Margaret Wise Brown/Poem: Reverant Road

Margaret Wise Brown helped make children's books profitable, because she understood that children experience books as sensual objects. She invested in high-quality color illustrations, and she printed her books on strong paper with durable bindings, so that children could grab, squeeze, and bite their books the way they did with all their toys. And then, in 1947, she published her own book, Goodnight Moon.



Reverent Road


Mostly on Sundays
stuffed in a black
fifty-five Ford.
Some of us with rosaries
others kept track on fingers.
Destination; our sister’s house
by route of Lake City Way.
We saw no lake or skyscrapers.
The drive was longer than the five decades
we prayed.

All praise to Mary fades
as we approach railroad tracks.
Dad slows the car, like a bus
laden with children.
These were dad’s tracks:
Northern Pacific, Burlington Northern,
names that filled the pause
between beads. We, ever familiar
bowed till tires bumped no more
and tracks disappeared into
the great asphalt way.

Dad’s beliefs chugged in my mind,
his gods of steam and diesel-
gods of destination and strength.
His creation brought forth
from steel tracks.


When cancer struck my father;
a derailment of mind from reason,
it rolled him onto deaths spur.

A Story about the Body By Robert Haas

A Story about the Body


The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

Robert Hass

Quote:Edith Wharton Comment: TA

There are two ways of spreading the light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton

As advent begins tommorow, it is good to read about light. That on a cold day like today a flicker is always present. What is light a metaphor for me? It is the possibility that it grows on the plans of the driest imagination. That it can become a major front; a storm aflame or it can be a couple wandering the streets looking for a place to rest and prepare for a birth, while trusting a dream. Which is most definantly light, as it best. TA

Quote: John Coltrane Poem:This Moment

My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music.
—John Coltrane

This Moment

More people are walking
Into traffic; so terrible
So traumatic.
A few get run over
More than once
Shape-shifters
Like coyote and armadillo.

We follow human aftermath.
On the teli, in the paper, from
No name to identification
To obituary.

Many times there is no
Summation, was he/she,
German, Irish, Sudanese?
Did I attend school with them?
Did she work for my dad?
It behooves me to demystify.

Yesterday
A road side bomb killed 35.

Quote:Shelby Foote Poem:Jesus and Junk Yard Dogs

Shelby Foote said, "A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing."



Jesus and Junk Yard Dogs

You found a door
And just had to paint
Jesus, or would it
Make sense to say Christ-
Resurrected from such
Yard junk?
That’s where He is most
The refuse of our being.

Sorting
He looks over His shoulder
Hounds of the self are unleashed
In fits of healing. And at that
Moment of pouncing, all dogs pounce
Christ uncurls to expose
Wounds of belonging
Dogs adjust their snouts
Sniff, and unsnarl, lick persecution
Till scabs form.

The door, where it is
That’s the key, consenting us
Into ourselves and Christ’s
Love, unsure foot by unsure foot
Over and over.

Quote:Arthur Miller /Poem:Getting Sentimental Over You

Arthur Miller died on February 11, 2005. He said, "Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."



Getting Sentimental Over You


I had an older sibling
I never knew- aborted
Decades before I was conceived.
I pondered my siblings trail
Down birth canal, assisted
By stainless steel, body cramps
Shame and scrubbed hands.

Mom was wounded to silence
Leaving bits of unborn
On all of us children
As we slid down
Her common tideway.

Prior to their wedding day
Mike loved Ellen and Ellen
Said I will, and she did.

Quote:Nathanael West Poem: Rules

Nathanael West said, "Forget the epic, the masterwork ... you only have time to explode."

Rules

Dad had a rule
that he could punish me
till I was taller than
the chest of drawers.

I was already over-height
and did not know
it was the one in his brain
he measured me to.