My Ideal Day?

Why, tea and chocolate in the garden, while sitting on my rocker reading . . . with a lovely chorus of bird song in the background, of course.

If only  . . .   *sigh* . . .

How about you? What is your ideal day?

Some light reading:

A Nice Cup of Tea (George Orwell),
Tea (Douglas Adams),
How To Make A Decent Cup Of Tea (Christopher Hitchens) 
My prior Tea posts: here, here, & here.

It's Here! It's Here! It's Here! It's Here! It's Here!

A while ago I left a comment on Jeanne's blog Necromancy Never Pays. And what do you know, I won a book as a part of a TLC book tour giveaway. It's the first thing I ever won.

The book is Our Held Animal Breath by Kathryn Kirkpatrick, and I don't have the words to express how much I love it. Her writing is powerful, political, and intensely visceral in its portrayal of the vulnerable and how they are compromised and failed by those with agendas. My words don't even come close to capturing the beauty of this collection.

“Whether she’s writing about personal loss or public tragedy, the poems in Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s Our Held Animal Breath always shine with a steady light.  The natural world—foxes and squirrels, the ‘raspberries in the sloping meadow’—is a constant, quiet corrective in this work to human creation.  We want to make the world over by ourselves and for ourselves, she suggests, but it is impossible for this poet to look away from the destructiveness that accompanies such greed.  We will surely ‘lose it.’  And yet, these are not despairing poems.  Kirkpatrick celebrates love and friendship, even memorializes the relentless hatred one woman can feel toward another.  These are poems that refuse nothing—neither blueberry bushes nor bluegrass nor babies.  We’re all in it together, Kirkpatrick seems to say, this ‘one wild rooted dance.’”

- Sarah Kennedy

Thank you Jeanne, and Thank you Lisa at TLC Book Tours. 

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I think this is my favorite poem in the collection. See if you can figure out why.

Mulch
- Kathryn Kirkpatrick

When we spread mulch, forking
the fragrant heap to swaddle
roses, their stubbed branches
cut back before bloom,

I open newspapers
to the yera I want to forget
and lay down on the bare earth
leaf after leaf of headlines

Taliban Ready for Holy War
Sharon Defies US Pressure
Terrorist Assault
Refugees Rebel

If I thought this a necessary violence,
that the world needs blood poured out
like a fire needs what will burn,
I would gather the winding sheets,
prepare my prayers, shape rituals
or suffering the inevitable.

But I don't.
Death is enough,
takes its portion early or late
without our help.

And it it earth, finally,
what I bend to now
again and agai, to tend,
particular ground and what it contains,
we defile by so much defending.

As I lay down the stories of war
and coming war
I want each changed, slowly,
to what will do these plants good:

the absence of weeds,
moisture in drought,
sustenance sufficient for bloom.

Cultural Stakes; or, How to Learn English as a Second Language

- Kevin A. Gonzalez

 

Wait on the corner of Isla Verde & Tartak

for your father to pull up in his Bronco.

Your mother will be right: he will not show up

at noon. At 12:20, you will recognize the horn,

its wail like an amplified conch,

but you will not recognize your father—

the gray stubble, the violent tan.

When he asks where you’d like to go,

say the movies, say La Feria, say the moon:

it won’t matter. You will go to Duffy’s.

When your father says, We’re only here for lunch,

his voice will be as straightforward

as a sandwich menu. The bartender

will greet him like a cousin

in a language you cannot understand.

A stick of incense will burn slow

& its ashes will sprinkle into the tip jar.

Fruit will be rolling inside the slot machine;

darts will flash by like hubcaps. There will be

mirrors with bottles drawn inside them

& not a word of Spanish in the air.

When your father gives you a Coke

with two cherries in it, bite the stem

& bite the stem & swallow the juicy red wounds.

When he gives you a stack of quarters for pinball,

recall the chips he’d stack on the counter

after the casinos closed. Recall the night

your mother left him on the loose stitching of a chair,

the living room as silent as a funeral mass

where nobody stands to give the eulogy.

Don’t ask him what compelled him

to call you today, eighteen months later,

& never admit that his absence

was a moist towel stuffed in your chest,

a constant fatigue of wanting. Don’t tell him

what the nuns at school said about divorce,

that tin bruise on the spirit, & don’t recount

your mother’s remarriage to a man

who is as plain as his own mustache.

Your father will tell you many times

he is not perfect. There will be a sunset

on his cheek & a bonfire in his Adam’s apple

& a coaster beneath his drink like a giant host,

the Scotch putting his tongue to sleep

like a pale stingray on the ocean floor.

When your mother asks what you did,

tell her you watched baseball all weekend

& bury your smoke-swamped shirts

in the bottom of the laundry. Every Friday,

she will watch you climb into that Bronco

& slide away till Sunday, your face

eclipsed by the tinted window’s twilight.

At Duffy’s, the women will be blonde

& they will seem as lonely as broken barstools.

When they speak to you, wait for your father

to translate, then reply to him in Spanish

& wait while he translates for them, & smile,

always smile. There will be something soulful

about this: the way your words become his

& his words become yours, as if the two languages

were shaking hands, casting one long shadow.

When your father brings a woman home, know

that laughter will leak through the doorframe,

that the body is an office always on the verge

of quiet. If she stays the night, the next morning

she might pull out a chair & gently say, sit

& this is how you will learn to concede

whenever a girl with sunlight digging into her cheek

taps your shoulder at the water fountain at school.

There, you will sit in the back row of catechism

& wait for the bell to trill its metal tongue.

You will stumble on the words of prayers

as if the short rope of your faith

was hindered by knots, as if religion was a field

with landmines scattered across. At Duffy’s,

shed the red skin off the bull’s-eye

with the lethal tips of your darts,

slide the smooth grain of the cue stick

over the wings of your thumb. Call all your shots.

Touch the chalk to your forehead

& trace a blue cross. When your father

begins to feed the slot machine’s pout,

remind him to save a ten for the Drive Thru.

He will sit on a stool, pushing the Bet button

as if he believed that if he pushed it enough

he would fill with an air that could raise him.

When the language comes, it will be

as if it had always been inside you.

You will look at things & their names

will drip from your tongue. Abstractions

will be archived as events, & there will be

a history you can instantly shuffle through

whenever a word is uttered. For example,

hustle will be the night your father challenges

a stranger to beat you at darts. Discretion, the night

two of the blondes who cooked you breakfast

sit on stools on either side of you. Impulse

will happen over a rack of pool: your father will say

you have an invisible brother who is better than you

& you will spend the rest of your life competing

with a ghost. Abandon will be your first beer,

a squeezed lemon wedge inside the empty bottle.

Independence will be the moment you realize

the only hands reaching out to you belong to clocks.

Irony, you will come to understand, will be

when you ask your father about those expatriates:

who are they & what are they doing here,

so far from home, & why would anyone

ever leave the place where they were born?

Fortune will be every time your father hits

All-Fruits on the slot. Innocence

will come right after Fortune—every time

you say, Let’s quit while we’re ahead,

not knowing how far behind you really are.

from: Wind Shifts, Copyright 2007.

Some Seasonal Beauty . . .

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

My Retirement Plan . . .

 
Oh! Alright, cats too!

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

"His uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives and a powerful voice for peace".

- Former US President Bill Clinton

BBC UK

NY Times

Poet Seamus Heaney, Dead at 74

Good night and sweet dreams, Mr. Heaney. 

You will be missed.

Digging
- Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

from: Death of a Naturalist Copyright 1966.

Featured Poet - E. E. Cummings

A couple of quotes: 

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. 

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

I had a high school English teacher who despised E. E. Cummings. She believed his approach to poetry was akin to an evil that was sending us careening into the bowels of hell.  His unconventional use of capitalization, spacing, and punctuation drove her to red faced tirades. 

Why she chose to teach a poet she hated so much, I don't know.  But I knew at the time that I was unable to share her opinion. I also knew that it was unwise to say so. What I didn't know was that I was the one in the majority, not her.    

Cummings' use of capitalization (or lack thereof) was the focus of a fair amount of controversy, but contrary to popular belief he did not eschew them entirely.  His signature for example, was signed using capital letters.  

"I am a small eye poet," he wrote to his mother by way of explanation. He used lower case letters to separate the poet from the poem, a unique way to solve a problem that still seems to plague most poets, the assumption that each poem is a small autobiography.

He was an accomplished writer in prose as well in poetry, and his intelligent, straightforward manner of expression brought him a great deal of respect. But did you know that he was also an artist? In fact, he considered himself as much a painter as a poet. Before he became disillusioned with the artistic establishment he garnered much acclaim as an American cubist and an abstract, avaunt garde painter. 

Unfortunately, not all of Cummings' efforts were as successful. His attempts to add his voice to the dialog on bigotry and racism were misunderstood. He fell into a pitfall that is common today, using the hurtful and controversial words while expecting his unspoken intent to be apparent. Also, surprisingly, this bohemian, avaunt garde writer and artist was a republican and an ardent supporter of Joseph McCarthy. 

When I think of E. E. Cummings, however, I think of poems like these: 

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

[i like my body when it is with your]

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric furr, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

 
from: Complete Poems: 1904-1962, Copyright 1991. 
Sources: sketch: self-portrait,   NOT "e. e. cummings" by Norman Friedman, The Paintings of E. E. Cummings (Painting: Nude Trio Two cavorting, one reclining) Ken Lopez Bookseller, Yes, I went to Wikipedia.