Memoirous

 My daughter used to spend hours playing with her Fisher-Price peoples, the one’s with the wooden head, lining them up and world building. In fact by dinner time and she was asked to pick up and get ready to eat and then bath and bed, she’d cry—“But I was just getting started!” I knew exactly what she meant. I’d do the same thing with my Barbies. I’d go over to a friend’s house with several carrying cases and we’d sit on the floor and dress them and decide who was who and what was what and then my mother would call and say she was on the way to pick me up. I’d wail—“But we haven’t had a chance to play!” I didn’t know that world building was play. That the actual narrative was subordinate to the setting up. All the time invested in dressing and characters, stage setting WAS the play. Sometimes we lose the forest through the trees. We forget that it is all part of the fun, the eventual outcome=all those fuzzy details. I think 2021 is going to be about mindfulness to the proce...

James Schuyler, In January "In January"                                            After Ibn Sahl The yard has sopped into its green-grizzled self its new year whiteness. A dog stirs the noon-blue dark with a running shadow and dirt smells cold and doggy As though the one thing never seen were its frozen coupling with the air that brings the flowers of grasses. And a leafless beech stands wrinkled, gray and sexless–all bone and loosened sinew–in silver glory And the sun falls all on one side of it in a running glance, a licking gaze, an eye-kiss And ancient silver struck by gold emerges mossy, pinkly lichened where the sun fondles it And starlings of anthracite march into the east with rapid jerky steps pecking at their shadows." — James Schuyler, “In January” James Schuyler, 1970 or '69 He wrote poems for friends, to mark ...

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells] Alfred Lord Tennyson ,  1809  -  1892 Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,    The flying cloud, the frosty light:    The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new,    Ring, happy bells, across the snow:    The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind    For those that here we see no more;    Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause,    And ancient forms of party strife;    Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin,    The faithless coldness of the times;    Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Rin...

POEM AT THE NEW YEAR by John Ashbery   Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight, you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs, that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is. Then the wind fell of its own accord. We went out and saw that it had actually happened. The season stood motionless, alert. How still the drop was on the burr I know not. I come all packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things, I wonder about Australia. Is it anything like Canada? Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system? Can we trust others to indict us who see us only in the evening rush hour and never stop to think? O I was so bright about you, my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for. The days are so polari...

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells] Lord Alfred Tennyson , 1809 - 1892 Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,    The flying cloud, the frosty light:    The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.   Ring out the old, ring in the new,    Ring, happy bells, across the snow:    The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.   Ring out the grief that saps the mind    For those that here we see no more;    Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.   Ring out a slowly dying cause,    And ancient forms of party strife;    Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.   Ring out the want, the care, the sin,    The faithless coldness of the times;    Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the f...

I write on the back of a scrap envelope, a message from Target that my account may have been compromised.        Oh, well. The snowy owl teases us at the beach again,      flying from the peaked-hut of Daniel's Mexican Food           to a snow-packed dune, dirty with blown sand. He/She stands as an emblem,           elusive nature in a city by the shore. We have lived here these many years, never migrating --as opposed to the snowy owl we've come to observe--      lived in Uptown on snow-packed sidewalks,               dirty with trash trodden underfoot. We'll see out the old, say goodbye to all that is gone      to friends who have moved on           and to the farm, to the lake, the f...