But it's Not Cordless

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

Magnificent Peak

- Muso Soseki

By its own nature
     it towers above
          the tangle of rivers
Don't say
     it's a lot of dirt
          piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
     the evening cloud
          draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
     you can look up and see it
          green and steep and wild.

from The Sun At Midnight. Copyright 2002.

It's A Garden Party! - Happy & Hardy

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me - large or small, inside or out - I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

Not much new is happening in the garden this week. We had more rain, everything is growing well (whether we want it to or not), and there is always more work to do.

Here we have happy Poppies and Agave. If you look closely you can see pups under the Agave. I'll have to move them this summer so they have room to spread out.

Of course, the Roses are still doing well. I wish I could get a good picture of the whole lot together. They are exceptional this year.

(Yes, I know I don't have any Saguaro, but I couldn't find poetry about Agave.)

To the Saguaro Cactus Tree in the Desert Rain
- James Wright

I had no idea the elf owl
Crept into you in the secret
Of night.

I have torn myself out of many bitter places
In America, that seemed

Tall and green-rooted in mid-noon.
I wish I were the spare shadow
Of the roadrunner, I wish I were
The honest lover of the diamondback
And the tear the tarantula weeps.
I had no idea you were so tall
And blond in moonlight.
I got thirsty in the factories,
And I hated the brutal dry suns there,
So I quit.

You were the shadow
Of a hallway
In me.

I have never gone through that door,
But the elf owl’s face
Is inside me.

Saguaro,
You are not one of the gods.
Your green arms lower and gather me.
I am an elf owl’s shadow, a secret
Member of your family.

from: Above the River: The Complete Poems. Copyright 1992.

A Temporary Inconvenience, for A Perman... Nevermind. I'll Be In My Pillow Fort, Coloring.

Me-Owf!

{Photo Source}

Translation Is An Art, Not A Science

I found many translations of this next prose poem. A number were mechanical, serviceable, but carried no feeling. The best I found was by Beth Archer in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

La Grenouille
- Francis Ponge

Lorsque la pluie en courtes aiguillettes rebondit aux prés saturés, une naine amphibie, une Ophélie manchote, grosse à peine comme le poing, jaillit parfois sous les pas du poète et se jette au prochain étang.

Laissons fuir la nerveuse. Elle a de jolies jambes. Tout son corps est ganté de peau imperméable. A peine viande ses muscles longs sont d’une élégance ni chair ni poisson. Mais pour quitter les doigts la vertu du fluide s’allie chez elle aux efforts du vivant. Goitreuse, elle halète… Et ce cœur qui bat gros, ces paupières ridées, cette bouche hagarde m’apitoyent à la lâcher.

The Frog
- Francis Ponge

When little matchsticks of rain bounce off drenched fields, an amphibian dwarf, a maimed Ophelia, barely the size of a fist, sometimes hops under the poet's feet and flings herself into the next pond.

Let the nervous little thing run away. She has lovely legs. Her whole body is sheathed in waterproof skin. Hardly meat, her long muscles have an elegance neither fish nor foul. But to escape one's fingers, the virtue of fluidity joins forces with her struggle for life. Goiterous, she starts panting . . . And that pounding heart, those wrinkled eyelids, that drooping mouth, move me to let her go.

We Call It A Grain of Sand

 - Wislawa Szymborska

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is inverted, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.

from: Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule. Copyright 1991.