How often in the name of stability
we have insisted on sadness?

Good G.K.C. - my friend and saint -
wrote well about this state, wherein

the plod of solemnity and weight
is absolutely easy to maintain

precisely for the reason it is
a forced incapacity, a mono-chord

that leaves out the effortless lightness
of our being's contingency.

It is difficulty sealed, rounded
back on itself. But one only breaks

into a smile, into a new vista,
into a skyward sprawling tree

splitting the husk of the seed.
You know, I do not think my Uncle Chestnut

was as fat as he pretended to be.

Time-stamped

High on mountains worldwide they blow
on long wood trumpets in tones of psalm
summoning weirdness or cattle or calm
or play a wood horse with a horsehair bow
and the didgeridoo, that lowland shofar,
throttles where dancing and secrets are --

--The Barcaldine Suites, by Les Murray, read the rest of the poem here.



Time-stamped:






Where the Green Ants Dream brings up some questions about corporate impact on the environment; how considering only profit ends in raping, pillaging and polluting the earth and decimating cultures.

The blinking number makes for one's entrance
a more fulsome welcome when there's no one
warming house - knowing a voice has spoken
within the room while no ear was there to listen.

Once without a greeting there was the whirr
of one who called for making himself
a window; a rin bowl; a spiraling ear
in which to place your ear; a shadow-someone

wafting above, just above, plains of silence
while an event of wind had poured upon them,
toppling the blades to attain the first-known
speech of grass, as the stare-down light removed

to the western rim, and gave the soft beneficence.
Slow from this emerged a chorus enclosed
like singing in a conch's spiral; a gale
at the back of a cave: union ongoing

of voices faraway, and running before,
always flying and all underlying,
reverberating in the speaker machine;
a loosening, almost-heaven drone

approaching some celestial melody,
enough to cease the rack-cares of deer in the lift
of head's attention; to let out the feline, quickening,
or let in the night spiders from their lairs.

At certain times, similar messages
out of leaves that fall early, fragrant on
bronze lawns; a call from the gravid poplar wave.
Sometimes the road clover. Sometimes the train wail.

Panhandling is illegal and unsafe
where the plantain and pineapple weeds
breach asphalt shield and marathon their seeds
along the traffic-flanked meridian.
Wheels-a-hundred-thousand blow them dust
for root bed - thin reserve, a fractional crust
to shimmy out their four-lane prophecy
against all skin-flint greed, ambition, lust:
not even Solomon was arrayed as these
that float white stars around tiaras
or nestle yellow orbs in frilly hair
and at the tonnage truck-by make ballet.
Obdurate man of the waiting red
with a cardboard square that pleads
noon clemence on cooking cement,
that a hand outdo the weeds at least
and give him coin like dandelion snow:
if such perfect spheres shatter at a winnow,
to drift up and down a hillock till they catch
and put past grass a taproot down, home-locked
a few dolphin undulations away
from where it hover-toed on parent stalk;
or as a sheepy herd all ankle-silent,
nakedly sail over blinding sidewalk
lowest rung language into the ear of earth
at the next open fissure or tree bed doughnut
joining generations, annum per annum,
then what for chump-change dumb in one's console,
to dress him with the least we know,
to bless him with a coffee and a bagel
or stay sealed in an air-conditioned bubble
at bay, windows rolled, a spectator grave,
respecting the new-placed sign that reads:
panhandling is illegal and unsafe.

Time-Stamped

Totally epic:

Time-Stamped

Totally epic.

Egyptian

Camille Saint-Saëns...hmmmm...mmm...interesting. Never heard of him before a day or so ago. Happened on his piano concerto No. 5.

I like those themes in the first movement very much. Beautiful intermingling going on there.

That picture of Richter is cool.

We take cucumbers as less than beans,
mere vessels for absorbing dill in brine
or cooling salad, sandwich or the eyes:
boatloads harbour under bristle patches
that the advanced nutritionist declaims
in the end, as pretty much valueless.
And such would be the definitive
conclusion of our superior age,
which in truth, is a kind of split infinitive
and historical afterward, in a word,
does not amount to a hill of beans, for
cucumbers in the ancient world
were revered as a camel-hump-gourd
that given to mature its prickle skin
was storable hydration for the desert
and an immanently clean water source
when poison or stagnant putrefaction
made a wellspring's virtue into sin.
Think about that, then, when you put your hand
into the itching leaves of them and think
they're a kind of vegetable inflation
that wrecks the almighty supply and demand,
a cheap proliferation that could use some
scarcity, backed with rarest peppers - no,
wait a minute, those can be rather prolific -
backed with rarest some such hard to grow
and yielding little thing - find something -
reflect how they're the best kind of money,
like water, like little rabbit bunnies.

Uncle Corky!

Hyssop!

A pinch of seedlings from The Thousands are dying to be put in the ground. They're not literally dying but figuratively dying. Hyssop readily sows itself here, since I have found seedlings hatching in between the established shrubs.

Above are some of the hyssop plants from which the seedlings came. This is at a corner of the garden. There will eventually be a double border of hyssop (interspersed with lesser amounts of thyme, rosemary and oregano). That yellow-green shrub at the very corner is a variegated sage. The hyssop is just about to start flowering.

Oh look at that. A little bit of baby burly. And here's a little bit of Canadian history for you. B.C. can go head to head with those Ontario boys.

Lamb's Quarters I leave. Like I leave plantain. Like I leave chickweed. Like I leave purslane. Like I leave a lot of the good gentle weeds that are good to eat and which keep other bad weeds at bay. It's good to bring them into your garden and let them seed themselves.

Like this one: sheep sorrel. So tasty. I'll always be grateful to the botanist lady who brought this one to the attention of my taste buds after, you know, seeing it all over the place all the time. Later I discovered it is also one of the four ingredients in the "Essiac" recipe - oh, look at that - more Canadian history! But don't expect that kind of history to be taught in the school system, if you catch my drift.

Old Chalk Boards

Check it out.

Beautiful.

H/T: Nick Ripatrazone

Icon - Mother of God of Vladimir, Our Lady of Tenderness

You can say at the age thirty four
one does become a staid connoisseur
of cool evenings, the time of merciful
setting dew, of leaf-breathing through and through
when every tittle of floating moisture
goes unwasted: nightfall divests itself
that flowers can fold themselves
and roots regain their drink,
expanding in the soil lounge
of surety for stem and leaf.

Perhaps the body is never so sure
as when it sleeps, though it dreams,
like flowers that close themselves
in the divestment of evening,
inviting a guardian circumnavigation
that holds it, like a star in void;
becomes so embodied
body seems a different body,
then wakes, and in labour,
tension and release, in sport and play,
the body abstracts itself, expunges
waste and draws upon nutrients
to partake and form, to form
in partaking, something beyond the body.

As one gets older the little things
you never noticed get fresher and fresher.
Perhaps one could say in the evening of life
the peat moss pots of the seedling sunflowers
draw like a sponge the available moisture;
and even the neglected dessicated
light as feathers for lack of water:
the little sunflowers wilting right over
pick up their faces.