Nature, the 10th iteration: plnats and other things that sprout

In which we present poetry and poets, prose and proseans, weather and crop reports, fish and fowl, flora and fauna, birds and bees, insects, art and architecture, the gift of gab, and so on and so forth, as the whim takes us. Once in a while we even mention a book.

For pix, as a courtesy to those with machines that lack memory (you know who you are), down-, up-, or offload to our companion thread:

Nature etc. etc.: photography

http://www.librarything.com/topic/95490

Hello... ello... ello!

Another good one, Ms. La Pine. You obviously thrive in rural settings.

I do... Mr Author Man. And I kid you not... We really do want to hear your short stories.

Piero, could you please translate into modern English as to when you will be away?

:-0 both Piero and Tani going AWOL! No wonder it's echoing in here.

You don't parlez-vous francais, Sheila? I thought that was a requirement for being accepted into le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple. I'm leaving Wednesday morning and returning Saturday night. Montreal is five hours north of here, plus whatever time it takes to wait at the border. I've decided not to wear my turban.

I wish here were that close to Montreal, and thence to Quebec. I trust that you will have a Gallic good time.

Robert

Good plan, Mr. Author Man!

Maybe I'll file a report, fill you in on the chewy little bagels they make there and the local dish called poutines: french fries with gravy and feta cheese. Just kidding. That's the kind of thing Tani might eat; not me.

Say hello to 'le gros bil', Ivan Courneyer, and Jaques Plante for me.

Huh? Whad'ya mean "that's the kind of thing Tani might eat", Mr Author Man?!?! I'll have you know that I may eat bacon-maple bars, but I don't eat feta cheese.

Hey! You spelled plnats right! Yay! Things are back to norml!

(oops, I guess you spelled it right on the 9th one too... my observation skills are off) *slinks off to bed*

Born in Ceylon, but a Canadian poet now:

To a Sad Daughter

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say "like"
I mean of course "love"
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're "sweet sixteen" you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with loss
--but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
--all those possible worlds!--
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

Michael Ondaatje

ESPECIALLY WHEN THE OCTOBER WIND
Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell your notes
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the nueral meaning
Files on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadows signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I Know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make you of the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

Dylan Thomas

Bah! - for geneg from the previous thread. We'll get ya next time. ;)

The Earth

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon
the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up
to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from
as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon
it.
He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at
every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon
it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest
motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and
all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
For we are held by more than the force of gravity to the earth.
It is the entity from which we are sprung, and that into which
we are dissolved in time. The blood of the whole human race
is invested in it. We are moored there, rooted as surely, as
deeply as are the ancient redwoods and bristlecones.

Scott Momaday

I've had House Made of Dawn on the tbr forever.

15>Jane, just remind Geneg how awesome Michaeal Vick is doing in Philly; how he will destroy Atlanta should they face off in the playoffs.

113 degrees in L.A. today. One hundred thirteen degrees!

Death Valleyish degrees. Wicked heat.

Rainy and cold here in Detroit.

I hear it's lovely in Montreal this time of year.

Any sightings of Le Grande Orange?
http://mlb.mlb.com/images/2005/11/14/IbkxvEK2.jpg

Just dropped by to say au revoir. If I see Rusty, I'll say bonjour. Looking forward today to the stretch of the Northway that skirts the Adirondacks and the hint of that place's pristine nature.

You and the Missus have a great time in Moanreal. What a beautiful place. Mine nuncle A. was from the area. How I loved his mother's bread and gigantic pancakes. Frances was her name, if memory serves. And his good friend Mondeau who could pick up a 100 pound bag of sugar with his teeth. The downside is that they drank like Templars. My dad had to muck-in when mine nuncle went on a bender, which he did every now and then. A. lived to 90 plus, drinking his beloved beer and smoking Chesterfield's till just before his passing over. I can still hear him scrambling around in pursuit of let us say emotional succor saying to no one in particular: Jesacli, Jesacli!! pfuck me. pfuck me. He'd snap the top of a can of Busweiser (no accounting for taste) and drink himself to the point where his son and I had to 'influence' him to the fruit cellar in the basement so that he could sleep it off. A. was the courtliest of men when sober, but was not the sort that Castiglione would invite for company and conversation when he was in his cups.

FERN HILL
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsmen and herdsman, the
calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hill barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it
was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among the stables, the night-
jars
Flying the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to wake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On the fields of praise.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas

Jane, I don't know about next time. I think the Falcons solved the Drew Brees problem: keep him off the field. The paper in this two-bit burg is still talking about that game. They need to put it behind them and get ready for SF. Championship teams expect to win games like that. They don't dwell on them forever. I will say I learned one thing watching that game, Drew Brees IS the NO Saints. He's the only thing separating the Saints from the Ain'ts. But there was the absence of Reggie Bush. I wonder if that would have made a difference? The Falcons weren't lucky on the missed field goal. New Orleans was lucky to be in position to win it with the missed chip shot. The Falcons took the Saints and stomped that sucker flat. You need to light a candle every Sunday at Mass for Drew Brees. If something happens to him the Saints are toast.

Good narration Porius. My Papa's Waltz by Roethke comes to mind:

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Yeah, Eugene, it could get a little rough around the edges, but growing up some of the time in my dad's green grocery I saw every sort of substance abuser before I was eight. They would descend on the watering-hole early Sunday morning begging for me to sell them a bottle of Maneshevitz (Sic), Boone's Farm or Boogie Down wine. There was nothing like the world-wide selections we have today, When I broke down one brutally hot Sunday morning, and sold a bottle to an element, 20 minutes early, let us say, he replied with all, or without all the verbal insouciance of the late William Safire: 'your kindness will not be obliberated.'

What's the word?
Thunderbird!
What's the price?
Fifty twice!
Who drinks it most?
Us colored folks!

Or;
What's the word?
Thundaboyd!
Fwat's the price?
Footeefoo twice!
What's the djoy?
Natetcha bawoy!!

Just about a perfect day. This evening even better if that's possible.

TO CHARLES DICKENS
As when a friend (himself in music's list)
Stands by some rare, full-handed organist,
And glorying as he sees the master roll
The surging sweets through all their depths of soul,
Cannot, encouraged by his smile, forbear
With his own hand to join them here and there;
And so, if little, if added something more
To the sound's volume and the golden roar;
So I, dear friend, Charles Dickens, though thy hand
Needs but itself, to charm from land to land,
Make bold to join in summoning men's ears
To this thy new found music of our spheres,
In hopes that by thy Household Words and thee
The world may haste to days of harmony.

Leigh Hunt (1849)

Muggy. '90s. Overcast. Scattered thunderstorms in the Southland, which also ain't a bad novel.

Peter W. is in that lovely city of Montreal. So it looks like it's fallen upon my narrow shoulders to shoulder the poetry today. I may have posted this already but what the hell, it's better then a kick in the ass with a frozen boot.

AN ACRE OF GRASS
PICTURE and book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

My temptation is quiet.
Here at life's end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon or Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake their dead in the shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.

William Butler Yeats (1938)

A perfect day for any season. Clear as crystal. Brilliant clouds everywhere.
Just got through watching WUTHERING HEIGHTS with Olivier and co. The actress who played Ellen is Flora Robson. Because of her imposing height (5'10"), high forehead, and largish nose she played a lot of Queens, etc. As I watched the movie it bothered me because I had seen Flora's face in another movie recently but couldn't place it. Then it dawned on me that she played, and I'm going to butcher this spelling, Fattatateeta, to Vivien Leigh's Cleopatra. She was in 'black face' and towered over the pocket amazon Leigh. Robson, a classically trained actress has a regal stage presence. She played Elizabeth the First opposite, I believe it was Erroyl Flynn.

Sorry, Olivier not Flynn was in FIRE OVER ENLAND, in the late 30's. She also played Sister SoandSo in another great movie, THE BLACK NARCISSUS, with Deborah Kerr (her birthday today) and the lovely Gene Simmons. Not EF's alter ego but the actress who played in SPARTIKUS with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis - who, as slickpdx informed us, passed away today at 84 or thereabouts.

48°F as the sun comes up. Football is well started and the Steelers are 3-0. Life is good. Have not found much that I am capable of commenting on but I assure all that you are read with pleasure. Being somewhat self educated I came to poetry very late and I have found a fine feast here.

Next week we have fall weather in the forecast. Until then around 80 and sunny. No complaining in Denver.

Porius, what do you think of 1978 film, Days of Heaven with Richard Gere and Sam Shepard? I caught the end of it on TCM the other day. It looks like one I need to see. Similarities to Legends of The Fall?

The Frogs

He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoons
wading in the tall grass, or standing in the leafy water
where the stream turned. Charmed by their stories
of woods and muck, he practiced singing with them
at dusk at the edge of that pond, while his mother and father
sat talking, with their cocktails, on the porch. As dark fell
his parents called him, most evenings, for dinner,
but sometimes they let him stay down there until the frogs
were hushed by the cicadas, whose conversations
startled him back to himself. Then he walked
up to the house, through the tall grass, through the dark,
still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,
drinking in a city bar, talking to strangers
who ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out into
the empty street, slightly drunk. He’ll be fine.
Think instead of that walk through the dark wet grass,
the sound of a child’s body moving through the grass;
think instead of those frogs falling silent, of that forest,
of mushrooms that push up overnight like elbows
in the moon-drenched mind of the woods.

~Michael Hettich

Didn't see it EG but will take a look on rental. I used to practice with the batrachian fellows and girls as a kid. I can still make an uncannily good frog sound. I've not met anyone who can duplicate it. I learned it somewhere in the moon-drenched mind of the woods.

pleasant to me rising
at morning
to see them the horizon
adorning.

Seeing them so clear,
my simple-headed deer
modestly appear
in their joyousness.

They freely exercise
their sweet and level cries,
From bodies trim and terse,
hear their bellowing.

A badger of a hind
wallows in a pond.
Her capricious mind
has such vagaries!

How they fill the parish
with their chorus
sweeter than fine Irish
tunes glorious.

More tuneful than all art
the music of the hart
eloquent, alert,
on Ben Dorain.

The stag with his own call
struck from his breast wall -
you'll hear him mile on mile
at his scale-making.

The sweet harmonious hind -
with her calf behind -
elaborates the wind
with her music.

Palpitant bright eye
without squint in it.
Lash below the brow,
guide and regulant.

Walker, quick and grave,
so elegant to move
ahead of that great drove
when accelerant.

There's no flaw in your step,
there's all law in your leap,
there's no rust or sleep
in your motion there.

Lengthening your stride,
intent on what's ahead,
who of live or dead
could outrace you?

The hind is on the heath
where she ought to be.
Her delicate sweet mouth
feeding tenderly.

Stool-bent and sweet grass
the finest food there is
that puts fat and grease
on her flanks and sides.

Transparent springs that nurse
the modest water cress -
no foreign wines surpass
these as drink for her.

Sorrel grass and sedge
that grow on heath and ridge,
these are what you judge
as hors d'oeuvres for you.

Luxuries for does
between grasses,
St. John's Wort, the primrose,
and daises.

The spotted water-cress
with forked and spiky gloss;
water where it grows
so abundantly.

This is the good food
that animates their blood
and circulates as bread
in hard famine-time.

That would fatten their
bodies to a clear
shimmer, rich and rare,
without clumsiness.

That was the neat herd
in the twilight,
suave and trim, unblurred
in that violet!

However long the night
you would be safe and right
snug at the hill's foot
till the morning came.

The herds of the neat deer
are where they always were
on the wide kind moor
and the heathland.

When color changed their skins
my love was most intense,
they came not by mischance
to Ben Dorain

Moladh Beinn Dobhrain (The Praise of Ben Dobrain), by Donnchadh Ban

It rained enough last night that the cat came in, but there was no weather on the satellite or radar pictures. It was cool during the rain. New gutters and downspouts changed the music. After the rain on into morning everything was wet. The tops of the trees were still. It felt hot.

Robert

Within the past three days the hummingbirds are gone and the geese, I'm assuming the same two that were here in the spring have shown up, along with a murder of crows. Monday the high is supposed to be 71F (22C) with sunshine all day.

My hummingbirds are gone too. But I'm back, to my good ol' 'merican keyboard. Maybe I'll think of something insightful to say tomorrow.

A postcard day today. 73 degrees. You could see for miles and miles. But it will only last a while longer. Rain comes in tonite and the high temperature for tomorrow will be 53 degrees and rain off and on all day.

THE SCHOLARS
BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

William Butler Yeats
from THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE (1919)

Really cool this morning. Perfect weather for watching football all day. :)

Sports Bacchanalia

Red Sox, Patriots,
UNH Hockey.
Soccer, football, NASCAR
and others
too great to number

Budweiser, Cape Cod chips
Nachos, Pepto
Oh I can't wait
for rest and
for slumber

Cardinals, cold fall air
bring on the Series
Where's the clicker,
the remote,
My eyes are bleary

Raymond A. Foss

I opened my WCW collection to this:

EVERY DAY
Every day that I go out to my car
I walk through a garden
and wish often that Aristotle
had gone on
to a consideration of the dithyrambic
poem - or that his notes had survived

Coarse grass mars the fine lawn
as I look about right and left
tic toc -
And right and left the leaves
upon the yearling peach grows along
the slender stem

No rose is sure. Each is one rose
and this, unlike another,
opens flat, almost as a saucer without
a cup. But it is a rose, rose
pink. One can feel it turning slowly
upon its thorny stem

William Carlos Williams

#42

...Or watching hawks. Nice strong Northwest winds brought them down towards Long Island Sound, by the hundreds, today. Kestrels, Merlins, Peregrines, Sharpies, Coops, Osprey, Eagles, Harriers. Awesome.

Madmen

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

Billy Collins

Billy is a deep one.

PHILOMENA ANDRONICO
With the boys busy
at ball
in the worn lot
nearby

She stands in
the short street
reflectively bouncing
the red ball

Slowly
practiced
a little awkwardly
throwing one leg over

(Not as she had done
formerly
screaming and
missing

But slowly
surely) then
pausing throws
the ball

With a full slow
very slow
and easy motion
following through

With a slow
half turn -
as the ball flies
and rolls gently

At the child's feet
waiting -
and yet he misses
it and turns

And runs while she
slowly
regains her former
pose

Then shoves her fingers
up through
her loose short hair
quickly

Draws one stocking
tight and
waiting
tilts

Her hips and
in the warm still
air lets
her arms
Fall

Fall
loosely
(waiting)
at her sides

William Carlos Williams
from THE CLOUDS (1948)

Funny, I came across that one yesterday, when I was looking for something to echo Jane's entry at #43, and went instead with "Sports Bacchanalia." Good one.

Great minds stink alike. Thank God faw the inta-nets.

Tomorrow’s predicted highs for selected locales:

Taipei 82
Denver 80
Los Angeles 75
Sydney (Sheila-land) 73
Atlanta 71
Little Rock 71
Ghent, Bel. 67
London, UK 64
Portland, Ore. 61
Chicago 61
Detroit 59
New York City 58
Bethany, Conn. 57
La Pine, Ore. 56
Sandusky, Ohio 56
Woodstock, N.Y. 52

Since Nine O'Clock

Half past twelve. Time's gone by quickly
since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading,
without speaking. Completely alone in the house,
who could I talk to?

Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp
the shade of my young body
has been haunting me, reminding me
of shut scented rooms,
of past passion--what daring passion.
And it's also brought back to me
streets now unrecognizable,
bustling nightclubs now closed,
theatres and cafes no longer there.

The shade of my young body
also brought back the things that make us sad:
family grief, separations,
the feelings of my own people,
of the dead so little recognized.

Half past twelve: how the time has gone by.
Half past twelve: how the years have gone by.

Constantine P. Cavafy

ALL THINGS TEMPT ME
ALL things tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was woman's face, or worse -
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deader than a fish.

from THE GREEN HELMET AND OTHER POEMS (1910)
William Butler Yeats

85 predicted for today in Denver. Fall coming? I'll know it when I see it. Like this poem by Robert Penn Warren. Images if boyhood, alone in the woods, perhaps with my old .22 rifle, (handed down from grandpa), squirrel hunting.

Gold Glade

Wandering, in autumn, the woods of boyhood,
Where cedar, black, thick, rode the ridge,
Heart aimless as rifle, boy-blankness of mood,
I came where ridge broke, and the great ledge,
Limestone, set the toe high as treetop by dark edge

Of a gorge, and water hid, grudging and grumbling,
And I saw, in mind’s eye, foam white on
Wet stone, stone wet-black, white water tumbling,
And so went down, and with some fright on
Slick boulders, crossed over. The gorge-depth drew night on,

But high over high rock and leaf-lacing, sky
Showed yet bright, and declivity wooed
My foot by the quietening stream, and so I
Went on, in quiet, through the beech wood:
There, in gold light, where the glade gave, it stood.

The glade was geometric, circular, gold,
No brush or weed breaking that bright gold of leaf-fall.
In the center it stood, absolute and bold
Beyond any heart-hurt, or eye’s grief-fall.
Gold-massy in air, it stood in gold light-fall,

No breathing of air, no leaf now gold-falling,
No tooth-stitch of squirrel, or any far fox bark,
No woodpecker coding, or late jay calling.
Silence: gray-shagged, the great shagbark
Gave forth gold light. There could be no dark.

But of course dark came, and I can’t recall
What county it was, for the life of me.
Montgomery, Todd, Christian-I know them all.
Was it even Kentucky or Tennessee?
Perhaps just an image that keeps haunting me.

No, no! in no mansion under earth,
Nor imagination’s domain of bright air,
But solid in soil that gave it its birth,
It stands, wherever it is, but somewhere.
I shall set my foot, and go there.

The Windhover

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

- Gerard Manly Hopkins

POETRY.

Anna, I'm flying higher...

Evening Hawk
by Robert Penn Warren

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.

Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Anthony Burgess has a great essay in his valuable URGENT COPY on GMH. Gash Gold-Vermilion. Here is the finish:

'Success' is an inadequate word for a poet who never aimed at the rhetorical or the technical TOUR DE FORCE for its own sake. He is, as we have to be reminded, not one of those little priests whom Joyce remarked at UCD - writers of devotional verse; he is a religious poet of the highest rank - perhaps greater than Donne, certainly greater than Herbert or Crashaw. The devotional writer deals in conventional images of piety; the religious poet shocks, even outrages, by wresting the truths of his faith from the safe dull sanctuaries and placing them in the physical world. Herbert does it: 'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.' / So I did sit and eat.'

Hopkins does it more often. The natural world is notated with such freshness that we tend to think that he is merely a superb nature poet, A Wordsworth with genius. And then were suddenly hit by the 'instress' of revelation: theological properties are as real as the kestrel or the fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls. Reading him, even the agnostic may regret that the 'Marvellous Milk' is no longer 'Walsingham way' and join in calling 'Our King back, Oh, upon English souls! - 'Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, / Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throngs' Lord.' This is big magic, which no good Jesuit ought to be able to use.

My parents both wrote their Masters' Theses on GMH. I once read a description of the Quran that said that it seemed that the language was not strong enough to contain the message and that it seemed that it would shatter. This is how I feel about GMH's poetry.

A great argument for JAAJ's Finnegans Wake, wherein the language, in my opinion is shatterproof. Being called to dinner and hearing 'sprung rhythm' and alliteration must have been some kind of pfun, no? How could you survive that upbringing and be perplexed by the idea of 'inscape?'

I told my dad I was bored with LOTR when I was about 13 and he shoved Ulysses at me. I said to myself, "What IS this stuff???" after about 2 pages. This traumatized me to the point that I only managed to finally get around to reading it in 2009, at age 41, with you good people.

As for GMH, I guess my parents got him out of their systems in college because he wasn't discussed much at the dinner table.

My mother gave me her complete collection of the writings of GMH including his letters, essays, journals, and poetry, a seven-volume set I believe - which I had to leave behind in Egypt.

Leaving that treasure trove behind must have been heartbreaking.

At 13 most of us would have felt the same way. 8th graders just want to have pfun, don't they. A good thing EF wasn't force-fed OOLISSIS at 13. Anything might have happened. The forest animals in the neighborhood would have been put on 'terror alert' red.

Finally had to take action against the pesky squirrels who found their way in through a hole in the miniroof over the front door and, it sounds like, built a city inside the wall there. My handyman/construction/carpenter guy--as crucial in any small town as the wood guy and the auto mechanic--told me he had to go in when they aren't there (they have a nest in a tree nearby) and stick some camphor or whatever to repel them before he sealed up the hole and did some rebuilding. Otherwise they'd be trapped in there and become a mausoleum.

NINE

After tea that evening we went for a stroll to the valley bed. Many comrades came on to us and wanted our impressions of the day's working, even asking us to sign our autographs and write some little verse about the lifting of the shadow in the kid's copybooks. Ben gave them a few short talks on paste and angles, we were met by our friend Mr. Simpson, the manager of the Exchange. He was coming out of one of the valley's large nonpolitical clubs where the impulse to conserve waged fierce war on theory and reached a classic summary of its own quaint formulas in an endless routine of sitting, drinking, and card playing, seeking in an almost Trappist silence of mind and body an answer to the Celtic jape of always letting words pump the passionate fluid of his sadness into a vat of revolutionary intentions. Mr. Simpson was merry and in a way to communicate. He closed one eye in a wink that expressed the essence of a genial evening in the club and an attractive desire to be at ease with the prolies and unbend in his off moments. Mr. Simpson was something of an entertainer and was well known as a chairman of concerts run by athletic clubs and groups of voters who liked their ideas small, monotonous and raw. Mr. Simpson had a blue-nosed turn that kept these voters rolling.

from VENUS AND THE VOTERS
by Gwyn Thomas

Had the same issue years ago, the entrance was a knot hole in the wood siding and it was directly over our bedroom headboard! We thought we had a mice in the walls. Try sleeping to that! I took the easy approach and nailed a wire mesh over the hole. We sold the house shortly thereafter.

84 predicted for Denver today. ENOUGH ALREADY!! Who stole our season? Pack the car kids, we are moving to Canada! We'll stop when we find a nice meadow near a stream in the boreal forest where we can chop some timbers and build a cabin. Chink it up tight for winter, cut more wood for the stone fireplace and set about digging a cellar for our meat and vegetables. ~The Western Traveler

Yeah, I noticed that you made it to the top of the high temp listing as some of us have been dropping down. Damp and downright chilly today here in Woodstock, though we're expected to both dry and warm up in coming days, to about 70 on the weekend.

My guy, George, threw camphor in the hole this morning, told me to call him if the squirrels vacate so he can come back and do the job. He's done quite a bit of work for me over the years, including reshingling the roof and building the backyard deck. But like more than a few of the old-timers around here, I have to steer clear of politics, lest I discover I'm dealing with a Republican, or worse, a Tea Partier.

Good deal. That will likely take care of it. Let's not bring politics into this thread. Otherwise, things might go flying off in all directions. I already get that treatment at work. =)

A beautiful crisp fall day here in Portland. Although the Pacific Northwest is not famous for its Fall colors, Portland has enough imported deciduous trees that it can be quite beautiful. Nothing like the East coast of course, but still pretty nice.

Never been to Portland. My grandfather use to talk of it's beauty in the early days. He was an accountant for a lumbering mill. Would love to drive along the great river this time of year, visiting the small hamlets along the way.

Cool and rainy here the past couple of days. Going on a small adventure this evening. I am going to go buy alligator meat at a store that the internet assures me carries it to make Alligator Sauce Piquante for this weekend's LSU/Florida game. This store also may or may not be running a counterfeit money laundering operation. We shall see on both cases.

This store also may or may not be running a counterfeit money laundering operation.

One of the joys of living in New York City are these little mysteries. Here's an excerpt from Digging Deeper, a chapter called "My Little Notebook":

Up the block there's a candy store of sorts that sells nothing but gum, cigarettes, and a few newspapers. It's always crowded with middle-aged men smoking, drinking coffee, hanging out as if something unseen were going on.

When I bought a Sporting News there one day, thinking to handicap the day's races at Aqueduct, to play with prognostication for a while, the owner, who had never said a word to me before when I bought gum or cigarettes, remarked, "They're good."

"What's good?" I asked.

"The paper," he replied. "The one you got there."

"Thanks," I said, as if in response to a compliment, though I didn't get it.

Around the corner, the Italian restaurant on First Avenue is never open, yet somehow hasn't gone out of business. Across the avenue, the People's Fruit Stand burned down last month, the entire three-story building above it gutted. But the Three Guys From Brooklyn fruit stand next door survived intact, and since then has prospered. Everyone shops there now.

And then this morning at seven o'clock a limousine pulled up to the Turkish bathhouse up the block. Two guys in expensive suits got out, lugging laundry bags. They went up the stoop and inside, and minutes later came back out without the bags.

I find it hard to believe they were delivering towels.

In days of yore, when my wife was my girlfriend, we sometimes went for a run in our portion of Brownstone Brooklyn which, despite the yuppies like us that were moving in daily, was still mostly Italian. In NYC early in the morning on a weekend it is generally empty and quiet. People stay up later there and they sleep in longer, especially on a weekend. This particular morning was different. Every other brownstone had an older Italian man waiting at the front door; just watching. Never did figure out why. It was eerie.

THE HUNCHBACK IN THE PARK
The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among the willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.

Dylan Thomas

A very pleasant day here in Detroit. I have the windows open, and will keep them open till it gets uncomfortable, if it does. Looks like pretty good weather for the not too distant future. I will be here till the end of the month, then it's out to San Diego for another season. I look forward to a more social sort of life after some few months of the lamp. I am loathe to leave my library behind but what else can I do? I think that I will spend the fall and winter writing something or another. Probably with pencil and paper. I shall be making myself a motley less & less in this forum. Though I will attempt to keep my Reader's Diary alive and well. As I create most if not all of the tension there, and I am perfectly content to do so.

Well listen here, Por-Man! I've got me a nice library here just up the coast a hop skip and jump from San Diego, and you're welcome to peruse its shelves anytime once you're out here. Of course, it lacks the hunnerds of Trollopes' and Kermode and Davies and Cowper-Powys and Lit-Crit abundant in yours, but there might be something worthwhile for you to read, such as my complete collection of European Writers series, fifteen volumes in all, edited by George Stade, which I obtained from the Denison Library of the Claremont Colleges, where David Foster Wallace once taught (and who know) perhaps even perused through these volumes. God, I'm so special. Yeah, man, let's get together and read!

Aw Porius, I have become dependent on your presence here, and will miss you. Though there's something very scholarly and attractive about the picture of your 'fall' and winter of writing. Turkish carpets and desk lamps. Firelight and storm. Polished oak and glass decanters.

We've had days of rain down here, and now when the sun comes out you can practically see the steam rising from the ground. It feels like if you just press a seed into the ground it'll spring up there and then, like Jack's beanstalk.

Gads, I like all the turkey carpets, et cetera, and only wish I had such tchotskys. I meant that you'll see me in motley less and less, I won't vanish in one feel poop. I hope my 'pfall' and winter will look very scholarly and somewhat attractive, though that explains why I don't post a recent picture, that somewhat attractive thing, like GHWB's 'Vision Thing' - is somewhat, or more than somewhat past its best.
Excellent job on last review, Choc, I wrote a response that pleased me mightily, but a sudden onrush of company, and I neglected to push the save button. I've tried since to rewrite what then I wrote, but to no avail.

PorMan, whatever you do, don't disappear in one feel poop.

You did write a thing that pleased me mightily, in my cafe thread. You don't mean this one, do you, http://www.librarything.com/topic/93060#2226757 ?

There goes a chunk of the Midwest, relocating to room temperature.

That's it! I lost track of it somehow. I'm a computer IDIOT. I'm pleased that it's not lost. It was unrehearsed and unedited. Just the way I like it though they don't always please me as this one did. Am I getting dotty? Or what?

Well it's not in Le Salon, it's in another group called Club Read, which is probably why you lost it. I was delighted to see you there in my thread!

THE BARE TREE
The bare cherry tree
higher than the roof
last year produced
abundant fruit. But how
speak of fruit confronted
by that skeleton?
Though live it may be
there is no fruit on it.
Therefore chop it down
and use the wood
against this biting cold.

from THE WEDGE (1944)
William Carlos Williams

Not quite winter, but has felt like it locally lately. Part I is one of my all time favorite passages ...

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Preludes
T.S. Eliot

What has come over Henri, I want to know. Dropping a poem into our thread and unabashedly referring to it as a "favorite passage." Mein gott, next thing you know he'll be signing off with hearts. (How do you make those damn things again?)

Ooh, time for sentiment! ♥ (Piero, Alt + 3 on numeric keypad on a PC) ♥

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare

Rique, that is an entirely unsentimental poem and I am not dissing it. It's the only T.S.Eliot I really like (probably because it's the only one I can vaguely understand).

I've turned over a new leaf Piero, and I'm ♥ing it!

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

~Mark Strand (from the last two lines of a poem whose title presently escapes me).

You darn well better be joining us, Piero, for The Brothers Karamazov beginning Nov. 1st.

I think you'll ♥ it!

Perhaps I'll lurk, sweetie. ♥

Sheila, another way to make hearts is to copy the other guy's and paste them: ♥ ♥ ♥

YESSSS! ♥♥♥ Victory! ♥♥♥

Funny, whenever Rique posts a heart I automatically read it as 'wuv'.

It's a pity the naughty hottie didn't know how to post hearts.

There's a lot the hottie didn't know how to post. She was clueless in many matters LT post-wise.

This was the hottie's favorite song back in the day: Two of Hearts by Stacey Q. SQ abandoned the music scene, moved to Asia, and became a Buddhist. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the hottie one day follows suit, and becomes the naughty Buddha hottie, and comes up with her own Four Noble Goofs.

Highdeal October Weather. Room Temperature, still very mild out there at almost midnight. Almost too nice to be inside. Went to hear one of my favorite singers who was in town for one night from Nevada. He sang one of my favorites CRUMP'S DUMP a song by another favorite of mine Michael Peter Smith. He also with his marvelous voice delivered Dylan Thomas' HUNCHBACK IN THE PARK.

Prodigy

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

Charles Simic

The alligator purchase was a success (or partial success) so the Saturday menu is: Alligator Sauce Piquante; Celery Root, Chestnut, and Apple Soup; and Guacamole. Tonight I've got some Collard Greens I want to make, but haven't decided what else. Weather: the day has cleared up after some early rain. Nice cool breeze. Tragic first day of the radiator being on in our building.

Apple soup strikes the right note, donit?
1
ONCE BELOW A TIME
Once below a time,
When my pinned-around-the-spirit
Cut-to-measure flesh bit,
Suit for a serial sum
On the first of each hardship,
My paid-for slaved-for own too late
In love torn breeches and blistered jacket
On the snapping rims of the ashpit,
In grottoes I worked with birds,
Spiked with a mastiff collar,
Tasselled in cellar and swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats
And out-of perspective sailors,
In common clay clothes disguised as scales,
As a he-god's paddling water skirts,
I astounded the sitting tailors,
I set back the clock faced tailors,
Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,
Hopping hot leaved and feathered
From the kangaroo foot of the earth,
From the chill, silent centre
Trailing the frost bitten cloth,
Up through the lubber crust of Wales
I rocketed to astonish
The flashing needle rock of squatters,
The criers of Shabby and Shorten,
The famous stitch droppers.

2
My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.
And the owl hood, the heel hider,
Claw fold and hole for the rotten
Head deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors' master with nerves for cotton.
On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,
Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,
I was pierced by the idol tailor's eyes,
Glared through shark mask and navigating head,
Cold Nansen's beak on a boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,
The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy
With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.
It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water
With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed

Summoning a child's voice from the webfoot stone,
Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.
Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
As quiet as a bone.

Dylan Thomas

Well, I think I survived the hunting trip... It's still questionable. (extra pain from the loading/unloading thing, blech!) Weather was incredibly hot Thursday through Saturday and we had rain all day Sunday. (As luck would have it, though, we had dry weather for the breaking of camp and unloading of the trailer) Two tags in camp; one filled on late Sunday afternoon near dusk (of course). The Cali's got six in their camp and can someone please explain to me why those yahoos cut the heads off? I have never seen that done while still in camp. They never cease to amaze me.

Lost about 6 bucks in quarters playing 'Pass the Shit' (fun, fun card game with a large group of people). As always enjoyed seeing the 'Sisters of my heart' and their kids, grandbabies and all the family politics going on around that.

All in all a very successful, if not exhausting, trip. My brother even came up for the night on Saturday which pleased Papa, no end. Good to be home. I am now officially a laundry slave...

Local weather is coolish in the 60s with lots of clouds, wind and raining pine needles.

>94 highdesertlady:. Succinct report, Tani, but as often with your entries, there are things that need to be decoded. Like Calis: people from California? And cut the heads off six what? Deer?

>92 janemarieprice:. Tragic first day of the radiator being on in our building. I know a lot about NYC radiators in October, Jane, but you really must explain the tragedy whereof you speak.

Pine needles raining. Heads missing. As old Al Kaline would say, great right fielder, not so great at the Coleridgian task, always said: 'he always ceases to amaze me.' Now maybe old Albert meant something the hoi-polloi could not possibly fathom, but I doubt it. Though he was a Master in right field.

Tani, it's called caping a deer. They do that to keep the head cool so they can take it to a taxidermist for mounting.

94 - Sounds like a good weekend. My dad switched shifts with someone last weekend and missed the opening weekend. Usually in Louisiana it's not that big a deal since it's typically still hot. But this year, of course, it was quite cool, and his best friend got a 10-point in velvet. He was none too pleased.

95 - Our radiator in the Living Room is ridiculously over sized for our apartment. A contractor I work with thinks it heated the entire floor at one point - our apartment is only half the floor and has two more radiators. So I'm always a little sad the first day it comes on. We keep the door half open all winter - sophisticated NYC thermostat.

As you might well know, Jane, once upon a time--and still, I suppose, for many of the older NYC buildings, tenements and the like--there was no internal thermostat. You got heat through pipes directly to the radiator from Con Edison plants, which accounted (accounts?) for the steam you saw (see?) rising from gratings in streets throughout Manhattan: quite literally, the only way to let off steam, so the system wouldn't overheat. Thus, just about everyone in the city got more heat than they wanted, and could either turn the radiator off altogether or open a window, in the middle of winter.

Martin Scorsese used the NYC letting-off-steam-as Inferno motif to great effect in Taxi Driver, fwiw.

99 - Yep. Most still work that way (every project I've worked on has been steam radiators), including ours (we call the door our thermostat). ;)

Oh, sorry, Wilson... Yes, Cali's as in Californians, heads off as in deer.

Thank you, Cowboy, for that. It makes sense, but sheesh!

Porius, darlin'... what the heck is Coleridgian?

>102 highdesertlady:. And how do you know they're Californians, Tani? Are they required to wear a badge?

>100 absurdeist:. Good catch, Henri, as we say in the editing biz. You've now cited Taxi Driver more than a few times; one of your--if not the--favorite, you've said, made when Scorsese was making such movies, which he hasn't for a while, including his latest thing on HBO, which I think is crap, despite the fawning critical acclaim. Steve Buscemi as a mob boss? Sheesh. And I'm a Mennonite transsexual.

But I sidetracked myself: Have you ever critiqued that movie? I'd like to see it, if you have. And if you haven't, I think you should.

No, Wilson, they have been coming up from California to hunt there since I was a kid. (we may resent their presence, but that does not mean we don't talk to 'em)

Wisconsin has the same problem with hunters from Chicago or Illinois. They seem to over-run the woods. We are so territorial as a species. Perhaps in a just world, the deer would decide how the game is played:
http://tinyurl.com/coemw2

Bwahahahahahaha! Okay, not fair... just spit coffee.

Jane, collards are God's way of getting you to eat more corn bread. Maybe some black-eyed peas with a big ole ham hock cooked into them. Ummm, makes me feel all warm and squishy inside. Oh, don't forget the Pick-A-Peppa sauce with those collards. Boy, you make me want to come to your house for dinner.

>105 eugenegant:. Good one, Steven. I like it when the LOL lady from La Pine gets coffee up her nose.

>107 geneg:. Even a Brooklyn boy like myself is into collard greens. Corn bread too. But I draw the line at grits. My wife likes 'em, orders it in the rare places that have them here, adds salt and pepper and butter, "Because it's so tasteless," I tell her. She claims otherwise.

Paula Dean can't be wrong on the collard greens:
Ingredients
1/2 pound smoked meat (ham hocks, smoked turkey wings, or smoked neck bones)
1 tablespoon House seasoning, recipe follows
1 tablespoon seasoned salt
1 tablespoon hot red pepper sauce
1 large bunch collard greens
1 tablespoon butter
Directions
In a large pot, bring 3 quarts of water to a boil and add smoked meat, house seasoning, seasoned salt and hot sauce. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 1 hour.

Wash the collard greens thoroughly. Remove the stems that run down the center by holding the leaf in your left hand and stripping the leaf down with your right hand. The tender young leaves in the heart of the collards don't need to be stripped. Stack 6 to 8 leaves on top of one another, roll up, and slice into 1/2 to 1-ince thick slices. Place greens in pot with meat and add butter. Cook for 45 to 60 minutes, stirring occasionally. When done taste and adjust seasoning.

Serve with favorite dish as a side.

House Seasoning:
1 cup salt
1/4 cup black pepper
1/4 cup garlic powder
Mix ingredients together and store in an airtight container for up to 6 months.

Peter, I'm with your wife on the grits. Salt, pepper and butter -yum!

;p @ Wilson

I do love it when you stick your tongue out, buttercup.

Coleridgian: the best words in the best order, sorry HDL I am a hopeless whatever it is that I am.

Collats, as they say in certain corners of Dee-troit. And mustihs, ie. mustard greens. Chitlins. Hawgsheadchee, pokerines, reeubs, pokeanbeens, pokesalat, gene's blackeyepees, pickledpigsfeet, turnipgreens - Soul Food, sits on your tummy like an upriight piano but reel good nevertheless. You can almost feel Slick Willy tucking into a pile of grits and redeyegravy. Wavygravy. Tony Joe White.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRF24LY5pvw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2MBN-RYN4c&feature=related

#98 - Jane, a 10 point still in the velvet in October? How very odd. Is the meat any good when they are that old? Personally, I prefer elk, but venison jerky is my favorite when done right.

103> Indeed I have commented on it: Taxi Driver Still Floors Me

If you click on the trailer at the top, you'll see the steam rising up from the streets that you and Jane were discussing.

My, how lively this place can get when the Oregonian deer decapitator is around. You should all be kind to animals, because they taste really good.

Hmmph! ;p

Yes, grits ARE a defining food, aren't they? My wife makes a marvelous grits based breakfast with grits crumbled bacon, shredded cheddar cheese, butter, salt ,pepper, a touch of sugar and an egg over easy and chopped into the grits. Usually served with BISCUITS. as Alton Brown would say, "good eats".

That's kinda what my wife does with it, come to think about it: smushes up the yolk of fried eggs, adds the salt, peppa, bacon bits, etc. Sugar is out; she's a diabetic, after all. Can she use Sweet 'n' Lo instead? LOL.

mmm... dang, that even sounds good to me.

All the grits talk has got my mouth watering. Not so swell for the arteries but awfully tasty.
But
'I FOUND HER OUT THERE'
I found her out there
On a slope few see,
That falls westwardly
To the salt-edged air,
Where the ocean breaks
On the purple strand,
And the hurricane shakes
The solid land.

I brought her here,
And have laid her to rest
In a noiseless nest
No sea beats near,
She will never be stirred
In her loamy cell
By the waves long heard
And loved so well.

So she does not sleep
By those haunted heights
The Atlantic smites
And the blind gales sweep,
Whence she often would gaze
At Dundagel's famed head,
While the dipping blaze
Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale
Of sunk Lyonnesse,
As a wind-tugged trees
Flapped her cheek like a flail,
Or listen at whiles
With a thought-bound brow
To the murmuring miles
She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe
Will creep underground
Till it catch the sound
Of that western sea
As it swells and sobs
Where she once domiciled,
And joy in its throbs
With the heart of a child.

Thomas Hardy

Being an ignorant Aussie, grits are a new concept to me, so I consulted my trusty friend Wikipedia. Apparently Charleston's The Post and Courier said in 1952: "...{Grits} should be made popular throughout the world. Given enough of it, the inhabitants of planet Earth would have nothing to fight about. A man full of {grits} is a man of peace."

I think I missed the global grits revolution. :(

Yum! Grits are my favorite. There was a good 7 years where I had grits every day for breakfast. Now I don't have breakfast that often, but I still have grits for a midnight snack on occasion.

The collard greens are getting the double garlic treatment - chiffonade and saute with garlic, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, olive oil, and some chicken stock. Going to pair with some bbq sausage, leftover salad and beets, and manchego cheese (we really should have monthly cheese assignments in Le Salon). Might make some cornbread if I get up the energy, but I have some other food prep work to do for tomorrow (mostly brining) so may not make it.

113 - Yep, it's still good. We get the majority made into ground venison (growing up we rarely ate ground beef), then some steaks, sausage, and my personal favorite - tamales.

Thank you, Sheila. I fell asleep there for a while and nearly dozed through the rest of Grits Appreciation Night, with sides of elk meat (and/or venison burgers) and collard greens:

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

A hobo (on a boxcar from Sidney, Montana, to Minneapolis) offered my pal and I cold venison sandwiches on Wonder bread which he'd copped in Seattle. We declined.

#121 - mmm... tamales. I am on a Mexican kick right now, that sounds so good. When I was a kid, we had our venison made into jerky and thuringer sausage. How many pounds did that 10 point weigh?

Yeah, watch out for them boxcar sandwiches, Wilson... ;-)

I'm not sorry I dint eat it. The guy did pull a gun on us at first, however, so we were very polite about it.

I just have to change the subject for a minute - I was idly looking out the window (I shoulda been working) and saw someone walk under the deep shade of a tree and then back out again, and I immediately thought of this. It's been a favourite painting of mine since I was at high school.

I hope you are working on your boxcar short story for us, Mr Author Man... (hint, hint)

Oh yeah! I was unable to respond to your chapter last week... Want More! ;-)

*sigh* I love Monet.

This one too, probably more so: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Monet_dejeunersurlherbe.jpg (just a section of a larger painting)

ETA: I love Monet too. I think he helped form my lifelong love of light and shade - I'm always conscious of it.

Monet's house at Giverny, courtesy of HDL, and presently residing on my computer desktop:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/88286#1910085

In Order To

Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had
to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The
order arrived three minutes of.

I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I
did it.

Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right.
No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in
early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.

Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town;
then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country;
then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an-
other)—In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to
burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And
I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing
of any kind whatever.

Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew
it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I) ...

Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the
way it was when you started.

Well ... it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks,
I didn't want any job that bad.

Kenneth Patchen
from Collected Poems

LIGHT BREAKS WHERE NO SUN SHINES
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like the sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitchmoon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas

One of my very good friends passed away this week, this is for him. He was a top-notch photographer. Who could tease out the best from his subjects; he could get them, somehow, to put their 'best foot forward.'

Really sorry to hear that Porius. Well said.

{{{{Porius}}}} ♥

Thanks, HDL & EF, I am heading out soon to attend a memorial at his Studio. It should be a zoo as he has been shutterbugging in the Detroit area for 50 years or so. I've got some terrific stories as I worked for him for several years. I got to see things I could hardly expect to see if I didn't work for him. And met an array of characters who have kept me amused till this very day. I'll post a few of his photos in the not to distant future.

Takes the breath out of you when someone you know or knew dies, particuarly a peer. Eulogies come to mind, and of course a sense of mortality.

Yes, by all means post a few things of his, Peter.

What was his name?

A lovely autumn day yesterday, and another one today. Did my loop, in shorts no less, wearing my black and white rugby shirt, out of awareness for possible bow and arrow hunters in the woods. Perhaps when it warms up to the low seventies later, I'll pedal up to town along Sawkill Creek, amidst the color-dappled leaves.

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

Sounds lovely, Piero.

I'll pedal up to town along Sawkill Creek,
amidst the color-dappled leaves

What is that man -- poetry?

I don' know. I got poetry in me, I guess. There's a similar line--about having poetry in him--mumbled by Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller when he's stumbling around after being rejected by Julie Christie.

And speaking of movies, I read your Taxi Driver review, mentioned in #114, and left a somewhat idiotic but truthfully visceral comment.

ON SITTING DOWN TO READ KING LEAR ONCE AGAIN

O GOLDEN-TONGUED Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thy olden pages and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit,
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

John Keats

WHEN I HAVE FEARS
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness sink.

John Keats

A plu-perfect day here in the Mid-West. Brilliant blue skies, gentle zephyrs. Indin summer as the Little Bigman would say.

A sunset to rival Constable. Another splendid Pfall Day. I was out in the country among the Blue Spruces, etc. 82 tomorrow, maybe some kind of reckid. I can't remember a better beginning to October. I've got 11 more days here and I am going to make the most of em.

I Sit by the Window

I said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destory the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow's my squat company.

My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my sholders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Joseph Brodsky

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When the bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

"Injun Summer"

Yep, sonny this is sure enough Injun summer. Don't know what that is, I reckon, do you? Well, that's when all the homesick Injuns come back to play; You know, a long time ago, long afore yer granddaddy was born even, there used to be heaps of Injuns around here—thousands—millions, I reckon, far as that's concerned. Reg'lar sure 'nough Injuns—none o' yer cigar store Injuns, not much. They wuz all around here—right here where you're standin'.

Don't be skeered—hain't none around here now, leastways no live ones. They been gone this many a year.

They all went away and died, so they ain't no more left.

But every year, 'long about now, they all come back, leastways their sperrits do. They're here now. You can see 'em off across the fields. Look real hard. See that kind o' hazy misty look out yonder? Well, them's Injuns—Injun sperrits marchin' along an' dancin' in the sunlight. That's what makes that kind o' haze that's everywhere—it's jest the sperrits of the Injuns all come back. They're all around us now.

See off yonder; see them tepees? They kind o' look like corn shocks from here, but them's Injun tents, sure as you're a foot high. See 'em now? Sure, I knowed you could. Smell that smoky sort o' smell in the air? That's the campfires a-burnin' and their pipes a-goin'.

Lots o' people say it's just leaves burnin', but it ain't. It's the campfires, an' th' Injuns are hoppin' 'round 'em t'beat the old Harry.

You jest come out here tonight when the moon is hangin' over the hill off yonder an' the harvest fields is all swimmin' in the moonlight, an' you can see the Injuns and the tepees jest as plain as kin be. You can, eh? I knowed you would after a little while.

Jever notice how the leaves turn red 'bout this time o' year? That's jest another sign o' redskins. That's when an old Injun sperrit gits tired dancin' an' goes up an' squats on a leaf t'rest. Why I kin hear 'em rustlin' an' whisper in' an' creepin' 'round among the leaves all the time; an' ever' once'n a while a leaf gives way under some fat old Injun ghost and comes floatin' down to the ground. See—here's one now. See how red it is? That's the war paint rubbed off'n an Injun ghost, sure's you're born.

Purty soon all the Injuns'll go marchin' away agin, back to the happy huntin' ground, but next year you'll see 'em troopin' back—th' sky jest hazy with 'em and their campfires smolderin' away jest like they are now.

J. W. Riley

The saddest-Pfunniest scene in all of moviedom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLso0ZBqOi4

Beautiful day! Sun shining, really cool, geese flying overhead. Feeling very fortunate not to be sick. Sauce Piquante was a hit, though I think the Celery Root, Chestnut, and Apple Soup was even better - highly recommended for fall.

Lobster bisque, bread and some excellent beer on the menu for us yahoos in Detroit. 82 but air is fresh and somewhat coolish. The trees are in great form, color-wise; I don't know if you could conjure up a better mid-November day.

Certainly not, Peter. Not even bad for mid-October!

Went for a modest hike today in an area called Platte Cove in the higher Catskills, the ski country north of Woodstock. The evening temps are about 10 degrees cooler there, which might be why the leaves on the mountain flanks were pronouncedly more colorful. Nearly spectacular, in fact. Stopped on the way home for local crops, not counting apples, the most local of all: cauliflowers as big as bowling balls, deep green broccoli, and brussels sprouts, dozens of them clinging to fat stalks. There were pumpkins, squash, and the like as well, but I'm not big on those.

I see my mistake. It's still October, isn't it?

I remember getting the feeling you all have now about 6 months ago. I tried to wax lyrical about it on here, and you all just kept carolling on about crocuses and pfalling blossoms (as PorMan would say). Hmph.

Well, let me tell you, oh russet-hearted red-mooned creatures of the Other Side, that here it is the springiest of all possible spring days. I woke up to bright sunshine and wet earth, and ever since, dark clouds have swept over and dropped sudden downpours, to be instantly replaced by brilliant sunshine catching the drips on the new green leaves. And then it all happens again. I want to be out in it with the birds, but I can't.

We're into mellow on this part of the planet, Sheila, not lyrical. And why can't you anyway? Be out with the boids?

Well, it sounds bad since I'm posting on here right now, but I'm actually at work. Quiet day today, so I can spare LT time, but not boidie time.

And Rique! I just noticed that you put 'my' Monet pic on the main Salon page, along with that Halloweenish wytche womyne picture. How nice of you. I love it.

Work? On a Sunday? Or is it Monday there? It's quite confusing. Maybe you're confused too: you forgot to end your love post with a ♥. Henri loves 'em now, to hear him tell it.

I just came across this on salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/memoirs/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/10/...

It's Monday here, Piero. Nearly lunch time.

And how could I forget?

One for Rique: ♥
One for Piero (who also loves 'em though he won't admit it):♥
And one for everyone else, MWA: ♥

I don't like Mondays

I don't like Mondays

I don't like Mondays

I don't like Mondays

♥ Enrique

Wellll, since they are being passed around en masse.... ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! mmmmmuuuuuaaaaahhhhh!

IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
(d. Jan. 1939)

1
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumors;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and the noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the
floor of the Bourse.
And the poor have the sufferings to which
they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost
convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something
slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

2
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From the ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

3
Earth, receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique.

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1939)

One of my all-time favourites, Porius. I posted Part 1 on a Nature thread a while ago.

Rique, how depressing. Thanks, I think. ♥

A WALK AFTER DARK
A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring;
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shapeless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be as shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to dislike the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may have already have hurled
Its first little no at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world;

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

W.H. Auden (August 1948)

Auden became a citizen of the U.S. in 1946. He actually did a stint here at the Univ. of Michigan in the early 1950's.

I'm not on the Hate Monday bandwagon. I like the weekend less, Saturday in particular: people out shopping, straining to have a familial good time. Monday is okay: I like to edit; to earn a living, sitting here in my house. Tuesday I put aside for my own writing; my favorite day, under the radar, so to speak, a forgotten, anonymous day. Wednesday is all right, and I like to eat out Thursday night. I'm supposed to like Friday, I know, but since I don't get off work--I pretty much work when I want to--I don't see the big deal. It's okay, I guess; not as annoying as Saturday. I find it tolerable.

Yeah, but everyday is like Sunday.

Whoa! Didja see Billie Whitelaw? Wot's she doin' in your video, Henry? Last time I saw 're, she wuz wit' Charlie Bubbles.

RAIN! Lots and lots of rain.

I know not whom Billie Whitelaw is! Who is she?

I was watching the Jets game just before half time, and there was a cloudburst. Game delayed for 40 minutes due to lightning strikes.

I saw her in Charlie Bubbles, Enrique, proving I am as old as Pietro.

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/artists/w/Billie-Whitelaw/index-140620.html

Don't forget TINY BUBBLES! Or my favorite, BUBBLE, in ABSOLUTELY FABUOUS.

Two by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
are infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Bubble was the best thing in AbFab, but they wisely kept her role small so she did not wear out her welcome. Always left you wanting more.

Adventures of Robin Hood: The Bride of Robin Hood
http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi379521305/

More on Billie Whitelaw, while waiting for slick's video to start:

Billie Whitelaw first appeared on the radio at the age of eleven. She made her theatrical debut in 1950 and in films from 1953. She has made a speciality of playing intense, single-purposed women. (She was absolutely fierce as Albert Finney's estranged wife in Charlie Bubbles.) Also, on stage, she has appeared in many of the stranger plays by Samuel Beckett.

Yeah, I was going to mention she appeared in most of Sam Beckett's plays that had a role for a woman, usually in first English language productions. I don't know if she and Beckett had a thing or not. I have a copy of Endgame that features her on the cover.

THE CANONIZATION
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his Grace,
Or the King's real, or his stamped face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured my love?
What merchant ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove,
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So to one neutral thing both sexes fit
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love.

And thus invoke us; 'You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love!

John Donne

What an education of Billie Whitelaw. I consider myself well taught! Morrissey had (maybe has) a thing for starlets from the past. The video was from his first solo album, Viva Hate, from '88, I believe.

So, Piero, did you enjoy Morrissey's music? I'm not a big fan of his solo stuff myself, but you really shouldn't get me started talking about the band that made Morrissey famous, The Smiths, because I love The Smiths. I love 'em. The song in the clip is "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" off one of their many masterpieces, The Queen is Dead, though it was also released in England on The World Won't Listen, available in the States as an import. Prob'ly, undoubtedly, more info than you really needed, but, hey, like I say, I love The Smiths, and I don't believe I've ever talked about them at length in LibraryThing, so why not here, on the nature thread?

Why not, indeed? A shy fellow like you needs a receptive forum.

*snort* sorry, carry on...

EF, receiving fire on more than one front and standing tall.

One of the poems we had to memorize in ancient days when memorization was in fashion:

You Are Old, Father William

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And you have grown must uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned back a somersault in at the door--
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment--one shilling a box--
Allow me to sell you a couple."

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eyes were as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"

Lewis Carroll

Has the growing-old story supplanted the coming-of-age story?

If that question is addressed to the universe, slick, then I confess I don't know the answer, since I don't read all that much, to judge from the size of various LT libraries compared to mine. If it's addressed to the thread, I suppose it's true that Porius and I do go on a bit about growing old.

Personally, I spend so much time in the past in order to capture it in writing--both looking back from my psychedelic year, in "Digging Deeper" and now in the next book, and moving on--I haven't yet gotten to the growing old part.

And you? I have a picture, based on your entries here and elsewhere--a wife (and did you mention a child or children?), places you've been, music you prefer ... Are you growing old or still coming of age, in what you read, the movies you favor, what you listen to and think about?

It's all the same story S.

MUSEE des BEAUX ARTS
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking duly along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an immortal failure; the sun shone
As it had on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and calmly sailed on.

W.W. Auden (December 1938)

We had that a while ago, but I recall another poet. WC Williams? Or else both of them, and no doubt others, were using Breughel's painting as inspiration.

And apropos the ordinariness of life as extraordinary things occur, this has to be acknowledged, though it's all over the news today:

http://www.salon.com/news/chile_mine_rescue/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/1...

I don't know for sure but I don't see PW or myself as young or old. We may call ourselves old pfarts but I'm sure neither of us is ready to pack it in quite yet. Of course we are blowzier fellows than most here. We are two city boys who are used to talking over, or competing with the din. We don't need the atmosphere to be just right when we set out to accomplish a thing, anything.
To cut to the chase, we have been doing the heavy lifting here recently. If we can't catch up to some of the younger voters then maybe, just maybe we should be put out to pasture.

Oh my god, what would we do in a pasture? You need your books, old man, so you could read. And I suppose I'd have to get one of those, whatchamacallits, wireless laptoppers, so I could at least write.

As we are old it wouldn't matter too much would it? I could get along just fine without reading and you would warble your wood notes wild like some peripatetic bard in the Eisthethfodd forests of NY.

'Tis true that I was once a fair hand, and mouth, at the woodwinds, first the clarinet, then the tenor sax. I even have an old reed here someplace. Wait ... a Rico Symmetricut no. 2.

What distinguishes an old fart from an old person?

Robert

I suppose it's gas, I'm jes sayin'...

I thought it was the smell. Fewer baths. Although, when you think about it "Old Fart" is an excellent metaphor.

idn't it just. ;-)

From "The Great Stone Face"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other.

Hawthorne was referring to the so-called "Old Man in the Mountain" overlooking Franconia Notch in New Hampshire, which I knew well, having spent a few summers with my family, as a boy, in a socialist boardinghouse in the vicinity. Or rather, the old man who once overlooked the notch, and fell apart several years ago, compelling that state to redo its license plate.

Ahh. It's a rather beautiful world.

ETA: I wrote the above because of a surfeit of sunshine and sushi and green things growing in long puddles, not in direct reply to Piero's above, though the great stone face and the re-done licence plate both contribute to the rather-beautifulness of which I was speaking.

189 A socialist boardinghouse ? in the US of A ?

Egads no socialist pent-house? I'd have to talk to the bosses about that.

From what I've seen of it, admittedly not much, but more than you, ha-ha, Wilson had a very interesting childhood.

In the eyes of the beholder, Gene. Your boyhood in North Carolina seems more exotic to me than mine in Canarsie (Brooklyn) ... though I do see how the social aspect of my upbringing might seem foreign in contemporary, stupefied, America. Back then, however, the trade union circles my family was part of--the vacations we took together, the rooming houses where we stayed, even the May Day parade we marched in--was one of the norms of the time, not some weird aberration; at least in the New York area, which was all I knew then.

What I don't delve into in "Digging Deeper," and perhaps will write about someday, was the network of places we'd go on a long weekend or on vacation for a week or two in the summer, where we'd gather with others of our kind: the aforementioned farm in New Hampshire, the boardinghouse in another part of New Hampshire, the workingclass "resorts" in New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as Unity House in Pennsylvania, the brainchild of the (Detroit) Reuther brothers (of the UAW), the kucheleins in the Catskills. And then there were the summer camps, about which books have been written, where the children of American socialists, communists, and so-called fellow travelers went, in upstate New York; Kinderland is perhaps the most well-known.

It rained and rained and rained last night. I drove home in a pouring rain from a night of fresh caught perch, beer & wine & the reading aloud of great poetry. I had been practicing reading Hopkins aloud and I acquitted myself well enough. I've been listening to some fine readers to get better. It's not so easy, that's for sure. I think I posted this great poem before but some time ago I am pretty sure.

THE MORE LOVING ONE
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all the stars to disappear and die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W.H. Auden
(7 September 1957)

Sounds like a great evening!

I do not have a voice that matches how I hear it in my head. If I did, I'd go for:

But
on earth
indifference is the least we have to dread
from man (rising)
or beast (flat)

I get terribly hammy reading to the kids. I really enjoy it. They are not too picky, yet.

S. I'm certain you are much better than you say. Though it's damnably difficult to read LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY and such things. We decided that if the Gods spare us into the near and maybe somewhat distant future that we would find a little place wherein we could put on readings and little plays, etc. etc. What's better than hearing someone who can read properly?

Today is P.G. Wodehouse's birthday. Where would we be without fellows like him?
http://theresaromain.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/pg-wodehouse.jpg

Anyone else experiencing wonky behavior on LT? First, the group home pages were sorting ascending (now they seem to be okay) and really slow loading. blech. Suppose I will reboot and see what happens.

>196 Porius:. We're supposed to get that rain tomorrow, or some other rain from elsewhere, but in any case, a soaker:

Like Rain It Sounded Till It Curved

Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I new 'twas Wind--
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand--
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road--
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad--
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.

Emily Dickinson

ON HEARING A SYMPHONY OF BEETHOVEN
Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made you plausible, his purpose plain,
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,
Till doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun,
A little while, that in me sings no more.

LOVE IS NOT ALL
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want passed resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food,
It may well be, I do not think I would.

Two by Edna St. Vincent Millay

who sharpens every dull ...

who sharpens every dull
here comes the only man
reminding with his bell
to disappear a sun

and out of houses pour
maids mothers widows wives
bringing this visitor
their very oldest lives

one pays him with a smile
another with a tear
some cannot pay at all
he never seems to care

he sharpens is to am
he sharpens say to sing
you'd almost cut your thumb
so right he sharpens wrong

and when their lives are keen
he throws the world a kiss
and slings his wheel upon
his back and off he goes

but we can hear him still
if now our sun is gone
reminding with his bell
to reappear a moon

e.e. cummings

TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard.
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily 'Hit them hard!'
I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over a sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And fronts the wind to unruffle a plume
His song so pitched so as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching-wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I had never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet.
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat

Out of the woods two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
All their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right - agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963)

175> Yes, Slick, I stand tall because I use ... Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables, for Men!

Ladies, does your man need a little prick me up in the bedroom? Are you sick and tired of trying to set "sail" at only "half mast" all the time, whenever that special moment comes along? Well, say goodbye to all those pills with pesky side effects and lotions and creams and unfulfilled evenings. Now, with Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables, for Men, your Man, the one and only, can provide you with the complete satisfaction you deserve. Guaranteed!

Merely apply the Prick-Me-Up™ needle applicator to the base of your man's flaccid Cadillac. (WARNING: Never apply the Prick-Me-Up™ needle applicator during a tumescent state, as the powerful Prick-Me-Up™ secret ingredients could cause your Man's precious hardware to either spontaneously combust or explode.)

Just press the pink button to the Prick-Me-Up™ needle applicator, and with a prick as quick as a blink (he'll barely feel it!) he'll go from zero to six-plus inches in 1.4 seconds! Faster than a Lamborghini!

Should your Man sustain an erection lasting four hours or more, congratulations! And contact the Guinness Book of World Records immediately!

Ask your contractor before using Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables if they think your bed frame and mattress can support your sexual activity. Do not use Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables if you've undergone any type of JRP (Junk-Reduction Procedure), as Prick-Me-Up™ can undo any diminutive gains you've made.

Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables for Men.

"Just a little prick does the trick."

Belligerent ghouls
Run Manchester schools
Spineless swines
Cemented minds

Sir leads the troops
Jealous of youth
Same old suit since 1962

He does the military two-step
Down the nape of my neck

I wanna go home
I don't wanna stay
Give up education
As a bad mistake

Mid-week on the playing fields
Sir thwacks you on the knees

Knees you in the groin
Elbow in the face
Bruises bigger than dinner plates

I wanna go home
I don't wanna stay

Da-da-da ...

Belligerent ghouls
Run Manchester schools
Spineless bastards all ...

Sir leads the troops
Jealous of youth
Same old jokes since 1902

He does the military two-step
Down the nape of my neck

I wanna go home
I don't want to stay
Give up life
As a bad mistake

Please excuse me from gym
I've got this terrible cold coming on
He grabs and devours
He kicks me in the showers
Kicks me in the showers
And he grabs and devours

I want to go home
I don't want to stay...

Da-da-da ...

The Headmaster Ritual by The Smiths (1985), from Meat is Murder

Tomorrow's High Temps
For selected locales

Notice that the spread between the highest and the lowest right now ain't all that much.

Taipei 80
Little Rock 80
Los Angeles 76
Atlanta 71
Denver 71
Chicago 66
Sydney, Aus. 64
Detroit 63
Portland, Ore. 62
Sandusky, Ohio 62
New York City 62
Bethany, Conn. 60
La Pine, Ore. 58
London, UK 57
Woodstock, NY 55
Ghent, Belg. 53

60F in Connecticut. The Nor'easter is old news and is way off into the North Atlantic. We'll have strong northwest winds tomorrow and the hawks will be flying like crazy!

Weather just perfect today.

>204 absurdeist: Peckers Aloft!!!!

What the cover of Digging Deeper will actually look like:

http://www.librarything.com/author/weissmanpeter

#209 Reminded me of Rusty Warren's great anthem, "Knockers Up", but apparently she keeps a tight watch on it, It's not available on youtube as far as I can tell, however, "Bounce Your Boobies" is available but doesn't fit in the spirit of #204 and #209. Oh, well.

Like the cover, Piero. Dark. Shadowy. Mysterious.

This is mostly for our upside-down friends, but this headline came up on my CNN News feed:

"Stoner on pole for Australian GP"

Sounds like high times ahead for the Down Unders.

Great cover, Mr Author Man!

AFTER APPLE-PICKING
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear.
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruits to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

from NORTH OF BOSTON (1914)
Robert Frost

The missus made apple crisp the other day, since apples are a big deal hereabouts.

Here's one recipe:

4 pommes pelées et tranchées
100 g de sucre roux
125 g de farine blanche
150 g de sucre en poudre
1 cuillère à café de cannelle moulue
1/4 de cuillère à café de sel
1 œuf battu
2 cuillères à soupe de beurre fondu
Recettes similaires

* Le crumble le plus facile
* Délicieux crumble aux pommes et à l’avoine
* Gâteau aux pommes et aux noix
* Crumble pommes framboises
* Crumble facile aux fruits rouges

▼ Plus

* Crumble aux pommes
* Crumble aux pommes fait maison
* Crumble facile kiwis et pêche
* Gâteau à 6 étages aux pommes et aux épices
* Tarte aux pêches et aux amandes

▲ Moins
Méthode de préparation

1. Faire préchauffer votre four à 190°C (thermostat 6/7).

2. Dans un plat carré de 23 cm de côté, mélanger les pommes avec le sucre roux. Dans un grand bol, mélanger la farine, le sucre, la cannelle et le sel. Dans un petit bol, mélanger l’œuf battu et le beurre fondu et verser sur la farine. Bien mélanger, puis en recouvrir les pommes. Faire cuire 30 à 40 minutes jusqu’à ce que la pâte soit bien dorée et croustillante.

Because food always sounds better in French

Now at least I understand it

Vraiment? Non seulement je ne parle pas français, je ne les lis pas ou convertir métriques soit. ;p

End of the World

When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.

Robinson Jeffers

SWIFT'S EPITAPH
SWIFT has sailed to his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

William Butler Yeats (1931)

Posting this for my friend, Wilson...

Montreal

Looking at it closer... what is the title of this piece, Wilson?

With that yellow tape it looks like a crime scene forever frozen in space and time. It's very evocative, whatever its title.

Just got back from this Buddy Walk which was quite touching. One of the organizers son's (who had Down Syndrome) had died suddenly earlier in the year from complications from the West Nile virus (he'd just turned 19) and so just before the start of the Buddy Walk his family and friends were each given the microphone to share what they liked best about him, and when the mic got to his best friend (who also has Down syndrome) he couldn't even talk, started weeping, and let go of his balloon in remembrance, and then everybody up there started weeping and gathered round him and group hugged him, and then a bunch of us, 500 or so there for the event, watching, were already weeping too and so we walked up front just to hug somebody and, my God, the love and compassion and comraderie that was shared there among friends and strangers makes the extreme daily difficulties and frustrations of raising a child w/special needs not seem quite so overwhelming ... in the comparative perspective of seeing the parents of a deceased child and his friends still grieving for their buddy.

"I miss him," the poor kid who started the healing weep-fest was finally able to articulate.

>223 absurdeist:. That's quite moving, Brent. Whenever I encounter someone with Down syndrome I always say hello, and I'm usually rewarded with a delighted smile. I recall once when I was a mailman when one of those beaming smiles undid what had been a rotten day.

>222 highdesertlady:. That's one of a series of sculptures in downtown Montreal, Tani. Thanks, as always, for posting it. ♥

The missus and I had breakfast this morning with the flesh-and-blood person virtually known as ganeshaka, and his wife. He'd discovered a bookstore in Kingston the day before, persuaded the proprietor to let him root around in the basement. She had a lot of books in cartons, having recently bought the place, and he spent three hours there, taking a break from entering books on LT.

Then the missus and I went on an autumn drive to Columbia County and the used bookstore in the woods called the Book Barn--outside Hillsdale, Peter, where Theodore Deiser, I believe, and whatshisname used to take long walks. Afterward we went to a sculpture park in a town called (I kid you not, Macumbeira) Ghent, which unlike the other Ghent is between Chatham and Hudson. A lovely day.

I'll look it up on Google earth

This is my fav from Wilson to post. Alas, I do miss my maple trees this time of year...

Autumn Leaves



From a tree in Wilson's backyard.

Okay, so I miss them, but not having to rake them. ;-) Have fun, Wilson... Looks like you will be busy next month!

I am off to the Valley overnight. Ciao!

Ain't it the truth. My back hurts even thinking about it.

226 - Beautiful!

It's getting cooler every day it seems. Probably time to take down the winter clothes this week.

Tonight's menu - meatballs and pasta with one side tomato sauce and one side cilantro pesto.

A PECK OF GOLD
Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.

All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like gold in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.

Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold.'

Robert Frost

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

Liked A Peck of Gold. Did not like the Koch after the word "dwell." Gets wordy and clunky after that.

C'mon - "you refuse any further contact"? Its like an application for an order of protection.

Even if I catch and agree with the sentiment and the thoughts, they just aren't expressed poetically.

A COAT
I MADE my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it,
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

William Butler Yeats (1914)

I see dwell, slick. But what is A Peck of Gold? Is that another Koch poem?

Sorry for the confusion. I referred to a preceding poem by its title and to the next by its author. You're not friends with old Kenneth, are you? And, who appointed ME the poem police, I'd like to know?

Absolutely no one appointed you anything, slick. So yeah, why don't you just ...

Try Prick-Me-Up™ Injectables for Men!

"Don't let it slag, raise it high like a flag!"

>235 slickdpdx:. Oh, I see. The Frost poem. I really should learn how to read better. And no, I don't know Kenneth, or any other Koch. And why would you think you were being appointed to the Poem Police, whoever they are? By choosing what we post, Peter and I might, with more justification, be considered (by the paranoid) undercover agents in the P.P., which of course we're not.

That is precisely what an undercover agent in the P.P. WOULD say, now, isn't it?

Iron gray sky tonight. Heavy almost winter clouds as messengers for the changing of the seasons. 52 degrees presently. Not much on the wind front. We've had the most beautiful nights as of late. The fall colors are in full swing. The red maples changing colors almost in front of our eyes. The yellow of the Japanese elms enough to make the Krishnamurti-like to faint dead in their tracks. Only a couple of more days left in Detroit. I hate leaving. Missing the rest of the color; and the bare ruined choir of November. The beginning of winter which has its own spare beauty.

A Spell Before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Howard Nemerov

Re Hi all. Have missed way to much to try to respond but read all with pleasure this AM. Had a spot of illness and then the end of season stuff starting. Plus we have a large new front porch. 61ºF here with some rain that we could have used a week ago.
Latest from the Guy, AR area is a small rash of earthquakes. No damage but they have fired the gas well drilling controversy and even managed to work their way into the local election cycle.
Late report from the garden:

To Date

English Peas 31.25
Green Onions 1
Kohlrabi 17
Green Beans 105
Yellow Squash 219
Patty Pan Squash 43.75
Potatoes 101
Broccoli 2.5
Spaghetti Squash 31
Onions 82
Peppers 238.775
Tomatoes 147.5
Cucumbers 38.5
Okra 76
Cabbage 32.5
Purple Hull Pea 127.007
Carrots 0.5
Corn 65.3
Peanuts 7
T. Greens 26
Black beans 24

Before you ask - we have a finickier who is not content with a fourth of a pound.

I am bowled over by that poem.

Golly

Its almost a spell!

Lots of wedgeehtables as Wolfgang Puck might say.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/26/alex-abramovich/oh-i-get-it-its-a-sci-fi-no...

David Markson's library sold in bulk to the Strand? Wouldn't the Strand be aware there might be some additional value there? I'm a bit skeptical.

No doubt they should've been aware, but as you no doubt know, the M.O. of the Strand, endearing to many, was its absolute chaos. You couldn't find anything there, and probably still can't. But you could, and probably can, encounter all kinds of things in the least likely places.

We are getting torrential rain as the tail of Typhoon Megi sweeps over us. This is the strongest typhoon to make landfall in history. Unfortunately, the Phillipines - that unlucky land- are getting the worst of it.

I am flying to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand tomorrow morning, I hope my flight is not cancelled.

mm.

THOSE IMAGES
WHAT if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

I never made you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce the drudgery,
Call the muses home.

Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.

Find the middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognize the five
That make the muses sing.

William Butler Yeats (1938)

Yes, I heard about your typhoon as it headed for the Philippines yesterday. And now it's wrought havoc there and moved on:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101020/wl_nm/us_typhoon

I've posted before. Here it is again.

THE BARE TREE
The bare cherry tree
higher than the roof
last year produced
abundant fruit. But how
speak of fruit confronted
by that skeleton?
Though live it may be
there is no fruit on it.
Therefore chop it down
and use the wood
against this biting cold.

William Carlos Williams

Another fine foto from Wilson...

Cauliflowers and whatnot, Jean Talon Market, Montreal. Whot! No cauliflower, Paul?

Looks like a photo taken from a helicopter over a tropical forest! Er. maybe not, if I look closer.

You know, it's pfunny... I saw a piece on the news the other night about a new breed (?), strain (?) of celery that they are developing. According to the news story, its new color is supposed to entice kids to eat it...



Edited my link, oops!

I read somewhere on the internet that all cole crops are a variety of kale. With the exception of kale itself they were all bred over the last two hundred years to express particular traits. Do any of you grow kale and if so does it have a central head like a cabbage or compact flower heads like broccoli and cauliflower? Or flower stalks like my favorite of all Brussels Sprouts?

TeeHee @ 'Enri! ;-)

The kale that I have seen has a central head that is like cabbage, Gene. (though I have not grown any other than the landscaping variety)

> 252 A long time ago, a German girl fell out of a plane which exploded ( yes just like in the Satanic verses ) above the Amazon forest. She survived because she flew out of the plane seat and all. The seat protected her when she crashed into the treetops. The last thing she tought was that the forest which came up at high speed towards her looked just like a heap of cauliflowers.
She woke up in the forest, unstrapped and walked to safety. Both her parents died in the accident.
Werner Herzog went with her years later back to the place where it all happened. He and the German television crew found the remnants of the plane. He put parts of the pieces he found in a satchel or bag which Bruce Chatwin gave him on their last meeting

Just something I think you should know.

What an image!

Link to CNN article: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-02/world/germany.aircrash.survivor_1_plane-air-c...

cauliflower ears:

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

My father's uncle Yale, who fought for the light heavyweight championship:

http://boxrec.com/media/index.php/Yale_Okun

I note that although he beat Corn Griffin twice he was defeated by Battling Bozo.

Oops, I wrote that before you reminded us he was a relation! Well, he beat a lot more guys than he was beaten by. I just liked those old names. Also the guy that fought under his rank, Sgt. Jack Adams.

That's okay. I won't take it personally. "You win some, you lose some," as they say. But did you notice that he beat Jim Braddock before Braddock became a heavyweight (and then became Russell Crowe in a popular movie a few years ago)?

thanks for posting that Slick

A raw, damp. chilly day up here in the Catskills; the kind of day I associate with early November, though it was surprisingly dry and pleasant last year. The backyard is littered with leaves. I'll get to them eventually, Tani. I am in procrastination mode at the moment; with the manuscript critique I owe your friend too, Peter.

A friend and a pal of his are coming up to hike Slide Mountain, the tallest "hill"--as you West Coast people would call it--hereabouts; which John Burroughs once climbed to honor the death of his friend Walt Whitman. I've got too much editing in the house, so I declined, told him I'd meet them for dinner this evening.

Ah, now we know for sure this had to be Wilson's fav foto...

Tomatoes, Jean Talon Market, Montreal



Them are some beautious maters! ;-)

I don't envy your raking at all, Mr Procrastinator... But driving through the valley on the way home the other day was spectacular. Boring, Oregon (yes, we have a town called Boring) has some of the most beautiful nurseries and I love taking the back roads this time of year. We have another trip over the hill on Monday and I hope the upcoming rain/snow doesn't take too many of the leaves yet. The vine maples are incredible on Highway 26 between the Warm Springs Res and Mt Hood.

I have a friend that was born in Boring. We have another town in Oregon called Drain which was on the way from my little rural burg to Portland so us kids used to laugh about Drain every trip.

Then there are the two streets in N. Portland called "Failing" and "Going".

Boring must be a desert Oregon town, aptly titled.

Oregone. Oregoing down the drain.

264 - How beautiful! We just got the last of the tomatoes from our CSA for the year. It was an especially good crop this year. For instance, last week I made pasta sauce with 4! different kinds - large red, large orange, red grape, and white plum. Amazing stuff.

Ah. I thought those tomatoes might draw you out of hiding, Jane.

;p @ Mr. Freeque.

Splendiferous leaves today, in "peak week": yellows, golds, reds, crimsons, rusts, amidst the nondeciduous greens. Even driving on the Thruway was a treat.

Alas, I think this was not during "peak week", but this is from Wilson as well...

Wilson's road in Woodstock (he doesn't recognize the kid)

Ahh, that's so gloriously green, leafy and colorful, I can almost smell the Fall fragrance wafting through the screen.

News from across la mer ... not Henri's mer, that is, but mine:

http://www.slate.com/id/2271948/

Oh, those crazy frenchies... ;o

What will they do when they retire and the workers suffering under the burden of supporting them strike?

I don't disagree. That is, my left brain doesn't. But my right brain, which flies over the world of valid details, sees the against-the-grain rebellion of true citizens--as distinct from the faux grassroots resentment of American nabobs--differently. (Check their placards; people with a sense of humor, with an awareness of the games those in authority play.) And looking at the world we live in, at its assumptions, at what it's apparently come to--rewarding cleverness over actual work--and out of an abiding respect for the socialist, communal traditions from which these demonstrations derive, I applaud this latest French resistance, while understanding that in a sane world, the details you cite call for less old world intransigence. Out of which I have to say: Vive la France!

I actually lived in Paris for a year and at the time I was really annoyed by the strikes which were very inconvenient in a variety of ways. But that was when I was 20. Since then I have thought about ways in which life in the States is unfair and hard and how people in France do not have to worry about these unfairnesses and difficulties. Example 1: Health care. Example 2: pensions. Example 3: Affording higher education. And it is not because the government of France is more enlightened but because the French people say "oh hell no" whenever it tries to take any benefits away.

When the TARP passed last year and we heard about all those multimillion dollar bonuses, my favorite comment was from Chris who just said, "Knit one, purl two."

Aux barricades!

Nicely put, mademoiselle.

In France, the money they can't afford is more broadly distributed, I suppose.

The health care and pension crises are related. Something has got to give - and it can't be health care, I don't think.

Things here are summed up nicely by the senate race in Nevada. 'Hot Dog' harry reid and that nitwit element he's running against.
'Hot Dog' has become a millionaire plus guy as a public servant; and the nitwit is beyond the pale - not above the pail. What does their race have to do with the poor dejected voters in Nevada? 'Hot Dog' just wants to maintain his sinecure and the nitwit is a cyfer for the greedy element.

The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Billy Collins

Up here in Seattle (Redmond) a little suburbanny but eye-poppingly lovely. Here for two or three days till I mosey on down to SD. The voters are very friendly up this way. My sister lives here in Redmond & 2 of my nieces live in Freemont. Looks like lots of good food in Freemont. Even street food, Mexican, etc. oh so good. A lot of used book stores but my luggage is full, though I still might buy and send back to Det. via the post office. I will certainly come back for a longer stay.
Up here I am reminded of this song. The singer's a shitheel, especially when he doesn't find at least a little courtesy for the so-called unattractive woman in the bar. I am always aware of Henry Louis Mencken's advice in these situations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e157Ner90

Or you could send the books down to me! Shorter distance; less cost in freight, and I promise I'll provide a good loving home for them. You're lucky you have a sister. I'm a lonely only.

And that's a great poem too, Piero. I used to be a Camel non-filter man myself, before I quit. Now I just enjoy an occasional cigar.

Porius, dahling... make sure you send them (if you find more than one) via USPS media mail, it's cheaper than parcel post.

Love the poem, Wilson... I was a Marlboro girl for decades, now I roll my own.

Really, Henri! A cigar smoker? Well, you know I was a cigar-smoking hippie, but I started before then, with cheap stogies in college. Then I smoked cigarettes, and then bought tobacco and rolled my own (which is the deus ex machina in my Paul Newman story, which I will tell you one of these days). And then I quit, but discovered that I couldn't write at all without something in my mouth, so (oddly, in the story I was just working on today, the tenth chapter in my present book) I went out and bought a box of cigars, to smoke while typing, and have more or less been at it since. Though I confess to rolling a cigarette now and then, and in fact had one after writing today, hence the choice of the above poem.

Oh yeah, and I also love the occasional cigar... though I like the vanilla ones best.

Vanilla, huh? I used to eat the chocolate ones when I was a child.

LOL... There is a brand that my brother used to get. They were oh so tasty! Last January he was going to give them up altogether and gave a case to my oldest brother while down on the Baja. He changed his mind and started up again and found out they quit making them he was so pissed. Well, when the oldest came home and we met at his grandsons' b-day party he brought them out and we sat around the fire pit reminiscing and smokin' vanilla cigars. Good times.

The cover of Digging Deeper is finally done. Hopefully it will pass muster with Epic Press. I await info as to when the book will actually be available; several weeks at least, I imagine. This is what the book's description should look like on amazon.com, etc.:

Digging Deeper begins where the author’s psychedelic memoir, I Think, Therefore Who Am I? ended. Having learned how to act appropriately, he sardonically observes himself with an existential eye as he reenters a world he once took for granted. This leads, in discrete, short chapters, to the compromises implicit in partnership and marriage and his struggle to lead a creative life in the seventies.

Look 4word, P! (that's "text" yo) for the youngsters like bokai

It's really a great read. I enjoyed it immensely. I'm looking forward to re-reading it when it comes out. Way to go, Peter!

Thank you, Gene. You're the man, as we used to say back in the day. Henri's slang, on the other hand ... just when I learned to decode Ms. La Pine, with her LOL&FOTF (laugh out loud and fall on the floor), I've got to deal with 4word and bokai. Act your age, Henri!

Don' forget ROTFL - rolling on the floor laughing.

Though now that I think on it, Henri and Tani are the same age! A further example of Ms. La Pine's concise style of communication, from another thread:

W&P, AK and C&P had better be on this damn list or I am taking my toys and going home.

I am quite a few years older than our beloved leader, Mr Author Man. (though I have never acted my age... there I said it! ;p) ROFLMFAO! (rolling on floor laughing my f'ing ass off!)

War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment had better be on this damn list or I am taking my toys and going home. (better?)

And what the hell is bokai?

Gene, I am still so very jealous.

Clarabel... couldn't have been that bad that you felt it necessary to delete, hun.

Now that I have addressed all of your concerns with my age, Mr Author Man... WFH! Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait... damnit, can't wait! (okay, I feel a little woozy)

(eta: fricken touchstones and html codes)

bokai is one of the original salonistas back from Ulysses' days yonder, and a friend.

Don't ask me to explain bohica.

Haha... know that one. ;-)

I'm also waiting for Piero's next book, Tani. I just didn't want to appear too eager.

Is Digging Deeper a metafictional autobiographical-type novel, would you say?

I'm waiting for Digging Deeper as well.

Upon reading that question, Brent, my first reaction was: WTF? Then I Googled the term and found this:

Metafiction is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. Metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.

Which I had to think about ...

And after a while it occurred to me that if you change the words fiction and metafiction in that definition to nonfiction and metanonfiction, it would in fact define Digging Deeper as well as I Think, Therefore Who Am I?

Here's an example of a device I employ, for instance, that I laid on Gene just yesterday ... Wait a minit, I have to go retrieve it from his profile ...

Here it is:

I too am a big fan of Celine. I stole a few of his stylistic devices for my own writing, like when he leaves the story and says directly to the reader something like: What was I to do? I had no choice but to eat his shit. Or at least I think I stole it. Maybe it's my own thing.

Metanonfiction! That's it! You best wikipedia that term, Piero, before somebody else takes credit for it.

Wot?!? Mr Author Man... You know what WFH means? Or did that one slip by you?

>304 absurdeist:. You're right, Henri. I should copyright the term, get a patent on it, whatever. I'm still kicking myself for not copyrighting the concept of half-birthdays. That was mine, you know. I came upon it in the seventies, and now everyone and his dog know about it and bandy it about.

>305 highdesertlady:. WTF, HDL? When did I say WFH?

You didn't, I did... and I was surprised that you did not ask me what I was sayin'...

WFH! Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait... damnit, can't wait! (Woo F'in Hoo)

Woo F'in Hoo? Is that what WFH stands for? And what does that mean?

Woo F'in Hoo? Is that what WFH stands for?

LOL... at my house, anyway. ;-)

Hate to interrupt your LOLing, HDL, but the question must be asked: What does Woo F'in Hoo mean? And thank you, clara, for setting the stage. Maybe between the two of us we can pin this thing down.

Well, lets see... As an excitable kinda gal, I say Woo Hoo a lot in RL (not here because that is the Naughty Hottie's phrase) And for emphasis it's Woo F'in Hoo!

So very nice in Seattle. Sun. Drizzle. Sparkles. Rain. Mist. Younameit. Wehadit today. Eating some delicious pumpkin ice cream from a little roadside dairy. Had a cigarette in honor of our smokers. Some great wine places. I could actually live here. There's not much around here that isn't pleasing to the eye. The city planners had something on the ball, that's for sure. The trees are splendidious. Trees. What more is there to say?

Glad you are enjoying our region, dear Porius. The Pacific Northwest is heaven to me. ;-)

Looks like I get to deal with snow in the passes Monday morning. Blech. I hate putting on chains! They're talking a foot at 4,000' which is the elevation for most of the passes. We're going to buy new rims for the snow tires, from a guy in the valley on the way to my brother's, but can't mount them on the car until the 1st of November. We are expecting snow most of next week up here. La Niña has arrived. I normally would not complain this early in the season except for this last trip over the hill for my Dad's doc appt. I Like snow, but I like it best when I can just stay home and look at it. *sigh* Wasn't summer yesterday?

Rochelle Ratner has translated a lot of Paul Colinet. Some of his stuff, maybe even a lot, is silly, but every now and again he hits the spot.

Black Soap

Saturday always means a pail of open oysters and a
gaping plank, over there, in the corner of the wood
where Oger, the staircase-maker, lives.

His wife Octavia washes with the black soap and eats
the raw, chilled comb of a cock killed during the night
by an axe-stroke, on the bakery block.

His drunken son Oscar has a sore throat. He set up a
cutting table in the cabbage patch. He licks the
almanac. It smells bad.

The carpenter has bare fore-arms. He whistles between
his teeth.

He thinks about his brother the peddlar's tired horse.
He dreams of his daughter Odile, dead at fifteen, from
hemorrhaging.

Heaven is pale, its cheek swollen, with waterpockets
under its eyes and a bandage on its calf.

In the evening, a preserved egg is eaten.

Summer

After exhausting itself with white dust on the roads
and bilberries in the wood, great summer, disarrayed
and weak, is pulled in through the roof, through its
wicker hall shaped like a hoop-net. Now, it's
neglected: ant-eggs clog its nose and a sore beard
pushes them up to the slots of its eyes, a beard of
rotting branches that's called autumn.

Paul Colinet

A Belgian surrealist, like his friend Rene Magritte.

Beautiful morning - cool, crisp, perfect for sitting outside with my coffee.

#315 - "He thinks about his brother the peddlar's tired horse." So is this guys brother a tired horse or a peddlar. What tricks do you employ to avoid creating this kind of confusion? Am I just reading too much into it? Does this particular construction add to the poetry?

Peter, I'm afraid I invented the half birthday well before you did. I invented it in 1949 when I first realized that having a birthday in December gypped me out of two full sets of presents in favor of one and occasionally one and a half.

The comment of summer exhaling put me in mind of this wonderful song.

I am left so confused by this morning's poetry and Gene's half birthday comment... What the hell am I missing here?

Jane, I am sorry about your Tigers... But what a high blood pressure kind of game it was, eh?

Gene: So then you know what I mean. If you'd copyrighted it, or whatever--made it your property--guys like me wouldn't be able to claim the half birthday as ours. In my case, I was into astrology and noticed that my brother's birthday was within an hour or two of being exactly half a year apart from mine (we are in fact that different). So his birthday is my half birthday.

Went to town to pick up the Sunday Times, the leaves so gorgeous I almost screamed.

In other news: look out for a thread switch tomorrow, with a clever name change as well.

Okay, thank you for clearing my Sunday morning head, Wilson. Gene's post makes sense now.

Still not so sure about Slick's poem.

Slick himself has that aspect of a bend in the road that strikes you one way or another, depending upon who you are.

They're poems you've got to take a few steps back and squint at.

Oh, that's why! I didn't have my 'squint' on... *walks away mumbling*

"getting" poetry,
I think,
involves as much intuition
as erudition,
whatever the hell that means

Well, I feel much better now... *walks away mumbling*

And so it begins at 1pm pdt in La Pine on this 24th day of October... La Niña has arrived.

A storm here in the PNW. But vera pleasant to not squint at the red maples sprinkled around these lovely little hamlets. The landscaping is done with taste everywhen. Great wine selections at the various shoppes and vintners, etc. Lots of good breweries too. Octoberfest beers. Cheeses. And phabulous Asian eateries. Soups laden with dumplings, noodles, wedgetaybles. Hangover soups, cold day soups, Soupy Sales. Good Mexican pfood too. Wavosrancheros. Minudo.
Outdoorsy and low-browish. Faintly hippie-ish, not in the way Asheville, NC is, actually somewhat 1950-ish. Or Lousville-ish. a not too hippie-ish 1960 - early 70's vintage. Haven't seen an overplus of glamour, or stylishness. Pretty horsy here in Redmond. Just an observation or two from a rust-belter.

Ah, yes, the noodles, and the noodle houses. I should've mentioned that in my April correspondance from Seatlle: called pho but pronounced "pha." But why no mention of coffee, Peter? Are you truly out there in the PNW or just writing from Detroit and pulling all our legs?

On the "Digging Deeper" front: the cover has been accepted and the price set, at $15.99.

Yay! WFH!!!! Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait! Damnit, can't wait! (okay, woozy again)

*slogs away in the snow muttering about getting too excited*

Really here for a few daze before flying down to SD. Coffee, yes , there's coffee everywhere. But I get more excited about wines and beer than I do about the bean. Got my 88 yr. old mother here to stay with my sister for the winter and then some.

Awww... hope she has a healthy and pleasant stay with your sis.

She seems to like it here which is a relief.

Possibly a repeat, I really just don't know?

THE SOUND OF TREES
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

from MOUNTAIN INTERVAL (1916)
Robert Frost

No worries in my book, P... I love it when you post Frost. ;-)

Happy to please one with such discerning taste.

Awww, shucks...Porius. Safe travels south!

I am heading over the snowy hills tomorrow am and back Tuesday afternoon. (Were that they were only hills) :-/

Let's face it: we appear to be shedding participants. Perhaps as the weather turns cooler and people hunker down in front of their machines more often we'll expand again. In the meantime the smaller (dare we say leaner, meaner) crew will carry on, posting whatever comes to mind, riffing off one another and our psyches, making virtual music as we move on to ...

http://www.librarything.com/topic/101135