People Who Take Care -- Nancy Henry

People who take care of people
get paid less than anybody
people who take care of people
are not worth much
except to people who are
sick, old, helpless, and poor
people who take care of people
are not important to most other people
are not respected by many other people
come and go without much fuss
unless they don’t show up
when needed
people who make more money
tell them what to do
never get shit on their hands
never mop vomit or wipe tears
don’t stand in danger
of having plates thrown at them
sharing every cold
observing agonies
they cannot tell at home
people who take care of people
have a secret
that sees them through the double shift
that moves with them from room to room
that keeps them on the floor
sometimes they fill a hollow
no one else can fill
sometimes through the shit
and blood and tears
they go to a beautiful place, somewhere
those clean important people
have never been.
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And just one more.  I am frequently asked why I do what I do, why I don't do something else, don't seek a job that doesn't try to eat the soul out of me on a regular basis.  This poem says it, I think.  Teachers are people who take care, too, after all.  I might print a copy of this off and keep it somewhere I can see it behind my desk.

Why I Have A Crush On You, UPS Man -- Alice N. Persons

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you're like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it's just what I've always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let's hop in your clean brown truck and elope !
ditch your job, I'll ditch mine
let's hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I'll make you my mama's bourbon pecan pie
we'll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I'm serious, UPS Man. Let's do it.
Where do I sign?
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And one more, lest you think all I think about is sex....  This one is from the same collection.  It made me smile.  I, too, seem to see a whole lot of my UPS guy, thanks to my amazon.com addiction.  I don't know that I'm quite to the point of eloping with him, though....

Last Gods - Galway Kinnell

She sits naked on a rock

a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. she opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime—the intimacy
of the geographical. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and talks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and murmurs her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human breast. Now in the lake
two faces, floating, see up
a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.

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I've never seen this one before...found it in a new collection of poetry I bought the other night edited by Garrison Keillor called Good Poems: American Places..  I'm gobsmacked now, though.  This is beautiful.  The things he's mixing here, the mythologies, the power of it.... Once again, both in awe and horribly jealous.  I wish I could get my craft together to be able to capture things this clearly.

An Embarrassment of Riches

The summer season for TV has begun, and all my smart, wonderful, imaginary men are back.  Doctor Who is back, and while I'm still a bit ambiguous about Matt Smith in the role, the show just keeps blowing my mind.  We're only one episode in so far (ep. 2 is tonight), but I'm already befuddled.  It's grand.

In Plain Sight is about to gear up as well.  I've so missed Marshall.  He's a delight, so off-beat, so smart, so strong.  I hope he's a bigger part of the show this year.  I hope they find a way to mop up the atrocious mess they made at the end of last season, too.  The finale made me ill.

The best news, though, was totally unexpected:  Goren and Eames are coming back to Law and Order: CI.  I had stopped watching it altogether.  Goren has long been on my list of favorite fictional men.  He just got better and better with every season, and then, poof, he was gone.  That decision never made any sense.  With IPS off for the season and CI running random other folk, I had stopped watching USA altogether.  I flipped through the other day and caught a commercial for the new season of CI and was delighted to see that they're bringing Goren and Eames back.

I guess with these three shows, my DVR might actually get some use.  It will be nice to see these gentlemen do their thing once a week.  Of course, once summer is over, I guess the shows will be, too, but at least I can be entertained for awhile....

Weird Dreams

I'm dreaming of people I know.  I hate that.  I like it much better when the people in my dreams are just dress extras, random configurations of my subconscious tossed in for makeweight.

Last night's extravaganza was very odd.  It didn't even feel like mine.  It almost felt like I had a walk-in role in someone else's dream.  Wouldn't it be odd if somehow, some way in sleep our dreams could cross like that? (And yeah, I realize that may be the plot of some science fiction thing somewhere...)  How strange would it be to run into each other in our dreams?

I ran away from somebody last night in mine.  They wanted to talk to me, but I had a moment of my oddness, and I fled.  I think that is my oh-so-subtle subconscious telling me that I need some alone-time, something I haven't had much of lately since I can't imagine my running away from this person in real life.  Then again, maybe my subconscious knows something about this person it's not sharing... Hmm....  Sobering thought that.  Maybe if so, it will get a little less inscrutable with these things.  Otherwise it's just going to have to take what it gets like everybody else.

Definition

Listen,
I need to tell you something....

Pink is not my signature color.
There is not one single pair of heels
in my closet,
and I do not care
if my purse matches my shoes.


My nails are not manicured or polished.
But these hands are strong and dextrous;
they know how to do many things:
hold a pen, a knife, a needle, a hilt,
coax life from somnolent keyboards,
transfix rainbows in glass,
soothe hurts large and small,
craft pottery ravens,
gesture disdain both politely and otherwise,
rescue kittens, building-bound birds, and cicadas,
focus a lens to capture a moment,
fry the best damn fried chicken you'll ever taste,
hold on tightly when the world goes to hell.

I don't harbor dreams of
of a magic prince who sweeps in
and carries me away
the cathedral length train,
the cloying smell of lilies and roses.

Instead I want the rhinestone benediction
the full glory of a chapel Elvis
and a partner-in-crime
driving away together with me
into the darkness of a Las Vegas night
into the rest of our lives.

Mixed Bag

Things that are good:

• We're making real progress in getting ready for the state test.  Our prep camp seems to be working.  The students seem to enjoy it, and I feel more confident about them than I have in a very long time.
• My cousin is coming home for a long visit.  He's more like a brother than a cousin, and I haven't seen him in a very long time.  I am so excited that he's actually going to be here.
• There are fewer than 35 days remaining in this school year.  I might be able to do that.
• There are fewer than 70 days remaining until I can go geek out with my fellow AP teachers in Louisville.
• Topamax has taken ten pounds off me.
• I didn't have a headache today.

Things that are bad:

• I've started having more missing and mispronounced words than usual.  The Topamax is dancing around in my head like someone with a fork making scrambled eggs.  It's terrible.  It makes me feel like a fool, and not in a carefree, happy way.
• I have way, way more bills than money right now.  I don't know what I'm going to do about that.  Trying to ignore it isn't exactly working.
• I'm fighting losing battles on many fronts.  I don't know how to turn these defeats into victories, or if it's time to fold tents, cut losses, participate in other cliches, and walk away.

That's life in Podunk today.

The Forgotten

I have been thinking now for some time of doing a series of dramatic monologues based upon carvings that I have seen in various places that I've been.  The first one of these came to me when I was in the church of Santa Croche in Florence.  I have been tumbling this one over and over in my head for over a year now, and I took my first stab at it.  Feedback would be most greatly appreciated.  I have included a picture that I took of the carving itself so you know what I'm talking about.  Santa Croche is the church in Florence that houses the remains of Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, DaVinci, and too many other geniuses to shake a stick at. 
________________________________________

 

The Forgotten

based upon a worn tomb carving in Santa Croche in Florence, Italy

It must be admitted

this is not how I imagined

the long wait for the glorious trumpet’s Last Call.

In the quiet darkness after the cameras are gone

they mock my choices from around the walls

from their elaborate monuments

Dante, Galileo, even that wretched, toadying politician.

I shift my shoulders philosophically

under my satin-smooth slab and sigh.

These things, after all, they do happen…

Laid to rest at Santa Croche’s altar

covered with my own image in such delicate carving

and three colors of Florentine glory

I rested head and feet on tassled stone pillows

crossed hands on flowing robes

knowing every penitent kneeling

would marvel and aspire to the beatific peace they saw

as I slept my little while.

It is no soft prayer that intrudes on my dreaming now.

Hurrying feet in soft rubber soles erase my identity

as they rush past seeking not heaven

but the exit, the gift shop, the rest room

Each presses lightly, indifferently into my chest

wearing a hole just where the heart should be.

A long crack slowly opens

halving my right foot

creeping toward the black border

where “Resurgat” still dimly gleams

stained stone script still unvanquished.

If they do not remember me here,

if no line forms to see this resting place,

if Time with every passing year his chisel removes

some further trace of my remaining earthly vanity

I take some comfort in this:

I am always near to God and known unto Him.

Poets, Musicians, and God's Other Fools

Warning:  Random stereotyping commences here

Pandora is a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.  One of my favorite things about it is that it helps me find new artists to enjoy.  Last night it spun me to the Avett Brothers, and today I've been listening to their Four Thieves Gone album and reading.  One song on it, "Pretend Love," got me started thinking about the way that musicians and poets love.

You'd think we'd be the same in love, but really I don't think we are.  We both craft words, we both go around looking at the world in a bit of a haze, but we're cousins, not brother-kin.  Poets have a tendency to fall hard and deep, attaching to a single person in particular.  Poets look at the object of our love and see in them the entire world.  Look at Petrarch and Laura.  300 freakin' sonnets in which he completely deified her.  While I prefer Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 for realism and sentiment, it still follows the pattern.  Love for the poet is to be stricken with the emotion and to fall at the feet  of the beloved for as long as they will allow it. 

Most musicians of my acquaintance have been something more in the nature of surface skimmers, more in love with the idea of love or its multitudinous sensations than with any one individual in particular.  They tend to be less willing to stay with any one person, more in need of their precious "freedom,"  and this seems to involve a capacity for falling "in love" over and over again, something most poets don't much do.  I suppose it's the difference between ravens and hummingbirds, those which mate for life and those which dart from pretty flower to pretty flower with a show of bright plumage.

Should you ever put a poet and a musician together?  Hell no.  A poet and a musician together would tear up the bed and burn down the house with their passion, produce reams of memorable material in the inspiration from it, forget to buy groceries and pay the bills, but they would eventually move on to have fights that make the Trojan War look like a polite misunderstanding, make mutual friends pick sides and hate each other, and end with recrimination and something bitter left in the soul that comes out in pieces of public work that turn into potshots taken at each other in song and in print.  They are things that are like, but not really the same, like animals of the same genus but not the same species.

I wonder how scientists, engineers, lawyers, law enforcement -- the sane, in other words -- I wonder how they approach romance when they don't have that creative hell boiling inside them riding them and trying to turn every moment into something else.  Do they know their own souls better, more truly, or are they just as confused as the poets and the musicians?  God, I hope not.  I hope somebody somewhere is quiet and sure.  I'm counting on it, counting on somebody being iron to ground my random lighting.  It would be so grossly unfair to think we're all hopeless messes. 

Foul Weather

Today I heard the sky scream.  Today, standing in our old red-brick school building, I saw a tornado skim over the treetops. 

We'd known there was the chance of foul weather all day long, so we were watching for it, and it arrived about 3:00, herding us all into the bottom floor halls.  Fortunately, since this is "prom weekend," many students were already gone.  Something that is usually a curse had turned into a blessing as we got our kids seated and quieted them.  Our administrators went outside, became "spotters," and we waited. 

Certainly I've been through foul weather there before.  I always feel safe in our vast sturdy building.  It was constructed in 1928, and its long wide halls feel massive and solid. There is really no other place in which I would rather ride out a storm.  Today, I edged over to one of the big windows regardless of the danger of glass and looked out.  Lightning was everywhere, and then it was strangely still.  The clouds were so dark, and the rain that was still falling was swirling wildly.  Then the end door opened just a little and we could hear it scream.

Someone standing near me told me to look, and when I did look back out the window, the funnel cloud was passing over us, headed to the north, mercifully skipping over us.  That is as close as I have ever been to a tornado, at least to my knowledge.   Who knows what has jumped over me in the darkness of the Mississippi stormy night....  All I could think about was, "Not here.  Please, God, not here with all these kids."  I couldn't even get a real prayer to form.  All I could do was look at them and say that.  And yet, it wasn't really fear that I felt as I looked back and forth from that mass of cloud to those trusting faces in the hallway; it was more a sense of both being somehow totally safe and of all of it being completely unreal. 

I hope I never spend another afternoon in the hallways.  It always winds up being a situation with the kids wanting to run out the doors because they can't understand the severity of the situation or something surreal happening with the weather.  Often it winds up being a combination of both.  Today, I am just grateful that the worst of all possible scenarios quite literally passed us over.  After everyone was gone as I was walking out to my car, I laid my hand on the worn brick wall and just gave thanks, both to the good old building that gave us strong shelter and the God that protected us from harm.  I am grateful to have been somewhere safe on an afternoon such as this.

Tea Cake

It's Their Eyes Were Watching God time again.  I love this book.  Zora Neale Hurston in general is a delight, but to watch Janie rise, overcome, and become is powerful every time I read it.  She is one of my favorite epic heroes.

It strikes me this time as I read it that I need to find my own Tea Cake.  I want to find somebody who doesn't try to own me or run me, somebody who will let me stand on my own, but at the same time who will also stand with me against the storms of life when they come.  I'm ready for somebody who tells me that I've got "the keys to the kingdom" and who wants to come along for the ride.  Tea Cake helps Janie realize that she needs to get back to herself, throw off the things that have held her back, and he helps her scrape away all the things that have been piled upon her by others.

I don't see Janie and Tea Cake as an ideal of perfection; they had problems and struggles like any human pair.  I just like that at the base of all of it was a bond of true love for each other, that he was crazy about her and accepted her any way she wanted to be.  He didn't try to put her in those restrictive showy dresses as a sign of status or tell her what she could and couldn't or should or shouldn't say to keep her in her place like Jody did.  He simply let her be the woman she was and loved her for it, told her it was glorious. That's what I want.  That's what every woman should have.

Sandpaper

Right now, everything is abrasive.  Everything is a little stroke of sandpaper against my skin, against my nerves, against my sanity. 

I wish I could be alone, could be in a place with no noise, or in a city where nobody knew me.  I would love to get on a plane, a train, in my car, and just disappear.  I would love for the crowds to just swirl around me and make me anonymous.  I would love to sit at the back table of some cafe or walk into some museum or stand behind the lens of my Nikon and watch the play of light and dark as people go about their lives, safe in my peaceful namelessness for a day, a week, until every buzzing of my phone in my pocket, every time someone says my name doesn't feel like an invasion.

I need peace.  I need the silk of understanding and closeness instead of the rough demand of more, more, more.  I need solitude or that special type of being with another that does not feel like an intrusion, like someone rubbing me raw with their needs and their constant expectations of what I can do for them. 

I like to give.  I am by nature a person who seeks to help others.  But today, just now, here in this very second of my life, my cup is running empty and I feel shaky inside.  Sandpaper, applied often enough to fine-grained wood will destroy the shape.  I hope I can find away to get out from under this grinding before it's too late.

Things I Did and Things I Didn't Do Today

What it says on the tin.

• I did not go to my pottery class tonight.  
• I got hugged a lot today. 
• I had that Sonic New York hot dog and a banana shake, both of which I am becoming dangerously addicted to.  (Please forgive the prepositional ending.)
• I did not have a migraine, although it was a very near thing at times as the storm arrived.
• I saw a former student I have been SO worried about (ref. hugs above).  He's not currently being shot at in a foreign country, and so I feel better about life.  
• I did not get wet.
• I wore Chaco flops and a silly Shakespeare shirt.
• I continued to appreciate the advice of the Sunglasses Hut salesman.  (Thank you, sir.  Polarized was the right choice, indeed.)
• I did not adjust well to the new reading glasses.
• I got at least one student comment on said glasses. (sigh)
• I got Super Glue on my fingers.
• I got Super Glue off my fingers.
• I did not use the Force, the Voice, or any other might or gift to destroy the pompous or the arrogant despite all provocation.
• I forgot to recharge my iPod.
• I dropped my handkerchief.
• I was confessed to by a student.
• I forgave said student.
• I read several good poems in stolen moments and smiled.
• I leaned against a red brick wall and pretended I was somewhere else for five-minute intervals every fifty minutes.
• I wished I had a tiny giraffe so I, too, could be "epic win." (and you may not get this one if you don't have DirecTV.)
• I drank far too much Diet Mountain Dew.
• I did not leave on time despite all my best efforts to the contrary.
• I prayed for Japan and my friend with cancer and two babies.
• I did not hit the person who ran the red flashing light at the intersection by Magnolia.
• I was happy with a friend who had good news.

A Reason to Wear the Motley

"It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish." ~ Aeschylus

I wish I could say it's the reason I wear the cap with the bells, but alas, I'm just an ordinary fool.  No wisdom to brag of here, folks....

And the Transformation is Complete

Make very sure you can read the caption.  I just got reading glasses today, so I guess I just need to grow my hair back out, put it up into a bun, and the transformation will be complete.  Damn.  And I do mean damn.  This is not who I wanted to be.  I am now the old-maid schoolmarm, glasses and all.  It wasn't enough that I'm built like an Amazon Queen, am interested in all manner of geekery, am mostly socially graceless, have my nose constantly stuck in a book, and have my mind constantly stuck in another world.  Now, I'm the living fulfillment of the Dorothy Parker phrase as well, "Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses." 

And that's totally unfair, by the way, since guys in glasses tend to be so terribly, terribly cute and sexy.  Glasses make guys look smart and delightful in most cases.  Case in point:

Would you kick him out of the bed for eating crackers?  He's lovely without the specs.  But when he puts them on....

Why doesn't it work that way for women?  I just can't imagine any hearts are going to flutter (if any hearts have ever fluttered for me, something I think unlikely) over mine.  Damn.  Damn, damn, damn.

I am not saying women can't be attractive in glasses.  I know lots of attractive women who wear glasses all the time.  I'm just saying that I do not personally feel that these help me out any myself.  I'm just saying that I hate becoming a cliche.  Sigh.

Just Another Saturday Night

It's late, late now, and the tree frogs and the night insects are singing.  The attic fan is finally pulling the last of the almost 90 degree temperature out of the house since I resolutely refuse to turn the air conditioner on before the middle of April, and the cool damp night air of a Mississippi spring is flowing in through all the screens of open windows, open doors.  I can hear the windchimes on the front porch clattering together, but other than these soft night sounds, there is no noise.

It's just another country Saturday night.  A car will briefly break the darkness with headlights every now and again as it passes, a temporary trespasser on all this solitude, but the night slides back together behind its passage like it never was there, its brief smudge of luminescence quickly devoured.  This aloneness is not uncomfortable.  It is not an isolation but a sense of being in one's own space.

It's a good night for reading or thinking, for remembering, and tonight my mind is dancing lightly across the past and into the future.  It's making the silliest and most improbable plans, confections with no basis in reality at all. These plans stir up longings and desires, make me take out maps and look up places online that I'd like to be, make me see myself with different light spilling over my face, different views out my windows.  Of course, Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."  However, that's the part that's giving me problems.  I can spin dreams for days.  I can make the most fantastic plans, see the most amazing futures.  When it comes time to begin attaching those castles to the ground though, that is where I lose my way. 

It's also apparently a good night for walking down the hallways of my mind and peering into old storage that I am more comfortable leaving the doors of locked tight and left alone, though.  And, so, too, this night also makes me sit and think of what is gone, what I had and wasted, what was never mine at all....  We recently read "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Herrick in my senior classes, and the last two lines, "For having lost but once your prime/ You may forever tarry," keep circling in my head like the mocking call of circling birds of prey.  My roses have faded.  I have not seized my day.  Herrick would be shaking his semi-priestly head at me, saddened by all the opportunities I've let go by.  But if I did not love them......

It's time to get up from here and take the freshly aired and sunned feather mattress and put it back on my bed, to take the clean sheets and reassemble my nest and get in it, perhaps even to take a cool shower to make sure all the heat of the day is gone before I climb in since sleeping hot will ensure the bad dreams I suspect are lurking at the corners of my mind will become a reality.  Whenever so much of what I desire and what I regret are in my head like this, I dream horrible things.

It is hard to be content sometimes.  I try to be.  I try very hard to be content with what I have, the blessings that I have at this moment here in this place.  Sometimes, though, I just feel like going out under the dark of the moon and throwing my arms up to the sky and screaming.  I don't know what that childish act would accomplish.  Nothing, probably, other than frightening the white tailed deer who sneak into the back yard and graze.  At least nobody would call the cops.  There are, after all, no neighbors near to be concerned by the sound of silly venting in the pasture edge....

It's just another Saturday night here in rural Mississippi.  The frogs are singing.  The breeze stirs the curtains gently.  My mind eddies and tumbles like fast-moving water over mostly submerged rocks.  This is what happens when there's nothing to distract me from myself.  I suppose what I need more than anything else here is something to save me from myself, then.  I wonder if anything ever will.

Book Haunting

I'm being chased.  It started about two weeks ago when I was looking at the Book Madness brackets and my beloved 1984 was getting trounced. The book doing the trouncing was The Great Gatsby.  I have taught Gatsby several times, and I love it, too, but well...put almost anything other than P&P up against 1984 and....

It got me thinking about Gatsby, though, and the cover art by Francis Cugat was much on the website.  I decided that on payday, I'd splurge and get the shirt since Out of Print finally released the original Cugat cover on a beautiful blue shirt, just like the original dust jacket.  I ordered it from San Francisco.  Keep track now, because these are instances of Gatsby numbers one, two, and three....

Sometime around in here, I had a strange dream about Gatsby.  I don't remember the details.  I just know that I woke up thinking, "Huh.  Can't wait for my shirt to get here.  Weird.  Maybe I need to reread that book."  I probably, to be perfectly honest, also thought something about Robert Redford in the movie version, too, because, well, COME ON...does any woman worth her salt really think about Gatsby and not think about Robert Redford?  (I mean REALLY?  He's all pretty...and...and...shiny....and...and...)

Then, last night, I had a interesting conversation with somebody that wound up headed down a literary alley and...voila...Gatsby was there again.  I sort of felt startled when I saw it come up, but then I just shrugged and went with it.  By now, I was sort of getting used to seeing it here, there, and everywhere, lounging idly against the hood of expensive vehicles and on street corners, insouciant and knowing grin in place.

Today, one of my students was turning in some work when another came in holding a paperback copy of the novel.  The second student wanted to give it to the first, as it had the first's name in it.  The first was bemused, saying she hadn't seen that book in over a year, hadn't brought it to school at all, didn't even know where it was until it turned up in the second student's hand.  I simply nodded and thought, "Okay, well, now it's actually coming AFTER ME in print..."

I've never been haunted and pursued by a novel before.  It's a little disconcerting.  I guess after I finish what I'm reading now I'll reread Gatsby.  I'm afraid that if I don't the next stage will be looking out my window to see a green light has appeared at the end of my pasture or having somebody start calling me "old sport" for a nickname.  That would be more than a little too much, I think.  I hope it can be patient until I finish this book I have going.  Otherwise, I guess I better look for big yellow cars as I cross the street....

Sonnet, Redux

As you can tell, I've rediscovered a treasure trove here.  This collection of sonnets, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, is wonderful.  This poem reminds me that all too often the private lives of creative people wind up as a horrible sort of sacrifice.  I believe everybody is deserving of privacy.  While I'm not usually a fan of Wilde, I am touched by his words here.  I don't think there were many more gentle in the world of letters than Keats.  To think of people pawing through the private musings of his heart breaks my own.  It's too much to hope that kind soul bought those letters, sealed them up in a box, and burned them to allow what was supposed to remain only between two to continue that way, isn't it?  I guess I'm just not much of a scholar when it comes right down to it; there's no desire in me to know what he wrote to his beloved.  It should be left alone.
_______________________________________

OSCAR WILDE  Sonnet: On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters

These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret and apart,
And now the brawlers of the auction-mart
Bargain and bid for each tear-blotted note,
Aye! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price! I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart,
That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.
Is it not said, that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?
1886

Musicians and Poetry

Found this today as I was pulling sonnets for my AP class.  It is, of course, Shakespeare.  I've felt this way too often watching certain musicians who were very bad for me play.....

_________________________________________________

SONNET 128

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
   Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
   Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

Rain and Eggplant

I had a D-A-Y today.  The natives were growing restless, what with spring and testing and all.  It is not to be talked of. 

After school I took my taxes out to the lady who does mine.  She's in the town where I went to high school, and just driving out there is an experience.  So much has changed.  When I went to that school, it was a small country school, very good, but not very big.  Most of the families who were there had been there for generations.  It was truly a community school.  Now, there are subdivisions everywhere and mammoth houses where people have moved in from everywhere.  It makes me feel strange, a little like somebody came in and took something that was mine when I wasn't looking.  I know that's not logical, especially since it's not mine anymore in any part, but still....

I came back to town and decided not to have a Sonic burger for supper.  Instead, I went to an Italian restaurant to have something more substantial.  Eggplant Parmesan is one of my favorite dishes, and I took the time to read over it and enjoy it slowly.  It was a nice change over eating a jalapeno burger in the car, even if the burger would have come with a banana shake.

I hope tomorrow will  be better.  Today I feel as if I was a bear in a cage who was being poked at from all sides.  I'm going to put my paws over my eyes and pretend there's nothing there and hope that they all leave me alone for a little while.

Why I'm Still Single

"Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men." ~ Kin Hubbard

Dunn's Falls

The weather was too beautiful to stay indoors today.  Although I left much later than I'd wanted, I finally went to Dunn's Falls to take some pictures. 

I hadn't been there since I was very little.  That's a shame.  It's a very peaceful place.  I need to go back when I have more time to hike the trails some.  There isn't much there except the mill, the trails, and the river, but there doesn't really need to be more than that to be honest. 

The old mill is in very poor repair.  I suppose things like that need a great deal of money to keep them up.  At one point, I think they used to run it and mill grain there periodically.  As I was taking pictures of the various components, I noticed the damage to most of the working structures.  I don't know if it will ever mill again, but it is still lovely for all that.  It's still possible to go in the building and look around.  I got several pictures inside it that I'm fairly pleased with, lots of interesting details to shoot there.

The river is beautiful where it bends at the falls, wide and curving, and with the water cascading down into them from the mill, it's a great spot to take photos.  As usual, I shot much more than I kept, even after editing, but it was nice to wade out into the spring-cool water in my Tevas, feel the sun on my face and arms, and baptize my feet in the water of my native region as I tried to find the right angles on things. The little shelf of limestone where the water comes over the falls is ridiculously pretty, and on either side, all of Mississippi's lush spring blooms were on display, native honeysuckle and dogwood sprinkled through the new green of the woods.  I am more glad than I can say that I waited for spring to go out to take pictures.  

I think I'll go back again with a picnic lunch, a quilt, my Kindle, and much more time.  It should be a good place to find a quiet spot in a bend of the river and listen to the water go by and the wind in the tree tops.  I won't forget it's as close as it is again.  There are too few places of refuge to throw one like this away.