Tuesday, May 24, 2005

There's just enough wind to ripple these grasses. Meadowlark tunes up, quail calls and calls. Big dog rolls joy, pleasure. Little dog sniffs the air, intent, nibbles a blade. Starling babies chirrup feed me in their dark eave-nest. Breeze fluting past, wowing in my ears. Creek still runs high, vigorous, pushing on. I think about my mothers, and wonder whether I ought to commit their ashes at last to this water while it's still a little wild. This water will flow into waters that flow past where their great- and great-great-grandchildren play. I saw a snake on the hill the other day. It was black and long, and a vivid orange-red stripe ran its length. It was coming uphill from submerged places, looking for a bright dry stone, maybe, for shelter, maybe. 8:07:10 PM    comment []

From Statcounter.com, the pie, as of today. 2:40:56 PM    comment []

From Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1989), p. 46:             Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.            "Doubt nothing, believe everything," was my friend's idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.            I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were the many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!            My friend's empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it. *********** p. 11:             He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother's cupboards. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell--and for what? Just because some people don't know how to bring their children up! 2:13:54 PM    comment []

Direct to keyboard this morning. No time to lolligag. Sunday we did indeed take six bales of hay back to the llama people and learned that the mama llama they had decided against giving us had--surprise!--given birth to a healthy cria on an April day when they'd been out of town. They hadn't known she was pregnant, although I'd expected it quietly back when they told me she'd weaned her little boy and it was time to find her a home "before it's too late." (It's already too late, silly, I'd thought then, and looked forward to the possibility of having a baby llama here.) She's elsewhere now though, and the hay is where it belongs, and I was surprised Sunday night to find the skin on my arms covered in angry welts, a rash of just the sort my son Josh used to get when he was little and used to roll on the lawn. A first for me, though, and it faded in a day. A tour and inspection of the ex-ponds yesterday revealed the final extent of the flood damage. They are quite silted in. No water can come in to feed them, and they've become murky puddles awaiting stagnation, advertising for fecund mosquitos. I wonder whether the trouts washed downstream in the torrent or smothered under silt? This means the llamas finally are without a water supply, and had been drinking out of the half-barrel I'd filled as insurance last week, and it was nearly empty. I keep a bucket over there for dipping out of the creek to fill it until I can toss over a garden hose and hook the creekwater pump to it. The creek is almost low enough that I can think about trying to improvise a footbridge out of lashed-together 20-foot corral rails I have stacked near the garage. Today has been a little vacation from vocation, as I am mercifully empty of verses, having finished a piece yesterday and exorcised/excised another bothersome dream image. They don't make for strong poems, I suppose, but I keep thinking if I can purge them I can move on to other subjects, be open finally to being moved by this world's experiences and events. Problem is, I keep having dreams, so it's like trying to dig a hole in dry sand. 11:27:26 AM    comment []