Poetry
So it being national poetry month, I realized that I needed some more poetry. So I went to chapters and optimistically and trustingly bought a book entitled "good poems" with my credit card (my poor, maxed out credit card.... but thats another story). Afterwards, I felt a little less optomistic... I mean who calls a book "good poems" and couldn't you think of a better, more descriptive word than good?
However, I've been reading it, and so far I have found a few that I do in fact like. So I thought I would post them.
For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old
By Robert Bly
Night and day arrive and day after day goes by,
and what is old remains old, and what is young remains
young and grows old,
and the lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the
weathered two-by-fours lose their darkness,
but the old tree goes on, the barn stands without help so
many years,
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.
The horse swings around on one leg, steps, and turns,
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost, its wings whelping
and whalloping,
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and
the dark.
And slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage, sits
down at table.
So I am proud only of those days that we pass in undivided
tenderness,
when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with
messages to the world...
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured;
so we pass our time together, calm and delighted.
"The Dumka" by B.H. Fairchild
His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak's piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense
and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about
the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the homecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,
the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.
Woolworth's
by Mark Irwin
Everything stands wondrously multicolored
and at attention in the always Christmas air.
What scent lingers unrecognizably
between that of popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,
malted milkballs, and parakeets? Maybe you came here
in winter to buy your daughter a hamster
and were detained by the bin
of Multicolored Thongs, four pair
for a dollar. Maybe you came here to buy
soem envelopes, the light blue par avion ones
with airplanes, but caught yourself, lost,
daydreaming, saying it's too late over the glassy
diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here
to buy a lampshade, the fake crimped
kind, and suddenly you remember
your grandmother, dead
twenty years, floating through the old
house like a curtain. Maybe you're retired,
on Social Security, and came here for the Roast
Turkey Dinner, or the Liver and Onions,
or just to stare into a black circle
of coffee and to get warm. Or maybe
the big church down the street is closed
now during the day, and you're homeless and poor,
or you're rich, or it doesn't matter what you are
with a little loose change jangling in your pocket,
begging to be spent, because you wandered in
and somewhere between the bin of animal chrackers
and the little zoo in the back of the store
you lost something, and because you came here
not to forget, but to remember to live.
Also: the saga of my broken house, no doubt built by high schoolers paid in beer (but only while on the job) continues....
First it was the handles of the wadrobe and drawers that clearly had not been nailed, glued or really anythinged (okay, maybe 'placed') into their holes, because they came right out in your hands.... secondly, it was the coathook that fell off the wall.... but lately, its been the kitchen tap.
2 weeks ago, our kitchen tap started to wobble. It was kind of odd, but whatever, that tap has always been weird (it doesn't know the 'just right' version of water temperature and is thus either scalding or cold) so I didn't worry too much.... that is until last week when the facet came off in my hand. I sort of stared at it for a moment. Then I fitted it back on (there's a little cyliner which fits on top of a sticky thing in the tap), and tried to be gentle. However, after a week of this, our tap decided we weren't being gentle enough, and the cylinder broke off entirely, making it impossible to fit back on. There was only one thing to do... so I took the tap downstairs, in peices, and asked the lady at the front desk what I should do about this. She sort of stared at it for a moment. Then she told me to fill out a maintenence form. So I described my problem (including a diagram!) and she wrote URGENT on the bottom. Actually I came home today, and we already had a new tap. But really now.... why not make something fairly sturdy the first time around?
Also, the pit is getting worse.