Saturday, March 28, 2015

The tree that would not be broken; Jose; Reprintables; Ritual Waters




I caught this the oher day
on the NY Times

Definitely worth a play:









^,^



Not bad
for a "blind" guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU2wHIwf_70

+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmyQOq4MAdY

+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAs7U1dyesQ

^,^



Waukesha raccoon sees the good news


Reprinted 
from THE WAUKESHA FREEMAN 
3-25-15



Reprinted
from the Shepherd Express 3-26-15



Also reprinted from
Shepherd Express
3-26-15



^,^





The mighty Fox River now sees the young Burmese father
At its banks communing with the moving water
Which flows like the Ihrewhaddy in his homeland
Slowly but surely, and it has fish

Hla rides my bicycle – now his -  in spare moments and continues
His pursuit of a livelihood at the Fox River
The other day he told me he caught eight big fish
“How big?” -  and he held his thumbs and middle fingers together
to represent girth

instead of  hands far apart to represent length
the way we do around here
which said he is thinking of food
where fishermen of my acquaintance usually are thinking of a trophy

How wonderful to think of Hla riding my bicycle to the river
With a fishing pole
Catching fish that struggle to survive in slowly clearing water
Fish to feed his boys who also like to catch and eat fish, as in Burma

In olden days and even now sometimes we see
Milwaukee (?) blacks and pore folks at the riverbanks and lakeshores
in Waukesha County – they aren’t from around here -
hunkered down, usually, so as not to stand out

fishing “our” recreational waters
for food, smiling furtively beneath broad straw hat-brims
when they snag one that would bring their hands
around in big O’s;
And well-to-do locals motor by and cluck their tongues and say:
“Just look at that!”

[David Dix 9-14-2002]


Saturday, March 21, 2015

Nola/Vincent - Muriel Anderson; Days we would rather know; View from space












Nola
Muriel Anderson




Vincent

^,^


Days We Would Rather Know



There are days we would rather know
than these, as there is always, later,
a wife we would rather have married
than whom we did, in that severe nowness
time pushed, imperfectly, to then. Whether,
standing in the museum before Rembrandt’s “Juno,”
we stand before beauty, or only before a consensus
about beauty, is a question that makes all beauty
suspect … and all marriages. Last night,
leaves circled the base of the ginkgo as if
the sun had shattered during the night
into a million gold coins no one had the sense
to claim. And now, there are days we would
rather know than these, days when to stand
before beauty and before “Juno” are, convincingly,
the same, days when the shattered sunlight
seeps through the trees and the women we marry
stay interesting and beautiful both at once,
and their men. And though there are days
we would rather know than now, I am,
at heart, a scared and simple man. So I tighten
my arms around the woman I love, now
and imperfectly, stand before “Juno” whispering
beautiful beautiful until I believe it, and-
when I come home at night-I run out
into the day’s pale dusk with my broom
and my dustpan, sweeping the coins from the base
of the ginkgo, something to keep for a better tomorrow:
days we would rather know that never come.

"Days We Would Rather Know" by Michael Blumenthal from Days We Would Rather Know. © Pleasure Boat Studio Press, 2005.




^,^


        View from Space  

       



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLHQQuiX02o

For Wiki data on the artist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Anderson

Saturday, March 14, 2015

No raccoon; A person of limited palette; Heaven



On Friday
March a week ago
at 4 AM a Waukesha ambulance
picked me up at the Odd Fellows hall on South Street.

After rapidly checking my vitals first upstairs
then hauling me inside, the several attendants continued working on me
before we got rolling to the hospital hill ER.
After 3 - 4 days of dehydratng I'd succumbed to
a case of viral pneumonia
it was determined.

The doctors at the airplane hangar
-it seemed like - hallucinating - 
at Waukesha Memorial
had me under control quickly -
going through their checklist of things
that could be wrong with me

given my history.

After a couple days of administering IV fluids
and antibiotics in intensive care
I was transferred to the regular patient population
and on Tuesday this week I was released
to the world at large.

That is why there was no raccoon last Saturday.

This remedial sortie was endorsed, embraced and underwritten by my good partner, Dee.







 Life has taken on its usual madcapacity again.
This get well card sent by friend Wm.


^,^



A Person of Limited Palette
by Ted Kooser

Listen Online


I would love to have lived out my years
in a cottage a few blocks from the sea,
and to have spent my mornings painting
out in the cold, wet rocks, to be known
as “a local artist,” a pleasant old man
who “paints passably well, in a traditional
manner,” though a person of limited
talent, of limited palette: earth tones
and predictable blues, snap-brim cloth cap
and cardigan, baggy old trousers
and comfortable shoes, but none of this
shall come to pass, for every day
the possibilities grow fewer, like swallows
in autumn. If you should come looking
for me, you’ll find me here, in Nebraska,
thirty miles south of the broad Platte River,
right under the flyway of dreams.

"A Person of Limited Palette" by Ted Kooser from Splitting an Order. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014

^,^



HEAVEN COULD BE LIKE THIS

SRN ed.:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pawgzVGC9-4