It's Irish poet Galway Kinnell's birthday. I heard him read once at the University of Georgia, in the late 80's. Incredible reading voice, rolling and burry, and a strong gentle presence.

Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should
not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John
Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something
from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if
they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket
through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the
configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark,
causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously
gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh
to join me.

--Galway Kinnell

two renditions of Townes van Zandt's song Nothing.

 

What kinds of words might the kudzu whisper to the magnolia branches as it overtakes them?

 I imagine them to be syllables of consolation and care, spoken with tenderness despite the encroachment of vine over pod. Inexorability curls around each phrase in a drawl, slowed so that the emerging noises sound like a record played at the wrong speed, lulling branches and blossoms into acquiescence.

How long does it take for rust to darken into this bloody burnt sienna?

No one can tell. The flakes defy any sort of analysis and resist being studied with the tenacious insubstantiality of snowdrops hurrying into dirt when flurries fall and the earth is too warm for them to stick.

When will this well run dry? And when it does, what will you do for drinking?

Its water, like the backside of that old barrel I found down in the ravine last fall, has been rusty for some time now, and there's no telling what will happen next. I can't say but I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or a giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

Whose face do you see in the moon?

Last time I looked, it was a bitter old man, in love with rocks, who collected them in heaps and hid them behind big sheets of glass for no one to hold and touch. That glass is cracked and clamped together now with big metal pincers and I see stick figures of men running in the stacks of marble alongside the buildings where the rocks wait for someone to see them, know them, hold them, collect them, love them.

How do you know what those rocks need?

I can't say but I had a feeling last time I was with them that they were lonely, that their coldness belied an ache for touch, a stony pulse that no scope can find. Of course, I could be wrong.

What kind of birds are those in the big white oak down by the train tracks?

They don't resemble any other birds I've ever seen. Their feathers almost glow with greenness and they sound like killdeers do at dusk, but they don't play games in the grass to keep things safe at home.  There are four of them and they share branches with six or seven crows in peace, the bigger darker birds still and silent like silhouettes in a shadow box.

How do you know what to gamble on?

No one can say for sure. It might be numbers, taken from some pool of pattern we all dip into when we need to quantify or guess. It could be weather: the blessing of rain in lakes, the welcome screen of snow on grass in early morning, the return of warmth. Or it could be something else entirely: a roll of the dice into the grace of shadow and the diminishment of wealth. Smallness, a challenge and a psalm, dealt out like manna or a sacrament as things fall apart and the center splinters into pieces of itself in places we can't reach or see. Loss, a subtraction resisted at first but then embraced and even loved.

When will we know when to quit?

When the smoke turns colors we don't see now. When cities percolate with the sounds of moving feet, not rushing but ambling, sharing the roads with the fed travelers who once sat hungry and alone on crowded hillsides. A multitude, at peace and heading towards some common space of work and gentle effort, a tribe finally able to claim its sustaining voice in the spaces where the words once slept.

laura sorrells
summer 07, Feb. 09

I keep running across this lately. three times in the past three days.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively
by constantly greater beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly

I must love the questions......like locked rooms full of treasure.

--Alice Walker

Wild, Wild

This is what love is:
the dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed
suddenly bursts into bloom.
A madness of delight, an obsession.
A holy gift, certainly.
But often, alas, improbable.

Why couldn't Romeo have settled for someone else?
Why couldn't Tristan and Isolde have refused
the shining cup
which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom?

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

Over and over Faust, standing in the garden, doesn't know
anything that's going to happen, he only sees
    the face of Marguerite, which is irresistible.
And wild, wild sings the bird.

--Mary Oliver

somewhere between
this tag of words
and the place
it's never been

a window frames
what shines like water
but could be anything,
even a sky.

lks 2/15

Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel, "I will not let thee go except I bless thee--"  Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct.

--Emily Dickinson, from her Letters


artwork by Guido Brink

I was tagged (over and over, actually) on another site recently, and the tag, which was originally 25 random things about yourself, turned into a list of 25 things for which you are grateful. I had to make it 27.

• 1.) Family. I can't imagine any other and wouldn't want any other.
• 2.) Forests. I love trees and how they creak and shift and catch the wind. Hidden grottoes with springs running beneath green moss and curves of root. Squirrels noisy in dry leaves. Ferns dense under mountain waterfalls. Pines narrow and straight under hot South Georgia sun. the flash of deer haunch leaping down a ravine. So much more.
• 3.) Friends. Again, I can't imagine life without them, without learning from them, laughing with them, pouring out my heart to them and listening to their stories and struggles, sharing meals and hikes and swims and books and music, silence and bad jokes, food and floats down slow rivers.
• 4.) Music. Beethoven's string quartets. Miles Davis. Radiohead. Van Morrison. Neil Young. Johnny Cash. Bob Dylan. Benedictine chants. Gorecki. Josh Ritter. Bessie Smith. Fela Kuti. Richard Thompson. Old Led Zeppelin. Django Reinhardt. Lucinda Williams. Francine Reed. M. Ward. Bach's Goldberg Variations. John Coltrane. Hank Williams. The list is really endless.
• 5.) Books.
• 6.) Teaching.
• 7.) Stories. My own, those of my family, those I read and overhear and listen to from strangers in the hardware store, my students', those I remember and carry with me from all sorts of sweet, lonely, haunted, joyous places. Myths and urban legends and lengthy narrative excuses for why an essay wasn't handed in on time.
• 8.) Rocks. Desert roses, hunks of quartz, hematite, malachite, dark green turquoise, amethyst, jasper in all its beige and golden hues.
• 9.) Coffee. Preferably a Sumatra blend fresh ground and steeped in the Bodum French press, but also the occasional strong cup of emergency caffeine purchased on the road and stirred with a wooden ice cream stick
• 10.) Birds. Cedar waxwings, red-tailed hawks, vultures over Carters Lake, cardinals at my feeder, Eastern bluebirds leading me away from nests, mockingbirds on powerlines varying their songs, finches bright with blue nibbling birdseed, big flappy herons rising over small swamps, gulls eating Sunbeam crusts from my hand, grackles silhouetted against an early island sky. And the ones I haven't seen yet.
• 11.) Computers and what they make possible. : )
• 12.) Wooden furniture: the shelves and desk my dad made by hand for my brother and me, the huge old dining room table that's older than me and is where my family shared so many suppers and breakfasts, the ancient straight chairs with basketweave seats that came from the old Floyd farm, big old farm plank tables made with pegs instead of nails, chifforobes with porcelain knobs, my stepmother's pie safes crowded with old Blue Willow plates.
• 13.) Pens, and sometimes pencils. Fountain pens that need fresh ink, ballpoints for business, gel pens for play and journaling, silver Cross pens for ceremony and special occasions. Broad thick carpenters' pencils for measuring things, colored pencils for school, sharpened number two pencils in my desk at work for students when they need them, holiday pencils with witches, bats and ghosts on them and which I always plan to give away but sometimes keep.
• 14.) Swamps. The funk of water, the rise of birds in winter, the way light happens through kudzu and branch. The float of plant tendril on blackwater, the hiddenness of gators, the surprise of cypress knees crowding against the sides of canoes.
• 15.) Fresh herbs: rosemary snipped and stuck in a pocket, sage with its funky wild crispness, lavender to place in small pieces of fabric and tie up with ribbon, parsley for garnish and flavor, oregano and basil to season with, and things I've never even tried to grow: lemongrass, patchouli, thyme.
• 16.) Toys, usually older ones: metal tops and drums and tambourines. But also the ones I run across in thrift stores and by the side of the road at the Burnt Mountain overlook. And the abandoned Tech decks and little stuffed lions and key chain etch-a-sketches I find at school and place in my desk drawer until no one has claimed them.
• 17.) Flannel. Shirts, sheets, pillowcases, pajamas, bathrobes with deep pockets.
• 18.) Watching people laugh and talk and drink coffee and think and listen to music, often in cafes or coffee shops but also at softball games and in the grocery store and watching parades and at the farmer's market buying organic corn.
• 19.) Travel: the rise of the jet into cloud, the rhythm of a train and how it feels to sleep snug in that little sleeper traincar space. Roadtrips by car across the country with friends and family. The games of memory and mental deftness that you play to help the time pass. Bicycles and how the breeze feels when you coast. Canoes and kayaks and getting back into the steering of them and how to look for shallow water and rocks.
• 20.) Animals, both wild and domestic: my cats and all their foibles and moods and how they lie for hours at the edge of my deck watching invisible things down in the leaves below them. The dogs and horses I grew up with and what they showed me about responsibility and companionship and grief.
• 21.) Sports: college basketball and all its moment to moment suspense, high school football and the slowness of it, the Braves having a decent season, learning the rules and stats of something new in order to have it make sense.
• 22.) Fresh stuff from the bakery: sourdough bread, croissants, carrot muffins, oatmeal raisin cookies.
• 23.) Solitude when I need it.
• 24.) Connecting with spirit and the unseen graces of walking labyrinths, remembering liturgies, burning sage in abalone shells, lighting candles for love and remembrance, silent and spoken prayers over food, making space inside for sky and marsh grass and lakewater and strange spiral shells at the edge of the sea.
• 25.) Glass and how it holds things like light, and water with magnolia blossoms floating in it, and iced tea with lots of lemon in summer, and pale orange tulips with scarlet edges. Dale Chihuly's transcendent, ethereal curves and furls and spheres and angles, hidden and bold amongst koi and orchids.

And two more I couldn't leave out:

• 26.) films. The Third Man, anything directed by Hitchcock, silent comedies with Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, To Kill a Mockingbird, Kurosawa's lengthy Japanese epics, chick flicks to soothe the soul, anything John Sayles directed, Amelie, Chocolat, the Godfather films, Fantasia, Crossing Delancey, The Big Lebowski, the Last Waltz, Spirited Away, Whale Rider, Smoke Signals.
• 27.) Andy Goldsworthy's work with stone, wood, ice, grass, water, leaves, and feathers. The shapes and textures I might have imagined but never did. The cracks and tumbles of rock and stem and snow and how they have a sentience that seems to speak but isn't heard aloud.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

--Howard Nemerov

In the woods, near mountains and amidst trees. Preferably with the crook of a narrow treetrunk or a big stone nearby for sitting, being still, reading, thinking, looking, listening, chewing on cheese and bread or maybe a Granny Smith, and noticing the way different textures of moss change hue and act as mattresses for tiny red bugs and fallen acorns.