Why Would I Be Writing Essays When I Could Be Reading Obscure Poems By Poet Laureates?"

Forgetfulness

By Billy Collins 

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, 
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those 
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart

This is how I feel, tonight.

Because I don't take criticism well
Because I have volatile amounts of energy
Because I just finished watching another episode of the Pacific
Because airplane sounds make me nervous
Because I over-communicate.

Mmm... That'll do pig.

Everyone wants a piece of you, Dr. King

O God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for this golden privilege to worship thee, the only true God of the universe. We come to thee today grateful that thou hast kept us through the long night of the past and ushered us into the challenge of the present and the bright hope of the future. We are mindful, O God, that man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of things and humanity is not God.

Bound by our chains of sin and finiteness, we know we need a savior. We thank thee, O God, for the spiritual nature of man. We are in nature but we live above nature. Help us never to let anyone or any condition pull us so low as to cause us to hate. Give us the strength to love our enemies and do good to those who despitefully use us and persecute us.

We thank thee for thy Church, founded upon the Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon thee. Then, finally, help us to realize that man was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity.

Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace, help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all of God's children -- Black, White, Red, and Yellow -- will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the kingdom of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.

-Martin Luther King, Jr (1956) 

Let's have a blogging party!

Today I was happy to drive outside of Seattle, for a moment.
In the car my friend, my current housemate of 2011, Tate Beers, she talked to me about her quarter spent in Australia. Its a changing thing, travel. But I hate to use that word, Change. Like you can become something you weren't before - something totally separate from your first being. Instead I hope its more like a widening and deepening of self. Unsounded depths! A reaching out to touch the edges of wherever you end, whatever that is.  Something John Donne would talk about, eyes threaded on a string.
The conversation transitioned to this idea of Past-Sick. Like homesick, different then being reminiscent. Its that immediate feeling that falls upon you when you know you've been somewhere in time thats really great, and the next phase doesn't seem to measure up in feeling. Oh the human, always seeking the ascent.

Have you been Past-Sick lately?

it freezes you

Life, and Death...
right?

Jacaranda Tree

It's been a while since a singer-songwriter and his album has imbedded itself so deeply into my life. I saw him at the Q cafe before I came home to Canby for the break, and it turns out he is currently recording in Portland. This man (Josh Garrels) has his words right; he has been reminding me all Winter break to Love you and to Love me. He also has his voice right, which sits some where between Bon Iver, Ray Lamontagne, and my friend Luke Bogue.

This song is a poem his wife wrote, and it gets me every time.

This song is about the birth of his baby girl, and it gets me every time. (only a real man can sing about babies:)

He is a poet, a midwestern boy, a man of God. I'll let you find the rest of his stuff.

t>

And here was evening, on the first day

A STORY


She turned toward me. Eyes old and wise, yet I have the sneaking suspicion they have always been that way. The places around her mouth weren't framed in laugh lines, but her eyes were. She blinked and said to me;

"We thought the old dogwood died last year, at the turn of fall to winter. I spent a childhood (and how long is that anyways?) wandering under its heavy boughs. A thousand years, please, I asked when the morning began to end. but instead it fell apart; like the peal around the oranges purchased in large cardboard crates from the baseball boys every January. Ah this isn't so bad I said, and lifted up my hands to the sun directly above me. Regardless of the talk I clung to my mother's breast and inhaled deeply. Hay, lipstick and dryer sheets.
What I saw first was never the moment but always the gentle nudging of the arriving moments, rendering the Final moment king. Growing up, (and how far up is that, anyways.) I never cried in movies until the very end, when el fin would move across the screen. Rolling cumulous clouds gathered in the sky in those times as well, always the precursors, they formed and collapsed giving way to more stable forms of precipitation. Castles without substance, I said, and sat beneath the dogwood tree which was always there with its branches of shade, my arms around my blooming knees.

Oh, they have always said that where your treasure is where your heart is also. And Hell, do I treasure my mind. But Hell do I feel, and that is my heart. Can you even see how this wakes me, and in the night tears me apart?

Give me a thousand years!

There is a desperate declivity at the end of things, and before then just guesses and stabs. When my mother died I guess a part of me died as well. I tried to climb back into the orange peels and roll up the fleshy sides until my fingernails stung. My mother always loved oranges.

There is a different sunset to each season, and that's how I knew it wasn't winter anymore when I took a walk this evening. Winter sunsets, they hang in the air intimately; illuminating both flaw and virtue in a thematic light. Things begin, however, to smooth and grow in the light of a spring evening. Thats when I noticed the tree for the first time in a while. Gravel on the pathway leading up to it, wind singing in the branches bare and raw. Except, my friends, for one, with a green tendril splayed out on the tip. A hidden pink all static within. A moment without the final moment  for once (and soon eternity) as the evening peel revealed the coming night.

They have always said that the heart lies where a man's treasure is. My mind is a treasure, I respond, but my heart devises my way. The Lord, then, must directeth my steps."

She ended her moment here, and then turned to walk away. Slow, I saw, and careful, but I suspected it had not always been that way. Once she was gone her rhythm however remained; peel peel peel. My heart saw. Peel peel peel, and a thousand more years!