Saturday, September 26, 2015

O cheeses; Happy birthday; Staying after; Cagney and Hope; Banjo; All my relations



Limburger and onion sandwich on rye


O Cheese
by Donald Hall

Listen Online


In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.
O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.
Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Évêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.
O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.
Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.
O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.

"O Cheese" by Donald Hall from Old and New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990




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Say it isn't so


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William Redding turned 15 last Sunday 9-20-15





Nobody's forgetting Dad




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Staying After
by Linda Gregg

Listen Online


I grew up with horses and poems
when that was the time for that.
Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky
in the Fillmore West when
everybody was dancing. I sat
in the balcony with my legs
pushed through the railing,
watching Janis Joplin sing.
Women have houses now, and children.
I live alone in a kind of luxury.
I wake when I feel like it,
read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.
At night I watch the apartments
whose windows are still lit
after midnight. I fell in love.
I believed people. And even now
I love the yellow light shining
down on the dirty brick wall.

"Staying After" by Linda Gregg from In the Middle Distance. © Graywolf Press, 2006


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Bob Hope and James Cagney
We think we saw them sprinkling sand
on a cloud recently.




WATCH


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28



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Peabody Parade, All-Frets Convention, St. Louis 2012.

A lovely colloquy by Happy banjo gentlefolk concerning Eddie Peabody.

A tribute to the human hands and fingers evolved in these musicians

and their mentor/idol Eddie Peabody


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObIWBC0jwZ8
Run time 34 minutes



and 
Dave Marty as younger man
playing Ain't We Got Fun!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQRIlcl0Szo






Eddie Peabody




Raccoon editor's Grandpa Haynes Bunker
with his banjo courtesy of our wavering hand

Haynes was a clerk in the phamacy at dowtown
Clarke's Walgreen drug store.
(Where the Clarke Irish Restaurant now is)

Grandpa tuned in Eddie Peabody's radio programs for us weekly
and he would play along, with his open purple-velveted case
at his feet.

He often took his banjo with him when he walked to work
as he always did
to have it after hours when he played at the Kavanaugh and 
Democheetz's tavern on Main Street (where Divino Gellato's is now)

  Ref: http://raccoonnews.blogspot.com/2008/08/from-annals-of-history-raccoon-district.html




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In Waukesha

For Native American Sunday tomorrow at the UCC
"All my relations"
We don’t think about it very much anymore
but the ghosts of native Americans might;
we walk, or alas, drive their ancient trading trails
paved many times over;
even our later inter-urban streetcar tracks
are now out of sight,

buried like their lightly-beaten paths
by time and poured concrete
and newcomers can’t get the gist of traveling downtown,
can’t figure these streets out because so many diagonals
cut through strangely, they say.

But it was all so simple then
for the woodland people
to follow their converging spoke-like paths
to the now downtown five points trading posts
No doubt

going through thick woods
from their outlying settlements,
intending to live forever in their homeland
upon which they trod so gently

Pioneers built great improvements
on their sacred burial grounds
and cannons stand in the library park
passing time’s additions, tentatively,

muddying the purer water of days
dim to us, unknown;

But not to the ghosts
who watched flowing streams
clear away many other silty stirrings
only for a moment hiding customary clarity

We are being watched by these patient spirits
these spector ‘savages’ who knew so much.
Their way to our downtown
is abiding.

(~ All my relations ~)

[DZD]




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....

H2O pending 



Saturday, September 19, 2015

Pigeon on sill, banded; Bob's 80; Wing-walking; From hidden earth - tomatoes; Metanoia


Pigeon
sits on sill at the feeder.
Is wearing a red band.
May 'belong' to somebody 
around here.

^,^


How to honor Bob Heeschen
on turning eighty (80)?

We have root beer stand
hot dog with onions and onion rings
in his name.


Bob discovers this week a bed of new raccoons 
in his wood pile up there in St Paul.
Sends picture.

Whudja git for your birthday, Bob?


One hopes that Bob's Greyhound
who peers in the woodpile's direction
has been deemed safe by the mother raccoon.




^,^


Wing walking


Omer Locklear, Lillian Boyer etc.

The 1920's

Wing-walking initiated by WW I pilot Omer Locklear
took off as a fad in this decade.

The tune COME JOSEPHINE IN MY FLYING MACHINE
was big:


click here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rGcELt5lUo











Hair-raising !

(Archival) Cat-Ass-Trophy

How many times must one say no
To a cat begging to go out
After hours

My reckoning of how many
Times I’ve leaned down to advise her
Sours

My disposition;  for heaven’s sake
Do you want to hear those mighty descending wings
From the nocturnal sky?  She glowers,

having no imagination, I guess
and continues her pitiful begging to go out
and take her chances during the darkened hours

An owl will, believe me, WILL swoop down
And pick you, you tasty morsel, as if
You were nothing heftier than one of our flowers

growing outside the door, in whose midst you slink and creep.
These owls are big with talons sinking deep,
They’ll carry you to a treetop;  disembowelers

these owls are;  your nemeses;
You don’t want to find yourself with great ease flying upward
By surprise, my pussy, to be sliced, diced, and devoured!

Like talking to a catter -wall;
At night a different creature;
She persists!  “ Mee-ow,  Mee-OW, MEE-OW!”  Hers

to learn the hard beak way, but not on this watch!
Her bones and parts shan't be reduced to pellets, trophies
dropped under the Tamarack’s peacable bowers!

No is NO, my furry friend, reckon thyself lucky;
Yea, and compose and confine thyself;
Not to be an owl’s, your howls and bowels are ours!

[David Dix 6-9-2002]






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Yes, Tomatoes
from the community garden
at the First Congregational Church UCC
have grown where the little old house once stood.

That house got torn down.
Now the land under it produces food
for the neighbors - and us.

I especially like the soil that clings to these tomatoes.
You won't find that at the supermarket
or even the farmers market.

At those places all food is polished and perfect.
I want real life -
give me some real dirt to go
into the bushed I allegedly
have eaten at my age.

We won't go into the possibility
that the clinging dirt may be
Uncle Charlie or an Indian

 or other unclaimed but now claimed
  broken down
matter that was unseen and unused
when the garden was a basement.

And yes, I will wash most of the dirt off
under the faucet, because I am at heart
a chicken. (Segue)


Hulda Chicken helps John Helt, retired UCC minister,  with his garden


Hulda takes sun with John 



T
If you put that tomato picture up
as your screensaver, it has a 3 dimensional affect.


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metanoia
At the heart
Two FUNDAMENTAL ideas:


 byJohn M. Buchanan
Editor, The Christian Century maazine
- - - - -

PENDING: 
Waukesha water piece 


Saturday, September 12, 2015

Helt sends letter to Journal-Sentinel (we clip it); Lawn less; Mr. Rhutabaga; Why worry?





John Helt
on Scott Walker's
 Eagle Scout rank

Walker and the Boy Scouts

"Gov. Scott Walker likes to remind us that he was an Eagle Scout, that his boys were in scouting and that his wife was a den mother.
Walker has used this resume footnote to suggest that he is qualified to be president of the United States. He has attempted to bolster his Wisconsin governor credentials with this scouting history, especially in relation to his ambitions to become a national and world leader: commander-in-chief, protector of the environment and guardian of youth.
While achieving the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America movement is laudable and something to be proud of, as a fellow Eagle Scout, I do not appreciate Walker's attempt to link his radical right agenda with the scouting movement. Beyond his ridiculous comments about being prepared to fight terrorism abroad because he held off Madison protesters, his overall record and strategy has been divisive in a way that contradicts the values of scouting.
Walker is reminiscent of the last Republican president who famously claimed to be a "uniter," but, it turns out, was the consummate "divider." I am surely not alone in hating to see the BSA in general, and Eagle Scouts in particular, associated with this ambitious politician who has proven to be such a "divider" during his time in the governor's mansion."
The Rev. John Helt
Colgate
......

John Helt's recent letter to the JS

Our addiitonal illus:









s e m a p h o r e (ed. note)


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Lawn less

From JS 9-10-15



http://www.jsonline.com/features/home/two-teachers-make-their-home-bloom-outside-and-inside-b99564907z1-325815941.html

Let the sun




Son David Jr greets sun
at John Helt's former church
which he pastored - St. Pauls UCC
Hubertus WI







The Lawnist


The tuneless tantalizer is at his tiny tines again,
showing our one-block-long street
how to wrap our leaves; how
in the face of raw nature's fluttering intrusion
never to sound lawn-care retreat!

Yes, it's true, the lax commoner rakes his leaves
to curbside and waits for the city vacuum patrol
to eventually come
and suck up the colorless artifacts,
but a True Lawnist -
and he is one - cannot countenance the slug's delay;
in never leaving leaves to new wind,
the requisite re-rakings must bereave the rascal's eves.

Moreover, he's almost - have we not noticed? -
got his grass golf-course-grandiose; gr-r-r-reat!
The perfect shade of green and blade count per square inch
so close to being on the weedless button,
albeit by means of contracted and self-ministrations
of many merchanted murder-lizers
and species-endangering sprayed spuriosities.
That,
and his criss-crossing, thrice-weekly mowing patterns
are to me a head-in-the-grass reality avoidance;
a harm, illicitors of sound-begotten
yawns.

Thus,
The Lawnist packages leaves that aren't even his,
some of them,
in plastic drawstring pajama bags
and trucks them elsewhere to sleep; city-dumped.
Fast,
before the vacuum truck might traumatize
his pedigreed grass roots
with too much harsh suction.
He's invested too much of himself
on his monk cell-sized tract that
anything could be otherwise.

Soon snow will fly, another of his property blights
which will demand of his ordered lawn creed
incredulous shovel-rounded snowbanks
at his sidewalk's rulered edge,
no matter how deep the snow becomes.


I in an unthrown spirit of slowly-mown grass,
formerly done with a push reel,
and eternally shifting leaf piles
will offer my counterpoint of
a jagged serpentine snow lane,
a studied randomness
garnering from the grumpen Lawnist
neither a summery hello
nor a wintery thanks!



DZD



^,^


Elsewhere,


Sun man son
DD Jr.
greets it again outside our tent
- his morning ritual -

Peninsula State Park WI
2006

.........................

David Sent this link today


^,^







A genial rhutabaga
was contained in a bunch
of them purchased at
the Farmers Market

This one had a stringy beard
and eyes, nose and mouth
colored similarly to the
plainer faces of his brothers
and sisters

A stand-out
but like the others he was
picked up in the cruel
mandibles of life

and was cooked and eaten

he had looked resigned to it


^,^


More Muriel Anderson


Why worry?
Imagine



OK ONE MORE



----

Still pending
WAUKESHA WATER
a breaking story
underway