Grandma and Grandson

Good News and Bad News

So. There's good news and bad news. The good news is that it's good to be back home again, after three weeks in the Northwest visiting my son and his beautiful wife, and their baby! I learned how to say 'good morning' in Welsh (bor da!), spent some part of every day rocking the baby, or singing (he sings a high soprano--I think he can hit high C!), or blowing spit bubbles together. My son is a great dad, my daughter-in-law is a fantastic mom. We are looking forward to next week, when the baby can begin eating VEGETABLES. His mom bought a food processor so she can mash up vegetables from the family dinner: brussel sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower! Yum! I wish I could be there to witness the first bite. Speaking of things yummy, we went out for pizza a couple of times and had roasted vegetables on it--red pepper, eggplant, and garlic buds. It was soooo good! We attended a little Welsh church where much of the singing (a lot of singing!) is done in Welsh, and they are learning the language, too. Little by little. Soon they'll be able to speak in a language we can't understand, like two of my other sons and their wives, who speak Japanese and Tagalog. And, just before we left, the cat began to get friendlier.

Now for the bad news. Last week I (and a lot of other people) were forced to make the big SWITCH to *New* Blogger. Since then, most of my old commenters who had names before have now become ANONYMOUS, and I have not been able to leave comments on many of your sites. It says 'incorrect password.' Anyway, until I can get the bugs worked out, know that I am trying! I love the new Poetry THursday place, and have nothing but applause for the girls!

Second bad news: somebody stole my credit card number and used it (in LOUISIANA!) so I've had a lot of crappy stuff to deal with. The good news here is that my account was not rich enough to accomodate all their charges, and the only things that went through were a couple of gas station fill-ups. Still. Why can't people just be nice, and honest? Then my husband discovered his credit card had expired the day before he arrived.... so our pockets were pretty shallow all the time we were gone. Empty when we came home. But the dogs are really really happy to see us. Our house has not burned down, and the bird and the goldfish are still alive!

PT: Change

LIVING MEMORY

Adrienne Rich


Open the book of tales you knew by heart,
begin driving the old roads again,
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wordings you remembered.
...

From here on instinct is uncompromised and clear:
the tales come crowding like the Kalevala
longing to burst from the tongue. Under the trees
of the backroad you rumor the dark
with houses, sheds, the long barn
moored like a barge on the hillside.
Chapter and verse. A mailbox. A dooryard.
A drink of springwater from the kitchen tap.
An old bed, old wallpaper. Falling to sleep like a child
in the heart of the story.

Reopen the book ...

I have watched
films from a Pathe camera, a picnic
in sepia. I have seen my mother
tossing an acorn into the air;
my grandfather, alone in the heart of his family;
my father, young, dark, theatrical;
myself, a six-month child.
Watching the dead we see them living
their moments, they were at play, nobody thought
they would be watched so...

Such details get bunched, packed, stored
in these cellar-holes of memory
so little is needed
to call on the power, though you can't name its name:
It has its ways of coming back:
a truck going into gear on the crown of the road
the white-throat sparrow's notes
the moon in her fullness standing
right over the concrete steps the way
she stood the night they landed there.
From here
nothing has changed, and everything.

The scratched and treasured photograph Richard showed me
taken in '29, the year I was born:
it's the same road I saw
strewn with the Perseids one August night,
looking older, steeper than now
and rougher, yet I knew it. Time's
power, the only just power--would you
give it away?

(These are excerpts from a much longer poem. Of "Living Memory," Rich writes: "I hope that the poem speaks for itself." It speaks to me, of change--how in photographs, in memory, "nothing has changed, and everything." The whole poem is too long to post--look it up!)
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Super Bowl Picks

Today's the day! Who's your pick? I don't really care. Today is good for the chips and dips, for the crackers and cheese, for the clam chowder, as far as I am concerned. For the million dollar commercials. I would rather watch the commercials than the football, truth be told. Superbowl Sunday has become a national holiday somewhat akin to, say, the 4th of July, or Labor Day. Me, I'm looking forward to the SNACKS, like my grandson! So, pass the chips, please....

(As if I am not fat enough already.)

PT: The Poetry of Numbers

THE TEN THOUSAND NAMES OF GOD

First, clear a workspace, make room. Maybe
before you have finished, you will have broken
the code. Have a seat. Pay attention.

Look out the window before you begin to count.
Take notes: the sky is liquid with falling water.
Find pathways on the glass. Begin.

100,000 light years illuminate the diameter
of the Milky Way. 1,000,000 kilometers equals
the diameter of the sun. Therefore:

in a universe full of personable gods,
or brutal gods, vengeful or vain and hungry gods,
only in our dreams can we imagine the 10,000 names

of just this 1 god. It has no bearing on the universe.
There are no rational or real numbers, maybe
there are more names than grains of sand--and every name

is precious. Write: YHWH. Write: El Shaddai
and Shiva, Ruach haQudesh (The Holy Spirit), and Brahma.
Allah alone has 999 names. There is no frozen spot

of light that remains anonymous. Try Abhir the Almighty.
Try Kadosh the Holy One, Shaphat the Judge. The list
grows long, and reads like a book of arcane Jewish poets,

a bounded set of geometric points that can be enclosed
within a box. When the sky clears we find that Pluto
is now called 134340--in a projectile motion of falling bodies

where t=Time and a=Acceleration to gravity. Maybe
God's 10,000 names are really a number, a googleplex of
numbers. Note: this is reputed to be the largest number

with a name, being a 1 followed by a google of 0's,
in a deleted neighborhood encountered in a study of limits.
Is the thunder an interval? Is the rain a set union?
Does each drop have a name?



(Okay, what am I saying here? I have no idea. This is all bulls**t, and I have NO mathematical understanding whatsoever....)
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PT: Why I Love Poetry

You know, the number of people who love poetry is about the same as the number of people who love to wear Davy Crockett hats. So we are a rare and wonderful people!
I think I was, maybe 9 or 10 when I discovered poetry let you say things you could say no other way, and when I was 15 or so, I found that poetry offered a way of understanding things I never understood before. Poetry sparked a new way of feeling, of insights and images I had never imagined: that someone could write The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer moved me to tears.

Edna St Vincent was my first love. Dylan Thomas was my second. After that there were suddenly too many to count, like stars on a good night, after the first one or two.

Mary Oliver writes of praying in words I think apply to poetry as well:

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but a doorway

into thanks, and a small silence in which
another voice may speak.

Like Abbe Joseph says in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, stretching his hands toward heaven, his fingers like ten lamps of fire, "If you will, you can become all flame." And we all understand what that is like, don't we? And we've all come through the doorway into thanks, and most of us have found the silence in which another voice may speak....

And if this isn't clear enough to be useful to you, stick around. Hopefully one day it will be, and you can become "all flame."

Just pay attention.

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Gone Fishin'

I will be away for the next three weeks. We are flying up to the great Northwest tomorrow, and look who we will be visiting! You're right! It's Baby Rhys, who is already five months old. But, of course, I will be checking all you guys out on my son's computer...so, don't y'all forget me when I'm gone! (This sounds like the lyrics from some old 1930's Blues/Torch song).

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PT: They Never Told Me Not To Go There

They never told me not to go there,
and there is a certain holiness in repetition.
I am not innocent:

I know where the body's buried
and what goes down at every streetcorner.
What comes up is always waiting there

pinched and brown as a scroll
of inkstained goatskins, a chant unrolled
upon a stick--the poetry of innocents

awaiting judgement. The left hand
never knows the right hand's doings.
I recall the phrases written there.

The priest intones a litany,
a sort of requiem: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison,
Kyrie eleison--filaments of innocence--

the price of repetition, and of waiting
without conscience. But there's a price to pay.
They never told me not to go there,
I am not innocent.


(picture: Guillermo Gomez Requiem, GaleriaDante, Mexico)
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@RTS Unlimited, Inc 2004

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Sunday Scribblings-- WINGS

When I was a little kid I thought I could fly. I'd tie a doll blanket around my shoulders like Mary Marvel (remember her?) and climb to the top of my backyard swingset and jump off. I'd measure with a stick to see how far I got. Each time it was a little bit farther. I knew that one day, if I practiced long enough and wished hard enough, I'd jump off and my feet would never touch the ground. Years later, I wrote in a poem:

Once,
as a child I tried to fly
upward from the valley floor
arms outstretched, a thousand
tiny filiforms of wings
flew about my sun-haloed hair.
I didn't know then
words
would be my wings.


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Quote of the Day

"Behind us lie
The thousand and the thousand and the thousand years
Vexed and terrible. And still we use
The cures which never cure.

O God, the fabulous wings unused,
Folded in the heart."


"Strange how we trust the powers that ruin
And not the powers that bless." *






*Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners

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PT: Nip and Tuck

ON MURDERING HER HUSBAND IN FRONT OF HIS MISTRESS

Love, she murmurs
under her breakable manners
to the special jockstrap,
counting wins and losses,
finding new delicacies
under each heavy-handed syllable.
She knows the score:
it's nip and tuck
before the final round
where, unmannerly,
she pulls the trigger,
smokes a screaming bullet
disguised
as a breadloaf
into his gut,
a second into his groin.
The afternoon
churns red and white
as Robintino's checkered tablecloth
and the red pasta on white china.
His wineglass tips,
spills onto his trim
and familiar white vest.
It is a long joke
with no ending but
a ruined vest.

(That's about enuf to piss off the good humor man! Understand, she never intended to kill him, just wanted to put a scare into him, which she did. She knows he has more moves than a bowl of jello--when he saw her there, face red as a tomato, you could've knocked him over with a feather he was so surprised. Too bad. He was on a roll, you might say, and he was stumped for about a second when she started pitching bread loaves at him--thought she was crazy as a loon--but then again, she might've come at him with the bread knife! He knew she'd caught him between a rock and a hard place, but hell, life's never all fun and games. Too bad about the vest though. It was almost new.) Thanks, Dana!
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,,,A Few of My Favorite ThIngs....

PT: A Gumball Poem

This is a true Gumball Poem, written by Mary Fisher, who works in a used bookstore called the Marginalian in Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't know Mary, or the Marginalian bookstore, but we Slick City folks have to stick together!


Stellar
for Q


So much about breathing and the body.
Soon the stars will come and we will know them
as well as we know each other.

The water reads like a drawerful of maps.
You've never seen the Pacific Ocean.
I've never seen millions of bats fly out at once.

Danger is a hymn I have forgotten how to sing.
I choose the wonder of your subtle damage,
the tiny bites. The songs that never repeat,

and in their newness become ancient.
Opus. Opera. The first level of uncountable infinity.
I am not confused. I am not vague. Those strange

words rise out of my heart like white owls
and need not be held in my mouth.
I am counting stars on your breath.


(I wish I had written this.)
Photo Credit: Corey Ford Gallery, Stellar Nursery

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Good Grief; Let the Good Times Roll!

Jacob (and Snoopy) doing his Happy Dance! And, the Grande Finale: TA-DA!





Doctor Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell: "Statistically, the probablilty of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places... Everyone is one in three billion* at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surface of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing!"

* (World population increased from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion by 1999. As of five minutes ago, the estimated population of the world: 6,616,052, 965. And heaven knows, I've done my share. Tho' I suppose the 3 billion Dr. Thomas referred to was sperm.)
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The Audacity of Hope

One of the gifts I received this Christmas was a book: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. In it he speaks of a new kind of politics, "that will reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won't be prepackaged," he writes, "it will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we'll need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break."

So. Saddam is history. We survived bad spinach and mad cows, Borat, and Brittany. We saw the resignation of Rummy. We saw the Democrats win in both the House and the Senate. This week, the last of 2006, we saw the 3,000th soldier die in Iraq. Obama writes: "I am not naive enough to believe that one episode in the wake of catastrophe can erase decades of mistrust. But it's a start."

Tonight, lets all do our various little happy dances for 2007, for the audacity to hope that 2007 will be better than 2006. I am full. Let me stay like this forever, lullabyed by family, by friends, by an unrolling of irrevocable love and intoxicant life. I hold it as carefully as mortal fingers will allow. Thanks.

Peace. OM.

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LOOK ALIKES?

January, what'd'you think?

Words of Wisdom

PT: Creepy Crawl The Whisky

They kept on playing
I asked them to stop
he said
but they kept on playing
the gig inside the black hole
of my eyeball
this eye here

Okay China White be warned
I say a full arm's length away
full of love and grief
before we're all blasted
away with your unholy vision

where the bone archangel Samhain
and his pig initiates
in a spray of blood
square across the jaw
crucify Christ again
on the wings of a U.S. bomber
(an imperfect cross
but adequate
to the four corners of the earth
and climbing above the stillborn bodies
of seven unnamed Jewish babies
rotting in the sun)

but everyone dies
my son arm in arm
I say even the aborted suicide
he won't let himself be talked to
there ain't no fuckin freedom here
he shrieks insisting on
the final blessing of L'Artiste

finding himself alone in the fire
he keeps playing
keeps playing with the red stub
of his tail
and all the rats of hell
blink their garnet eyes while
he plays they sing
life stinks


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Mohawk

For Pam! ...

Merry Christmas

FIRST, THERE WAS A BREAKING OF WATERS

Once wast Thou born of Mary's womb;
And now, newborn from out the Tomb,
O Christ, Thou bidd'st us rise with Thee
From death to immortality.

--Liber Usualis
Rex Sempiterne Caelitum


First, there was a breaking of waters,
like every other birth,
and pain, before the first cry.

There was a star, perhaps a supernova
spilling fluorescent gases into the void,
perhaps a confluence of planets -- whatever...

whatever, His first words may have been Egyptian,
but the Jewish schoolboys, He among them,
circled at the Rabbi's feet, learned Torah,

learned sacrifice, and love, and loss.
He drew us in by blood, by suffering;
every one of us balancing in air, all newly-blossomed, and Reborn.

Hallelujah.


WISHING YOU WARMTH IN YOUR HEART, PEACE IN YOUR HOME, AND EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR LIFE.

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HOLY NIGHT

Nothing travels like light does--
no earthly stuff can be
so fine and fast.

Imagine this:
millenniums past, and
no Copernicus
nor Einstein yet
to reflect what light is--

(Said Einstein, "Give your friend a flashlight,
turn it on, watch him run and measure it,"
far down amoung so many other lights).

What were the questions asked
that night
by shepherds (a mere instant ago
as fluid time is measured
at the velocity of light) in Judean fields,
figures shaken out of sleep by a stream of Joy
diffused
in particles and waves of white and gold and rose
starlight bending itself at last in air
above some dazzled sheep and goats,
illuminating rocks, and hoofprints among the brush, and ragged tents.

Now "clearsighted" as Cezanne,
who once told his friend Emile Bernard the secret
of truly seeing is "to get
to the very heart of what is before you," the shepherds
follow it to the crib where it illuminates
this God-child.

Now this:
we get "to the very heart"
of what is before us, and we're "clearsighted" as Cezanne,
as those shepherds! Imagine:
the Baby's newborn cry resounds across the universe
lit with a hundred billions of fires,
bridging for us this immense gulf between
His radiance

and everlasting dark.


Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and J.M. Apellaniz (IAA, Spain)

CLICK IT!

~Christmas Past~

GLORIA

Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy...


This beautiful Christmas angel has graced the top of our tree every year since 1975, when our second-grade son brought her home from school. Note the lovely golden ringlets, the gold belt, the lace-and-roses hem of her skirt, her shining golden wings, and her jeweled crown! (Then, if you can, notice her blue lips and her vampire teeth. This is part of what makes her so special.) Only a second-grade boy....

...on earth peace, good will to men!

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PT: At The Corner of Guatemala & Argentina

Directional Artifacts


South, at Tenochitlan is blue
As water, indigo or azure as chalchihuites
Thrown into the temple mortar,
Is the season of rain, and life,
And wet sky.

East is the red son of the flowery wars,
The moon-sister of Huitzilopochtli, slain
And dismembered on the hill of Coatepec,
And her thin, red-nailed hands.

North is black as the volcanic disks
Of his stone eyes, black as the abyss
Of the executioner's block.

The west is white as the sickness
Of her death, white as the bones
Of her children, fishbones,
The bones of frogs and the skulls
Of feathered serpents.

Their colors shine with an
Extraordinary luster,
The holiness of direction
Excavated two meters below
Street level at the corner of Guatemala
And Argentina.


(This is an old one, from The Book of Fours)
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'TIS THE SEASON...

... to be jolly!

Around the Christmas Tree ...

For January: What to do when "no" doesn't work ....


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The Antikythera Mechanism

Did you see this in yesterday's newspaper? What is it? Turns out, after X-rays and much speculation, that this is a mechanical computer of "an accuracy thought to be impossible in 80 B.C." when the Greek ship it was on sank. It's about the size of a large book, and its "sophisticated technology" was thought not to exist for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears make it a portable orrery of the sky.

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It's Beginning to Look Alot Like Christmas!

We woke up this week to a yard full of snow! And it's soooo c-o-l-d! Yesterday morning the temperature was 4 degrees! By afternoon it had warmed up to 25. Could be worse, I know. Our roads are clear, and it's really pretty. Last night the kids went sledding down at the hill, then came over to decorate our tree, and we had pizza for dinner. The boys sang "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" while they worked, something they both must have learned in their preschool classes. It was fun. Hope you are all getting into the holiday spirit!
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PT : INVITATION AND REPLY

"Come with me, Love, and I will show you where
the deadly nightshade blooms, and bittersweet
grows wild and red, and bears such poison meat
as Adam ate. Come eat, Love, if you dare,
and say goodbye to life, my Love. Godspeed!
The spider spins a shroud of webs and roots
of grass and columbine, and tender shoots,
all brittle lace, finespun and filigreed!"

"The grave's a boggy place, my Love, and narrow
is the bed. The night is long and safe,
my Love, the earth is soft, and will not chafe.
I'll come and smile and thank you well tomorrow:
I'll come and bid adieu, but I'll not stay!
I've other fires to spark and tend today!"

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Thanks to Brianna, in Mrs. Gursky's First Grade Class.

WHAT ARE YOU THANKFUL FOR?

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UPDATE

I LOVE THIS BABY!

Noodles & The Unholy Ghost

For Dana: See, I told you so. This is a real snapshot, nothing retouched. I didn't see anything in the camera--it was not until the film was developed that the "ghost" showed up. But Noodles obviously sees something. Notice the potato-like nose thingy protruding in both photos!

WHAT IS THAT?

In the botton photo it looks sort of like a cartoon of Bill Clinton.