Here's a wonderful poem by Amy Shutzer:
Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky
Poetry, Gardening, Birding, and other reflections on life.
Monday, March 18, 2024
Almost the first day of Spring!
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Major Facebook trouble all over the place
I can log on to mine on the phone,but not on the laptop. Very weird and frustrating. But at least I know I'm not alone in this craziness. Facebook users all over the country and probably the world are struggling.
However, some weren't affected at all.
I mind because I can't post the beautiful artwork or photos or reallly anything.
Sigh. A first world problem. It will get fixed eventually.
full moon over the Inn of Cape May"March is the month of expectation,
The things we do not know,
The Persons of Prognostication
Are coming now.
We try to sham becoming firmness,
But pompous joy
Betrays us, as his first betrothal
Betrays a boy."
- Emily Dickinson,
XLVIII
"This hill
crossed with broken pines and maples
lumpy with the burial mounds of
uprooted hemlocks (hurricane
of ’38) out of their
rotting hearts generations rise
trying once more to become
the forest
just beyond them
tall enough to be called trees
in their youth like aspen a bouquet
of young beech is gathered
they still wear last summer’s leaves
the lightest brown almost translucent
how their stubbornness has decorated
the winter woods"
- Grace Paley, A Walk
in March
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak won't arrive for another month or more. I wait for him.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Harshness vanishing
Early Spring
-
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents.
Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.
Michael Cheek Robin
Sunday, February 25, 2024
"February made me shiver..."
"with every paper I'd deliver,
Bad news on the doorstep,
I couldn't take one more step..."
( from "American Pie" by Don McLean)
Truly, being in my middle seventies has turned my mind to nostalgia, or memory, and hopefully not regret. In the month of Valentine's Day, I have been remembering the men I've loved in my rash youth. I connect them all to songs from my youth, which now I can access through itunes, and can download and save and play on my ipod. Those are words that didn't exist in my youth, though the songs certainly did. Here are a few:
Angeles (Enya)
A Summer Song (Chad and Jeremy)
Try to Remember (Harry Belafonte)
You've got your troubles, I've got mine ( the Fortunes)
Yesterday ( Beatles)
I'll follow the sun ( Beatles)
We'll sing in the sunshine (Gale Garnett)
Here comes the sun (Beatles)
Stranger on the shore
Ventura Highway (Simply Red)
Waiting for Snow (Gordon Lightfoot)
Song for a winter's night ( Gordon Lightfoot)
MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)
Come to my bedside my darling ( Eric Anderson)
I'll always be beside you
Fields of Gold ( Eva Cassidy)
I'll be seeing you ( Judy Collins)
Miles ( Richard and Mimi Farina)
One time only ( Tom Paxton)
Greenfields (Brothers Four)
The green leaves of summer ( Brothers Four)
The Promise ( Tracy Chapman)
All that you have is your soul ( Tracy Chapman)
The good times we had ( Peter Paul and Mary)
Friends ( John Denver)
Last month I found out that Frank Reilly has died in Florida. He was 82, and had Alzheimers. Sixty years ago I had an enormous crush on him, though our relationship was strictly platonic. I had an email from him, out of the blue, in April of 2017, and we corresponded until 2020. Then, I imagine , his mind began to go,.
Others have passed away: Jim Wambold, Pat Finnegan, John Whelley, Barney Galvin...
Now occasionally they show up in my dreams.
Friday, February 23, 2024
insights from writers in The New Yorker
Tufted Titmouse artist: Diaga Dimza
our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.
"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."
Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years
are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.
A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
No narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis
A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing
no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis Hilary Kelly
talking about writer Diana Athill
How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions.
“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.”
Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.
"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."
She was still writing when she was in her nineties. I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Only in winter
"There is a privacy about winter which no other
season gives you … Only in winter…can you have longer, quiet stretches when you
can savor belonging to yourself."
- Ruth
Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb without
an Aching Back
The
Freedom of the Moon
by
Robert Frost
I've
tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above
a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you
might try a jewel in your hair.
I've
tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone,
or in one ornament combining
With
one first-water start almost shining.
I put
it shining anywhere I please.
By
walking slowly on some evening later,
I've
pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And
brought it over glossy water, greater,
And
dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The
colour run, all sorts of wonder follow.
The Dream of February
BY JOHN HAINES
I
In the moonlight,
in the heavy snow,
I was hunting along
the sunken road
and heard behind me
the quiet step
and smothered whimper
of something following . . .
Ah, tree of panic
I climbed
to escape the night,
as the furry body glided
beneath, lynx with
steady gaze, and began
the slow ascent.
II
And dark blue foxes
climbed beside me with
famished eyes that
glowed in the shadows;
I stabbed with
a sharpened stick until
one lay across
the path with entrails
spilled, and
the others melted away.
The dead fox
moved again, his jaws
released the
sound of speech.
III
Slowly I toiled
up the rotting stairs
to the cemetery
where my mother lay buried,
to find the open grave
with the coffin
tilted beside it,
and something spilled
from the bottom—
a whiteness that flowed
on the ground
and froze into mist that
enveloped the world.
“The Dream of February.” Copyright © 1993 by John
Haines. Reprinted from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer with the permission
of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Source: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected
Poems (Graywolf Press, 1993)
Monday, February 12, 2024
Gardening in January...and February
In January and in February it begins with a dream. These grey days I look out at my garden and imagine all the activity going on under the leaf litter and cluttered sticks and twigs. Struggling right now with my desire to "leave the leaves" and follow the guidelines for "overwintering habitat" from the Xerces Society, and clean up some of the messiness. My faithful friend Micah, the grounds guy in charge of the courtyard, is pushing for a cleanup. My other faithful friend, Sister Mary Jo, is urging me ( and him) to leave everything until the temperatures reach the fifties .
January got away from me, not because I was particularly busy, but because my mind was occupied with worrying over a situation in our house. With one of the sisters who lives here, and who is having some serious physical and mental problems involving a hoarding disorder. That's about all I can say about that in this semi-public forum.
art by Kat FedoraWinter Trees
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
I Am Learning to Abandon the World
BY LINDA PASTAN
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
Linda Pastan, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” from
PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982).
Copyright © 1982 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted with the permission of the Jean V.
Naggar Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author
Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub
He built himself a house,
his foundations,
his stones,
his walls,
his roof overhead,
his chimney and smoke,
his view from the window.
He made himself a garden,
his fence,
his thyme,
his earthworm,
his evening dew.
He cut out his bit of sky above.
And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.
(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The
Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)
Tomorrow is FatTuesday - Mardi Gras day...
and the next day is Ash Wednesday....And Valentines Day...
Deborah Gregg - Valentines
Sunday, January 7, 2024
A little snow
Here are some lovely snow scenes from artists:
Alexis LavineJanuary by William Carlos Williams
Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear."
“The world is beyond us even as we own it.
It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.
A place only the wind knows, the kingdom
of the moon which breathes a thousand years
at a time. Our soul and the body hold each other
tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb
and his sister walking again to the madhouse.
Hand in hand, tears on their faces, him carrying
her suitcase. Blow after blow on our heart
as we grope through the flux for footholds,
grabbing for things that won’t pull loose.
They fail us time after time and we slide back
without understanding where we are going.
Remembering how the periodic table of the
elements
didn’t fit the evidence for half a century.
Until they understood what isotopes were.”
Sunday, December 31, 2023
New Year's Eve
Vanessa Bowman
Maria Popova
Hindsight is our finest
instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of
reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing
the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend
our lives.
What have I read this year? I've re-read more things than I've read, and re-listened to things that I've listened to many times over.
There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.
As Maria Popova says, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.
So , what do I remember reading in the past 12 months?
Many New Yorker pieces, for sure.
Several pieces from The Atlantic, too.
What else?
Anyway, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm spending it at home. I was invited to a party, but one of the sisters here has RSV, and I don't want to take those viruses with me.
I had hoped to spend the day, a retreat day for the Daughters of Charity, meditating over this past year.
But one of our sisters had to be rushed to the hospital late last night, and the resulting activities here have kept me busy. She is 85 years old, and a very serious hoarder. I won't go into the gory details here, but we've been cleaning out a small area of floor which was two feet deep in paper, shoes, cards, dirty clothes, etc. And that was just a small part. She will be in the hospital for a few days, and we all dread her return here, when she sees that we've been intruding on her private space. But when her private space is strewn with urine and feces, because she was so sick that she couldn't make it to the toilet, we really had to intrude on her private space. But enough on that.
Here's a poem by William Stafford:
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval
you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn
around?
by William Stafford
It's been a terrible year in the world, full of violence and war, the hateful politics of the Republicans, and the threat of Donald Trump.
Here's a wonderful poem from Richard Wilbur: