New Year's Eve Day

I've been struggling to write and revise poems for days, and falling back to procrastination and listening to podcasts about "Breaking Bad"  and  going to the kitchen and baking ( more productive than the podcasts).

And then today my Facebook/Poet friend April Lindner posted this poem by Richard Wilbur:

Year's End by Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.


- Richard Wilbur


What can I write after that?


I'm listening to a tape I recorded off the radio some years ago on New Year's Eve day, from the wonderful radio show "Songs for Aging Children."  Here's one from Neil Young:

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

Old man look at my life
Twenty four and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two

Love lost, such a cost
Give me things that don't get lost
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through

Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true

Lullabies, look in your eyes
Run around the same old town
Doesn't mean that much to me
To mean that much to you

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past
But I'm all alone at last
Rolling home to you

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

and this one from Paul Simon:


Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
of the high shoes of the old friends

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears

Time it was and what a time it was,
A time of innocence, a time of confidences,
Long ago it must be,
I have a photograph,
Preserve your memories,
They’re all that’s left you...

Some Books I Ditched this year

I got this idea from Sarah Sloat's  ( blog: The Rain in My Purse) post about her abandoned books.

I don't even remember all of them...  but in no particular order, here are the ones I do remember:

Dean Koontz   The Darkest Evening of the Year... haven't read any of his books for a while, though I loved the Golden Retriever in Watchers. This book also has a wonderful Golden Retriever, but the rest of the characters... well, after about 100 pages I could tell that the bad guys were just going to get worse and worse.  So I left it.

Gillian Flynn    Dark Places... I read  Gone Girl, and have talked about it in an earlier entry. I tried this one and just couldn't get into it.  I don't like the extreme self-consciousness of the narrator.

Neil Gaiman     Good Omens... I loved The Graveyard Book, but I left this one after about 50 pages. Just didn't grab me.

Hilary Mantel    Wolf Hall...  I was really looking forward to reading this, but I just was not engaged by it; left it after about 50 pages.

Barbara Kingsolver     Flight Behavior...  I loved The Poisonwood Bible  and  Prodigal Summer, and I know I will love this one when I really read it... but just couldn't get into it this year.

Claire Messud    The Woman Upstairs...  tried and gave up.  Didn't like the characterizations.

Jessica Anya Blau    Drinking Closer to Home...  very picaresque... too much so for me.

Paul Harding     Tinkers... heard wonderful things about this book from readers whose opinion I look to, but still couldn't get into it.  Found it slow.

Mary Karr      Lit...  way too much backstory for me.

John Elder Robison     Look Me in the Eye- My Life with Asperger's... really wanted to like this, but didn't. 

I know there were more. Sorry I didn't keep a list.  I'd borrow them from the library --- most of them downloaded onto my ipod --- and return them without much of a second thought.  Too many others to read and love.   Most of them I have already talked about here.

"Does it always snow like this here?"

I'm quoting one of my first year students as he handed in his final exam on December 11. He's from North Carolina.  I told him it is different each year. We've had more snow this December than we've had for a while in the weeks before the solstice.

December 8, snow and ice...December 9, sleet... December 10, snow... December 14, snow... December 17, snow...

 

never a blizzard on these days, fortunately; some of the profs couldn't get to school to administer their exams, but my friend Jim Grinder drove me over and picked me up later. The show must go on!

Then, the sun came out and it was dazzling:

 and Sister Jean took this one of our courtyard:

Snowy Owls in Maryland!

 

photo by Diane McAllister

 It's called an irruption.  This time, it's an irruption of Snowy Owls.  I'm quoting from reporter Tim Prudente in the Capital Gazette:

"A scarcity of tundra food, mainly lemmings, is driving these owls south from the Arctic where they breed, said Jessie Barry, a researcher at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a world leader in the study of birds.

“There’s typically a snowy owl invasion every three to five years,” she said. “This year we’re seeing a particularly intense invasion. There are thousands of birds on the move.”

One unconfirmed sighting, years ago, was of a snowy owl devouring a gull atop a Glen Burnie light post.

These Arctic owls have appeared in ancient cave paintings and Harry Potter films. Recently, a snowy owl was seen sitting atop a farmer’s tractor in Prince Frederick in Calvert County.

A snowy owl was also reported at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore. Others were reported just north of Tilghman Island, at Dulles International Airport, and at Hart-Miller Island State Park in Baltimore County.

And Anne Arundel?

“We’ll see one. I would bet money on it,” said Tyler Bell, a researcher at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater. “The most likely place is Sandy Point. They seem to like beaches.”

In fact, snowy owls prefer open landscapes resembling the tundra, such as beaches and farms. The owls hunt mice, rats and ducks.

On the tundra, they’ve been reported to attack wolves.

So birders are warned to keep their distance while enjoying the sight. Snowy owls are a protected species.

“There’s something magical about seeing a snowy owl,” Barry said. “Just the fact that it’s all white. It feels out of place down here.”

Haas founded Facebook pages, MD Birding and Anne Arundel Birding, to collect sightings from local birders. He took a detour home from work on Wednesday.

He arrived near dusk at North Point State Park in Baltimore County. There, perched on a tree, above a marsh, sat a snowy owl. A young male, it was spotted, preening itself and opening its mouth — offering the appearance of smile.

Perhaps it had just dined on a duck.

“This is just the beginning of the invasion,” Haas said."

Since then, one has arrived in Frederick County, just about ten miles south of my home.  Here's a photo from  Nikki DeBraccio  on the Facebook page MD Birding:

 
I'm very excited about this, and hope to see this owl myself.  I've never seen one in the wild.
Right now, it is snowing heavily, and I will probably have to wait until tomorrow to venture out in search of this bird.

Calm before the Storm

I took this photo from my bedroom window at dusk yesterday; dusk comes at 4:30 these days. Today we are expecting our share of this very bad weather that the west and midwest and south have been suffering: snow, sleet, and freezing rain. Already, at 8:47AM, the sky is grey  and the world seems more quiet.

Advent Calendar

Painting by David Hollington

Here's a wonderful poem by Rowan Williams:



 He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone,
and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the solf shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, word-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
Decwember sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.


Rowan Williams

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

© Rowan Williams

- See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2280/advent-calendar-a-poem-by-dr-rowan-williams#sthash.vqD6zEZB.dpuf

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

© Rowan Williams

- See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2280/advent-calendar-a-poem-by-dr-rowan-williams#sthash.vqD6zEZB.dpuf