all things andrewjthomas

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

---
I'll happily admit that this is my first time posting here, after having spent the better part of the last two hours looking back through entries, reading and enjoying myself. But I am looking for poems that have to do with the sea: the ocean, the tides, sailing, beaches, boats and ships in general, water, underwater, what-have-you. Anything would be much appreciated.

This beautiful passage opens the astonishing "Signing the Body Poetic" and I can't seem to get its rollicking rhythm out of my head. Whitman was such a deeply feeling wordsmith and human creature.

A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds
out of your friends' mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they.

Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
(In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's,
well-shaped, natural, gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)

( Air, soil, water, fire--those are words, )

John Burnside
Amor Vincit Omnia

Find me when summer ends and the lamps
are everything.

I have practised being the one
to whom you return,

if not the betrothed, then at least
the autumnal familiar,

the almost unveiled.

Songlike and lost in the mist, I have made you a bed
of fingerprints and outlook and those

footsteps that go in the dark
through a litmus of snow

to seek benediction.

Call it a house of cards,
or a hall of mirrors,

but nothing will measure you here
and find you wanting.

(From: John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forest, London: Cape Poetry, 2009).

I know a woman who keeps buying puzzles chinese puzzles blocks wires pieces that finally fit into some order. she works it out mathematically she solves all her puzzles lives down by the sea puts sugar out for the ants and believes ultimately in a better world. her hair is white she seldom combs it her teeth are snaggled and she wears loose shapeless coveralls over a body most women would wish they had. for many years she irritated me with what I consider her eccentricities - like soaking eggshells in water (to feed the plants so that they'd get calcium). but finally when I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realize that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). she has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through like I said she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. she has won. Frances, this poem is for you.

Add a new friend to your page

babybarrow

La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle
—René Char

( I'm a martyr, a girl who's been dead two thousand years )

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Meddling

Before I wrote poems I meddled.
As a boy I would dress the dog
in my clothes and get my parents
to fight over who I resembled.
I told my brothers there was
no gravity and watched them flail
their short arms as they bounced
around the ceiling. Once I tore
a page from the kitchen calendar
and nothing happened for a month
though I don't really remember it.
What turned me around was a night
in my eighteenth summer spent
watching old movies. I was tuning
our black & white when I touched
the glass and found it soft and wet.
Fitting my hands into the frame
it came away in my hands like yolk.
The people in the film stopped
talking and looked around, startled.
I got ready for them to be angry
but instead they just stood there;
the man scratching his forehead
with the sight of his empty gun,
the woman smoothing her skirts,
unable to face me, my terrible colors.


( two more )

These poems are from Letters to Guns, which I am apparently not allowed to link to but uh, google it and you'll get an Amazon link. Highly recommend checking it out.

The Love Song of the Square Root of Minus One (i) 
Richard Siken


I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you...
 

The Love Song of the Square Root of Minus One (ii)

I am the hand that lifts the rock, I am the eye that sees the worm, I am the mind that strings the worm and throws the line and feels the tug, the flex in the pole, the key in the lock, as the root breaks rock, as sunlight streams across the plain to make the world visible again, foot by foot, I find the groove, the trace in the thicket, seed to flower to fruit to seed, a holy pilgrim moving through the stations of the yardstick, I track, I follow, a flashlight, a crowbar, I find the fulcrum, I hinge and turn, a simple machine, frictionless and efficient as an equal sign, I manifest, votive and incandescent, shrinking the space between here and there I become the future, as drowsiness overcomes the dreamer, as the eye of the archer is the eye of the target, I flip and fold, I superimpose, the letter delivered, the year decembered, I become location, plum pit and apple core, I am motionless and you veer towards me, the eye to which you are relative, single point, silent witness, there to your here, I decide and calibrate, magnetized for your revelation, the doors burst open, I am your outcome, the verb in the sentence, intransitive, end of the road, hook and bait, polestar and checkmate, time and space as I observe them serve me like gravity, lamp to your moth, dot to your map, home and heart and hearth, a selfishness, submit, surrender, I am your arrival, there is no refusal, we are here, you see, together, we are already here...

I was tooling around youtube and was noticing that one of my contacts on there whom I have been following has not posted a video for a long time. Her son with DS is a tad bit older than Oliver, and watching the videos of his progress gave me hope, which is why I post videos of Olivers milestones - and the last video she posted was 5 months ago of him after his heart surgery. I then read a comment someone posted 3 weeks ago about her son in past tense, then saw she posted yesterday that she was mourning her son that left us on October 7th - What an ordeal to go through for that long - I know his surgery did not go so well that 5 months ago according to the video she posted of him in the hospital. So sad - I started crying right there, and gave Oliver a big fat hug.


*looking for something to donate to?
http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/lavatri10/jeffmcneill
(my old boss [still coworker] is doing this)

Friday was a blur. I got more work done, thank everything with shiney fuzzy everything powers. Then there was tired, a debate about health care, more working, more tired, a drive with traffic, some dinner, story time, and then a complete passout because if you haven't noticed, this week has sucked monkey balls.

I wanted to do a Friday Chicken, a la Havi, but whilst thinking about it and what was hard and what was good, I... fell asleep.

So that's good, I think.

Things to post next week:

• more pictures (those are fun, aren't they?)
• a Wordless Wednesday
• a Friday Chicken
• some more about the spiritual things I have been doing, because like a chicken butt, I am not posting them. But I should. I should indeed.
• perhaps a long winded rant about work, but those can get tedious. Perhaps I will make it funny. That's the ticket!

All sorts of body parts are spasming right now, so I'm going to take a shower.

Thursday was full of bad day ness, some productivity, and then drinking too much and falling asleep before posting. Rock. And when I say drinking too much? Yeah, I mean two beers. Lightweight, table of one!

So here's my cop out post: a peeekture.


Inspired by the photos at PrettyGood.

These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men
Brian Patten

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.

so I thought for sure we'd have some trouble re-adjusting time with Oliver. Thankfully him being up as soon as the plane landed (10:30pm) until about 2am (2 hours after we got home) let him sleep till 7am - then take a long early nap and still be tired quite early, but only to get up at 640am -
You see, while we were in Indiana - its 2 hours difference, then we changed time while there.
He was going to bed a 'normal' time for being there - but he would get up at 5:30am!! which worried me because thats like 3:30am california time. But I think we are back to normal.

The trip was fun but as usual exhausting - We stayed at my moms house this time. wise anyway since my brother in law had some crazy sickness flu thing going on - he did see the doc but they did not say if it was swine flu - probably just another flu - he was very very ill - my sister got a cold of some kind during that as well - so we stayed away from him as he was recovering - and he was on the mend when we got there - He took Lukas to a colts game (they were playing san fran) but had to leave early as their seats were way way up high which scared Lukas.

Dan and I took the boys to this place called bellaboos - an indoor kids discovery museum - they had a lot of fun there. It was pouring rain outside so that was a nice get out of the house activity. Mom had lots of company on Saturday and Sunday - Oliver made out with some 20's (its a thing, when you see little kids for the first time or not often cause they dont live around there, the people hand them money).

Got a small lot of some clothes handed down (mostly 3T stuff thats still too big)

We managed to not get sick while out there - Oliver did start his snot season though - at one point he sneezed spaghetti. Seems better now but these things go no forever it seems during this season, plus he starts his new pre-school on Monday so new germs to swap

Oliver knows who spongebob is now as if he sees him, he starts saying 'bobobobob'

its freezing in here - it said it was 63 this morning - have the space heater running and its up to 67 now - another hour or 2 and we'll be up to the norm. We had to post pone the fireplace gas insert project until after this winter so its space heaters (Oliver has his own in his room regardless as we keep his door closed when he sleeps). We had a double sided wall heater we pulled out last year because the grates are all sharp inside and can cut your finger good (like it did Olivers thumb once).

The freakin cats are being super annoying since we got back. I have them sleeping on my head, or both of them right on top of me. Boris will come up on the desk and like get all cozy on my hand that I use for the mouse while I am trying to mouse.

gotta try to finish up the shingling on this one side of the house before it starts to rain all the time.
Its costco time as well (big bag-o-tp is down to 5 rolls) -

and after this round of unsuccessful trying to get preggers - I have learned to stop being so obsessive about it - I was spoiled getting pregnant with Oliver first try - so I thought it would possibly happen again -

gotta go get cleaned up so we can go run to costco when they open today.

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

I'm watching Million Dollar Baby for the first time.

Hilary Swank's character of a boxer girl is from Theodosia, Missouri, which seems to be a real place.

LATER: This movie was good, but not great. I found it overly sentimental and the the lead characters to be overly desexualized. I also found the portrayal of the boxer girl's family from rural Missouri to be way too stereotyped as ignorant hillbillies.

Joe is such a great-looking kid.

Fantastic whiskers.

And he holds down papers on my grading table.

In the Park
Maxine Kumin

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
--you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park. He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there's a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

(First time posting here. This poem is one of my favorites and is interesting to read in contrast with Not Waving But Drowning.)

When the cry goes up
by Sergey Chudakov, trans. Daniel Weissbort

When the cry goes up:

                                                “Man overboard!”

The ocean liner, huge as a house,

Comes to a shuddering stop.

Lines are lowered

                                and a man’s hauled up.

But when

                a man’s soul goes overboard,

When he’s choking

                                with fear

                                and despair,

Then even his own house

Doesn’t stop for him

                                      but continues on its way.
 

DSC00186
Originally uploaded by nadanaka.

This is my niece Juliana - She's got some nice teeth