Dancing Around the Four Sides

1) Went out on the deck yesterday to repot a small African violet I'd picked up for $2 from the clearance shelf at Lowe's, and while I was out there, I realized there was something wrong with the two little bird feeders I had hanging from our oak trees. When I looked more closely, I saw that squirrels (I assume it was squirrels) had STOLEN THE STEEL PERCHES. Luckily, they'd just thrown them on the ground, but. Four little U-shaped perches on each feeder, eight in total. I could only find seven, but Mister Nightdog found the last one today. They were all easily re-inserted, but ffs. THE BRAZEN LITTLE VANDALS. O_o

2) In the backyard again today and there was a huge crow high up in a tree in neighbor's yard, cawing. Layla saw it and started barking at it, then bounced across the yard, following it in flight as it flew away. I laughed and told her what a silly girl she was. She was so happy. What a goofball. :D

3) So sorry to see that poet Mary Oliver passed away today.

4) Currently reading Michael Ondaatje's new novel Warlight.

5) Here is a Mary Oliver poem:

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Five things make a post.

Poem for a rainy Sunday (rainy here, anyway).

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
    Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

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Had to turn the a/c on AGAIN because ffs it is almost 90 outside. >:-[

Finished the new biography of Shirley Jackson (by Ruth Franklin) and really enjoyed it. Was sad to realize that she died at such a young age (48) in 1965 -- she could've lived well into the 1970s and '80s and even the 1990s, and written so much more. Am now reading Entry Island by Peter May, which I am liking although I think the narrator/protagonist is a bit of a Gary Stu. :D

Also have been watching Westworld on HBO and Timeless on NBC. The former has exactly the kind of gritty, dark story that pulls me in; the latter is ... not that. *g* Timeless is a goofy series about three time travelers in pursuit of the bad guy, trying to keep him from changing the past. There are so many plot holes you could drive multiple trucks through them, but it is an endearingly silly show and the actors are giving it all they've got, so I keep tuning in.

That's it, ( but here's a poem by Philip Larkin ...  )

The writer Jim Harrison passed away yesterday, at the age of 78. This has always been one of my favorite poems.

Barking


The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.


~ Jim Harrison, 1937 - 2016
From Poetry, September 2008

And it's actually from the new New Yorker again. :D

Half-Light

That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of

Coachella -- I'd never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives

still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed

beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.

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New issue of The New Yorker came yesterday, so here's a poem by the Irish writer Eavan Boland.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing


The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,

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New issue of Poetry came today, so here is a poem.

Doors

An open door says, "Come in."
A shut door says, "Who are you?"
Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.
If a door is shut and you want it shut,
   why open it?
If a door is open and you want it open,
   why shut it?
Doors forget but only doors know what it is
   doors forget.

~ Carl Sandburg
Poetry, September 2013

The last poem for Poetry Month (an even dozen!) comes from an Irish writer named Eavan Boland, and is about love and loss. Thanks to everyone who read along -- let's do this again next year. ♥

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Helpful tips, from Jennifer K. Sweeney!

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Huh, I didn't realize there was a limit on subject line length. The complete title of this poem is Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased from the Blackboard Except the Word 'Save', and it's from a writer named Dobby Gibson.

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