Reasons why...

There are a few reasons I haven't blogged:  limited time is one, reconsidering my son's privacy is another.  He's getting to an age (TEN if his birth certificate is to be believed) where my writing about his antics, or my reaction to them needs more consideration.  A need for more, well, not privacy necessarily, just keeping my cards, my life, closer to my chest.

The main reason, though, I think is that this sense of time speeding past, like a bullet train, has me straining and squinting to trick myself into seeing it in slow motion.  Or at least slower motion.  Writing doesn't slow it down any, I need to watch closely, enjoy the view.

I ran across this poem today that sort of sums it up nicely:

The Size Of Spokane
The baby isn't cute.  In fact he's
a homely little pale and headlong
stumbler.  Still, he's one
of us _ the human beings
stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);
and when he passes my seat twice
at full tilt this then that direction,
I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see
just why.  He's

running back andforth
across a sunblazed circle on
the carpet - something brilliant, fallen
from a porthole.  So! it's light
amazing him, it's only light, despite
some three and one
half hundred
people, propped in rows
for him to wonder at/ it's light
he can't get over, light he can't
investigate enough, however many
zones he runs across it,
flickering himself.

The umpteenth time
I see him coming, I've had
just about enough; but then
he notices me noticing and stops -
one fat hand on my armrest - to
inspect the oddities of me.

Some people cannot hear.
Some people cannot walk.
But everyone was
sunstruck once,and set adrift.
Have we forgotten how
astonishing this is? so practiced all our senses
we cannot imagine them? foreseen instead of seeing
all the all there is?  Each spectral port,
each human eye

is shot through with a hole, and everything we know
goes in there, where it feeds a blaze.  In a flash

the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems
less clever; all his chases and embraces
narrow down, while we
fly on (in our
plain radiance of vehicle)

toward what cannot stay small forever.

Heather McHugh


I'll be around once in a while.  You just might have to knock a little louder for me to hear you.

Your First Wife

I dreamt that I read your obituary
while sitting in my father's recliner
in the house I grew up in.

You were celebrated in bold face type,
you would be missed.
And they spoke of your first wife,
from whom you had been separated
"it was amicable" they said.

You had been living the life you were "supposed to live"
when you passed,
(but they gave our marriage the first long paragraph)
They quoted a statement you had made
regarding our marriage:
"It was good to be known"

I put down the paper and wept
having only just learned you were gone,
and that we were no longer married.
I buttoned my grey wool coat to the top
opened the rickety screen door of my father's house
to go sit under the Hawthorn tree

"It was good to be known"

Like a cup to catch my tears
it was oddly useful and practical
but not enough to hold my sorrow

Then your voice cut through the dream
like groggy thunder
muttering at the cat
"Bosco, stop"
I squirted him with the bottle
to keep him from scratching at the raindrops
sliding down the windowpane
and touched your sleeping shoulder.

It is good to be known.

"the darling 'buds' of May"

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18