybe they had changed the weather since I was there.

Robert

Embrace Noir

I go back to the scene where the two men embrace
& grapple a handgun at stomach level between them.

They jerk around the apartment like that
holding on to each other, their cheeks

almost touching. One is shirtless, the other
wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window

to steal documents or diamonds, it doesn't matter anymore
which, what's important is he was found

& someone pulled a gun, and now they are holding on,
awkwardly dancing through the room, upending

a table of small framed photographs. A chair
topples, Sinatra's band punches the air with horns, I

lean forward, into the screen, they are eye-to-eye,
as stiff as my brother & me when we attempt

to hug. Soon, the gun fires and the music
quiets, the camera stops tracking and they

relax, shoulders drop, their jaws go slack
& we are all suspended in that perfect moment

when no one knows who took the bullet--
the earth spins below our feet, a blanket of swallows

changes direction suddenly above us, folding
into the rafters of a barn, and the two men

no longer struggle, they simply stand in their wreckage
propped in each other's arms.

Nick Flynn

When it's this cold, we deserve snow. Of course the lightest dusting closes the schools for days since we're not equipped to do anything about it. My seven-year-old son's soul is shriveling up inside him with each cloudless, clear day and he is bearing some resentment to the lucky residents of Pennsylvania, who have been given four feet of the stuff lately.

I know what you mean. We have a skim coat of snow on the ground, put there a few days ago, but not that first, magical snowfall that transforms the world and everyone likes, though few will admit it.

Snow Day

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch,
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed,
the All Aboard Children's School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with--some will be delighted to hear--

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School,
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and--clap your hands--the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.

Billy Collins

That year the autumn weather lingered
Over the field and around the yards,
Winter held back, Nature awaited,
In January only snow fell at last
On the third, at night. And waking early
Tatyana saw through the window clearly
The yard all covered with morning whiteness,
The flower beds, roofs, and all the fences;
On the window glass the leaves of frost,
The trees in their winter silveriness,
And cheerful magpies in the snow.
The hills all covered with the soft glow
Of winter's carpet glistening bright,
Around all was shining, all was white.

Winter ! The peasant breathes a sigh,
Renews his sledge, and makes his way.
His horse, snorting in the fresh snow
With a finicky trot gets along somehow.
And now the dashing kibitka flies,
In the powdery snow cutting feathery furrows.
The coachman sits huddled upon his box,
In a sheepskin coat and a scarlet sash.
A yard boy runs out, and on his sledge
His favourite 'Dasher' is the driver,
While he himself is the willing puller;
The rascal struggles with frozen hands;
What fun it is, but so painful too,
While his mother scolds him above at the window.

Eugene Onegin
Pushkin
Canto 5 first two stanzas
trans: G.R.Ledger.

Do you people have any poems about the tropics, sweltering heat, hot beach days, volcanoes? I am FREEZING in my office.

The Nick Flynn poem is great, right up my alley, being a lover of action scenes and the intricacies and difficulties of close relationships.

But seriously, about the heat, even Dante will work right now.

302: A tornado! In December! In Oregon! How weird is that? It's "global weirding" is what I say...
http://www.oregonlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2010/12/aumsville_tornado_amazingly_...

Global weirding!? Love that!

My computer's getting a mite sluggish loading our thread, so a switch is coming up. Not right now, but soon. What words will I misspell while launching the next iteration? What misspelled words will I mispell correctly? It's anyone's guess. Stay tuned.

#312 - I know, Anna, global weirding is right!

Mine, too, Wilson. Looking forward to the new thread.

Well, in that case:

Nature Audacious: plnats and other things that sprout

http://www.librarything.com/topic/104695