"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

Listen - by W S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

a 2004 Keats poem

“Keats”
by Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain
of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room
on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini
Fountain “filling him like flowers,”
he held his breath like a coin, looked out
into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.
He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s
weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”
and there he was, secretly, for the rest
of his improvidently short life: up to his neck
in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries
of street vendors, perfect
and affectionate as his soul.
For days the snow and statuary sang him so far
beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless
and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow
of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”
may enter you.

From Light’s Ladder
University of Washington Press, 2004

from a friend

“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”

- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

"Dream Song 34" by John Berryman

My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.
He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn't feel the best, Sister,—felt less
and more about less than us . . . ?

Now—tell me, my love, if you recall
the dove light after dawn at the island and all—
here is the story, Jack:
he verbed for forty years, very enough,
& shot & buckt—and, baby, there was of
schist but small there (some).

Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back—
in the taxi too, sick—
silent—it's so I broke down here, in his mind
whose sire as mine one same way—I refuse,
hoping the guy go home.

book excerpt

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.

You never baked bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.

Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would that look like? And how would that feel?

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.

--from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

"The Life That I Have"

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours

- Leo Marks, 1945

This poem was used for code purposes in WWII and also read at Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010.

some Nash

Laments for A Dying Language

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We are in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness provides its own excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage

1962. Ogden Nash

Stephen King speech

Of all people, right?

But I thought his remarks at his acceptance for the National Book Award were very thought-provoking and good.

Read 'em here, if you like.

Follow feministhulk

Feminist Hulk - a Twitter feed of the Incredible Hulk's thoughts about patriarchy and contemporary feminism. :)

"unfriend"

Like many language people, feel squicky about Facebook-minted words. But "unfriend," I found out today while poking around the Oxford English Dictionary, is quite an old word after all. And it seems to have meant mostly the same thing!

"I hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us."

- Thomas Fuller, The Appeal of Injured Innocence, 1659

Palahniuk meets Austen

This has been going around the internet this past week, and I thought I'd immortalize it here:

Jane Austen's Fight Club (Link to YouTube)

the power of parentheses

One Art


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

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

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

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

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

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


by Elizabeth Bishop

"The Summer Day"

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?



from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

from Poetry 180, one of my favorite websites

"The Piano Tuner's Wife"

The Piano Tuner’s Wife
By Karl Shapiro

That note comes clear, like water running clear,
Then the next higher note, and up and up
And more and more, with now and then a chord,
The highest notes like tapping a tile with a hammer,
Now and again an arpeggio, a theme
As if the keyboard spoke to the one key,
Saying, No interval is exactly true,
And the note whines slightly and then truly sings.

She sits on the sofa reading a book she has brought,
A ray of sunlight on her white hair.
She is here because he is blind. She drives.
It is almost a platitude to say
That she leads him from piano to piano.
And this continues for about an hour,
Building bridges from both sides of the void,
Coasting the chasms of the harmonies.

And in conclusion,
When there is no more audible dissent,
He plays his comprehensive keyboard song,
The loud proud paradigm,
The one work of art without content.

joint compound

This stuff is so helpful for fixing up the old plaster walls of our house before painting.

It goes on like butter and smooths out to look very nice.

baby tomatoes

After today's sudden soaking rain.

Poem: An Entomologist's Last Love Letter

An Entomologist's Last Love Letter


dear samantha
i’m sorry
we have to get a divorce
i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:
it’s not you
it sure as hell isn’t me
it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do
i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species

i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night
i know you would never DO anything, you never do but..
i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night

did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication.

after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together
like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away

this is not true

after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down
while he still has control over his motor functions
he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift
she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes
spooning every morsel into her mouth
she wastes nothing
even the exoskeleton goes
she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them
now that.. is selflessness

i could never do that for you

so i have a new plan
i’m gonna leave you now
i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices
i hope you do the same
i will jay walk at every opportunity
i will steal things i could easily afford
i will be rude to strangers
i hope you do the same
i hope reincarnation is real
i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures
i hope we are reborn as flies
so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.


by Jared Singer



found via You Are Among Friends

Mary Karr poem

"A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son"

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
nor single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six-foot, three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go buzz,
or an Afro-ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell--
creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

-Mary Karr, from Sinners Welcome

originally published in the New Yorker 2-2-2004 issue, which I is where I first read it and still remember

E-vites, taken up a notch

Everyone likes the functionality and low cost of e-vites -- and I have to admit it's very nice to have a list that updates in real time with people's RSVPs. But most websites that offer e-vites are pretty tacky and loud and ad-driven, so I never thought I'd use one for a function I cared about.

Until Paperless Post.

As you can see from this sample wedding invitation, the quality of experience on these is far above the rest -- and such pretty designs, too. Although they're still in beta, I've used them for birthdays, Mother's Day, all sorts of things I never imagined using an e-card for, with great success. I wouldn't go so far as to use them for weddings, graduations, or baby announcements, the real "milestone" events... but for parties, holidays, etc.? I think I'm sold. And even if you run through your free initial set of "stamps" (the currency at this site), refills are very affordable.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.

Moving documentary

A Walk to Beautiful -- a PBS one-hour documentary about women in rural Ethiopia overcoming childbirth injury. Very sad but very uplifting as well, and a great reminder about something too easily overlooked.

Book inventory website

A wonderful thing: LibraryThing!

Today I organized our 11 bookcases. Because they are spread throughout the house, and because they were mostly full of chaotic juxtapositions, it took pretty much all day -- about seven hours not including the break for lunch. But things are now finally organized into genres for the first time since... well... ever, really.

Our categories are:

Upstairs hall

• Poetry
• Plays
• Memoir

Office

• Books about Writing
• Books about Teaching
• Crafts & How To
• Special Topics (for me this is T. S. Eliot, John Keats, and Virginia Woolf, for him this is Kansas and geography books)
• Maps

Downstairs built-ins:

• History
• American Lit
• British Lit
• World Lit
• Dictionaries & Reference
• Language books
• Literary Theory / Philosophy / Psychology
• Travel Guides / Travel Writing
• Atlases
• Music books
• Interesting Nonfiction that does not go into another category

Living room:

• Piano music
• Oversize Books (mostly history)
• Architecture & renovation books
• Home & garden maintenance books

Kitchen

• Cookbooks
• Telephone books
• Recipe notebooks

Upstairs guest room #1

• Humor

Upstairs guest room #2

• Children's/YA
• Animal books
• Fluff fiction (good enough to keep, not good enough to go in any of the "Lit" sections)
• Valuable/Rare Books
• History sets + additional History

Landing:

• Religion / Theology
• Puzzles / Games

Our room:

• What we're currently reading
• What we are looking forward to reading
• What we just finished reading
• Personal favorites

They're all organized by which part of the house we think we'll use them most in. My next goal is to have them all loaded onto my page at LibraryThing at some point soon.

A nice contemporary poem

"The Drywallers Listen to Sinatra While They Work"

by Jack Ridl


This morning, my mother, here
for the holidays, is washing
the breakfast dishes, when Al, wiry,
coated with drywall dust, takes
her hand and says, “I bet you loved
Sinatra. Dance?” The acrid smell
of plaster floats through the room.
Frank is singing, All or Nothing
at All, and Al leads my mother
under the spinning ballroom lights
across the new sub-floor. He
is smiling. She is looking over
his shoulder. The other guys
turn off their sanders. Al
and my mother move through
the dust, two kids back
together after the war. Sinatra
holds his last note. “It’s been
seven years since I danced,”
my mother says. “Then
it was in the kitchen, too.”
Al smiles again, says,
“C’mon then, Sweetheart!”
biting off his words like the ends
of the good cigars he carries
in his pocket. Sinatra’s singing
My Funny Valentine, and
my mother lays her hand in Al’s.
They dance again, she looking
away when she catches my eye,
Al leading her back
across the layers of dust.

© Jack R. Ridl 2001


Originally found at his blog, here.

An interesting blog

Amy Karol's blog is called Angry Chicken -- cooking, crafts, sewing, etsy stuff, patterns, DIY -- I like it.

inspiration, from Four Quartets

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

from Burnt Norton, by T. S. Eliot