An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.
Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full stress, passion, and danger.
…
(The oyster) has eight enemies, not counting man who is the greatest… .
Life is hard, we say. An oyster’s life is worse.
-from Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher.
TO ALL THE VETERANS PAST AND PRESENT THANK YOU.
“I remember my first drawings of my mother’s face—longish straight nose, clear brown eyes, high-boned cheeks. She was small and slight; her arms were thin and smooth-skinned, her fingers long and thin and delicately boned. Her face was smooth and smelled of soap. I loved her face next to mine when she listened to me recite the Krias Shema before I close my eyes to go to sleep.”-My Name is Asher Lev
note: My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is our next book for Group Read which starts in September. What is Krias Shema?
I’m leaning against the railings
I did not count how many butterflies
My inner thought is flowing
like the sap of the rubber tree
the climb is slow, steady and sometimes tiring
even a sequences of sentences
can be counted in my left hand
the Japanese movie Afterlife gives me
an angelic vision of what a new life
can be. Not to start all over again
with new diction or language
but of awareness, continuity.
Where are you?
note: I pass these railings half way in my walk. I stop for a few moments, wipe sweat on my forehead, look at the hills and rest my mind then resume my walk home.
Why unreal?
It rattles cymbals,trumpets
Are dragged out of the attic.
Cats stand in awe.
The rain disturbs the leaves
The leaves swarm the river
The fisherman complains
Trouts have sharp teeth.
I’m having coffee with a friend
We stop our conversation
We allow the ambulance to pass.
My phone is dead,does not hear your text.
Note: from the Friends of Library book sale I picked up Collected Poems of WallaceStevens, 10:04 by Ben Lerner & Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child. And from the library’s rack of new books I borrowed Tess Gerritsen’s Playing with Fire.
I’m not sick anymore.
Her eyes are ambiguous,her
stare is not of affection,storm
can start anytime,
trees can start falling.
Then she turns her head
And smiles, someone is
calling her name. Suddenly
the earth is beautiful again.
Yesterday I took a shower,groomed,drove down to the library to browse at the book sale.
I stayed a little more than half hour. The room felt like it was moving. My throat felt like ivies were crawling. My cough rattled still the chandelier.
I could not see the red planet.The sky was cloudy with the impending rain. It did not rain.
I listened to a few songs by the four Holbrook sisters:SHEL
Today my appetite returned. The chandelier still shuddered and the ivy,still an ivy. I might see the red planet tonight.
Note:I finished Arcadia,a multilayered science fiction fantasy,by Iain Pears.
The weather changed for me on Wednesday. I’m hot, cold, achy, tired,and have no appetite even for cold water.
I’m lying down on a sofa and resume reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.I finished Swann’s Way and half of Within a Budding Groove.I listened to the fictional Vinteuil sonata. “The moment when night is falling among the trees,when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth.”
And I’m reading, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, again. I alternate reading them for variety.
Music is mixed with the reading. Mendelssohn’s violin concerto and Beethoven’s sonatas.
The art teacher dug up
shallot from the student’s garden.
She placed it on top of a table.
The students were learning
how to paint still life
You picked it up
started stroking the leaves
like an angel playing a harp,
a choir of angels singing:
feed the hungry,
bring them to the table of the Lord.
All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast
In the infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated
I have
touched it,
It undoes me
wider than wide
Everything else
is too narrow.
You know this well
you who are also there.
-Hadewijch II
◦ note: quoted from Women in Praise of the Sacred edited by Jane Hirshfield

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