Ten crooked fingers to count with

Not that it matters, but this is definitely one of my to 10 favorite poems ever.

This World, Not the Next 

by Lance Larsen

True, God dreamed our first parents out
of chaos of firmament and longing.
And true, he pled with them to return
to a delicious Forever of his making.
But it was this world, with its tides and machinery
of sweet decay, they learned to love.

He touched their hair, then covered their sleeping
mouths with His and declared breath
holy, but forced them to draw another
and another.  He commanded that they eat
not of that dazzling tree of awe and penumbra,
but knew its fruit would eat at them.

And when it did, and when they fell
into knowing, God folded the garden and hid it
deep inside the woman, but commanded
the man to tend it.  And in due season the man
Eved, and the woman Adamed back
and the song of radiance they keened was pure

darkness by morning.  And God blessed
their bounty to be infinite, but left them
ten crooked fingers to count with.
And buried His echo inside their bodies,
a delicious lapping that answered yes and yes
though neither could remember the question

Ecclesiastes was wrong about that

A Man in His Life

by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose.  Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.  

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur.  It tries and it misses
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and in its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches already pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

The Hippy Commune

You all know what you've been waiting for: pictures of the commune. Yes, these are SFW.

In back of the main house. Yes, that's an outdoor shower.

The outhouse is a happening place, man.

The outside of the outhouse, or "privy," as we like to call it.

Milling sorghum.

Pressed sorghum stalks next to the vineyard.

If I were a princess, I would send princes on quests for a butcher block like this for my castle. This is the holy grail of kitchenware.  

Road Trip Down to Dallas or Indiana Never Ends

Well, it's been a month in Dallas, and I'm finally posting some pictures from my road trip down from MI.

The Indian Sand Dunes by Gary, IN

I met a white-haired, snaggletooth man in a down jacket and a baseball cap here. His name is John. He quit his job, sold everything he owns except his Windstar, and is visiting every National Park in the country. I wished him the best of luck.

I don't remember what town this is in, but it was right after Utica, or right before Utica, where this crazed museum curator snatched me off the streets and held me captive for an hour explaining the glories of their little museum. All I remember is a wooden duck and a carriage Lincoln road in. This hefty homeschool mama came in and the two of them started monotone monologuing about Noah's flood and the fossil record under our feet. I edged out. 

The sunbursts accurately represent my mental state after 7 hours of Indiana. It's officially my least favorite state (sorry).

Don Quixote didn't show up, much to my chagrin.  

Pentatina for Five Vowels

I have about 5,000 words written which I'm sure will someday find themselves edited and published in blog-form, but right now I'm weary and I just want to post a poem which struck me from last month's Poetry.

Pentatina for Five Vowels

BY CAMPBELL MCGRATH

Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.
The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.
Nothing unspoken goes without saying.
Love’s a casino where lovers risk playing.
The future’s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

The future’s a promise there’s no guaranteeing.
Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.
Love is a marriage of feeling and being.
The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.
Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.
The future is chosen by atoms colliding.
The past’s an elision forever eliding.
Today is a fog bank in which I am hiding.
Love is a burn forever debriding.

Love’s an ascent forever plateauing.
Nothing is granted except by bestowing.
Today is an anthem the cuckoos are crowing.
The future’s a convolute river onflowing.
The past is a lawn the neighbor is mowing.

The past is an answer not worth pursuing,
Nothing gets done except by the doing.
The future’s a climax forever ensuing.
Love is only won by wooing.
Today is a truce between reaping and rueing.

In case you're wondering...

...this is why a liberal arts education matters. From October's Poetry, reprinted from its first publishing in that same magazine in 1958.

Private and Profane 

by Marie Ponsot

From loss of the old and lack of new
From failure to make the right thing do
Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
     From words not the word, from a feckless voice
     From poetic distress and from careless choice
     Exclude our intellects, James Joyce.
From genteel angels and apostles unappalled
From hollywood visions as virgins shawled
Guard our seeing, Grunewald.
     From calling a kettle an existential pot,
     From bodying the ghost of whatever is not,
     John save us, o most subtle Scot.
From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod
From eating the pease and rejecting the pod
Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.
     Couperin come with your duple measure
     Altar our minds against banal pleasure.
Durer direct with strictness of vision
Steady this flesh toward your made precision.
     Mistress of accurate minor pain,
     Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane.
From pretending to own what we secretly seek,
From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,
Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.
     From ignorance of structural line and bone
     From passion not pointed on truth alone
     Attract us, painters on Egyptian stone.
     From despair keep us, Aquin's dumb son;
     From despair keep us, Saint Welcome One;
     From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.
The zeal for free will get us in deep,
That the chance to choose be the one we keep
That free will steel self in us against self-defense
That free will repeal in us our last pretense
That free will heal us
     Jeanne d'Arc, Job, Johnnie Skelton,
     Jehan de Beauce, composer Johann,
     Dark John Milton, Charter Oak John
Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt,
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.

Does anyone know anything about Marie Ponsot?? Her other poem in this month's Poetry, "A Visit," is also swell. It reminds me of my grandmother a lot (sans the gin). I just really dig the vim with which she wrote.

Downer of the Day

Ok, I'm really sorry, and I know this is might sound negative and uncharitable, but this month's Poetry has some real stinkers -- like, hoo boy, some of this stuff is bad. One example:

My Weather

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,

restless, stunned, relieved.

Does a tree also?

A mountain?

A cup holds

sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.

I hold these.

Oh for goodness sake. What is this?? I don't even want to talk about it.

That's not to say it's all bad -- Deborah Paredez and Mary Karr's stuff is really interesting (and Karr's poems are about David Foster Wallace, which Serena intuited w.o even knowing they used to date, because Serena, as I've said before, is really really smart). But for goodness sake.