Pesky Poetry Day

The late great Dylan Thomas.

Ears in the turrets hear

Ears in the turrets hear
Hands grumble on the door,
Eyes in the gables see
The fingers at the locks.
Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone till the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?
Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

Beyond this island bound
By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast,
The land lies out of sound
And the hills out of mind.
No birds or flying fish
Disturbs this island's rest.

Ears in this island hear
The wind pass like a fire,
Eyes in this island see
Ships anchor off the bay.
Shall I run to the ships
With the wind in my hair,
Or stay till the day I die
And welcome no sailor?
Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

Hands grumble on the door,
Ships anchor off the bay,
Rain beats the sand and slates.
Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
Hold you poison or grapes?

It's a Poetry Day

'Ron' said something over at his place the other day that I heartily agreed with....

Now books are different. I'll never throw those out. One day, I aspire to having a house that has a 'library', tall wooden bookshelves that encircle the room.... And most of the ones I have are full of memories for me. Where I was when I bought or received them, when I read them, little bound signposts.

...and I thought of it again last night when I pulled out a book to find a poem. Feeling the same way about books, it was hard for me to get rid of so many of them when I left Calgary and so the few that I kept have become, in their way, even more important to me.

Most of the poetry was left behind by my dad when he left 'us' and, because I was the reader (and maybe because I'm the only one who cared about them), they became mine. I think most of them were from his years in university because they're all pretty much dated before and up to my birth (we moved 'west' when I was just under a year old).

For example - Al Purdy's 1965 Cariboo Horses, the 1959 edition of ee cummings 100 Selected Poems and so on.

The one I grabbed last night was the 1969 edition of the New Yorker Book of Poems. It's a hardcover book, over 800 pages, holding a price tag inside of $10.00. The pages are fine paper, the watermarked kind, the sort that we use only now for important documents - creamy, ridged, holding a weave that can be seen when held up to the light.

I don't know if the New Yorker still publishes these, although I know that the one I have is its first (and I can't be arsed to look) but the one in my hand includes the following in its 'foreword'...

We would like to believe that these nine hundred poems broadly represent almost a half-century of poetry and are among the best poems that appeared in The New Yorker between 1925 and 1969.

And so, in honor of the brave and steadfast Cabot - who's recently noticed the world outside the window that he no longer is able to access and sits for hours brooding at the blinds - this one seemed fitting for today...

Kindness

Your kindness is no kindness now;
It is unkindness to allow
My unkind heart so to reveal
The difference that it would conceal.
If I were, as I used to be,
As kind to you as you to me,
Or if I could but teach you how
To be unkind, as I am now,
That would be kindness of a kind-
To be again of a like mind.

Catherine Davis

A Canadian Culture Moment

Yes, kids, it's a poetry day. A little poem and a gentleman named Robert Sward caught my eye.

One for the Road

One for the road.
A little detached it was, but bouncy, flouncy, hoochie coochie,
woo wah woo, out there under the stars,
woo wah woo,
one for the road, one for the road it was,
and end of the show.
Stupid shit, how was I to know?
One for the road and end of the show?
So good-humored it was, I missed the clue,
hugging and kissing, all that
hugging and kissing.
Missed just how all over it really was.

Uneasy Bedfellows

First, I have a techie / hardware question.

Now you could say I shouldn't have assumed that my Mobilepro's PC Card Slot would allow a USB adapter when I went ahead and bought that Lexar LDP-600, which can only be recharged by USB connection. You could say it's my own fault. You could say I should just slow down and think things out. You could say that I should wait until I have ALL the information before I jump in.

You could.

I wouldn't, obviously, like you anymore. But, that's your choice.

I'm keeping the Mobilepro so just drop that suggestion.

Now, I could test my theory by making that nice young man at the computer store open a new box of something I'm not going to buy (it must be the phone voice), or I could assume (yet again) that I'm right and open the Lexar (thereby rendering it to a lower resale value) and buy a gadget that may not be useable in the context I need it to be OR you could just save my ass by telling me you have the ability to TEST my theory or that you have seen it in action.

Pwease.

OKAY, here it is. I need to buy a memory card reader because my Mobilepro uses CF for storage, the camera has it's little funky cards and I can also use the card slot for another kind of storage as well so it only makes sense to be able to read/write and swap info about on the cards, yes? So, THEN does it follow that a card reader that *includes* a USB hub could theoretically be used to recharge my Lexar if it came WITH an adapter that supplied extra power.

What I'm saying here, is that even if I couldn't plug the USB hub INTO a USB port at the time, isn't it still feasible that it would supply power enough through the USB connections to recharge my Lexar if it were just plugged into a power source?

Did anyone get that? Am I making sense? Or am I just so desperate that I've taken the 'think outside the box' thing a little too far out da box?

---

Second. A little John Keats for this fine fall evening.


sonnet: "When I Have Fears. . . "

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
   Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love; -then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.


1817