I don't owe them anything

"Thank-you Note" - Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.

The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,

I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

A beer brewed from anger

Why so quiet lately? My nose has been buried in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, on of my own damn books. Can you believe it?!

This tome of a book has sat on my bookshelf for years, passed by again and again by shiny library books. I like to tote my books around with me and read them everywhere. At 781 pages, this book is hefty and special provisions needed to be made to take it to work or read it in bed.

I'll admit that the first bit was a slog. There is a long beginning before you meet Jonathan Strange. Then the story becomes engaging. Its the story of the only two magicians in England right around the Battle of Waterloo. The story is deliberate and well-paced. I didn't race through this novel; I savored it.

Particularly wonderful is the interesting little bits of tales you get when a few people under an enchantment try to speak of their enchantment. Instead of saying what they mean, they open their mouths and stories come out - about bird herders or beer brewed from anger. I would love a book of nothing but these oddities.

I also loved the many footnotes throughout the story, and the complicated relationship between the two magicians. They are rather at odds with eachother in temperment, but, being the only practising magicians, there's also an interesting comradeship.

This really is a treat of a book, and I give it an 8.5.

Bouncing

We watched The Lucky Ones last night. Its a movie about 3 soldiers home from Iraq - 2 on 30 day leaves and one done for good. They end up sharing a rental car to get to their destinations.

I spent the whole movie veering between delight in expected soldier cliches that were avoided and absolute eye-rolling at the immense number of movie cliches. Only giving this one a 4.5, and that's mainly 'cause Colee was pretty adorable at times (although super annoying at others). Sigh...

I'd love to see a good movie done about both sides - the soldier away from family and his family struggling to get along with him or her away. If done well, that would be a good story.

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. From the Interstate, America is all steel guardrails and plastic signs, and every place looks and feels and sounds and smells like every other place. We stick to the back roads, where Kansas still looks like Kansas and Georgia still looks like Georgia, where there is room for diversity and for the occurrence of small miracles." - Charles Kuralt, On the Road

it won't last

"There is Only One of Everything" by Margaret Atwood

Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth

later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my

eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,

fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavours. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,

I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear

but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want
this.







(This poem makes me ache. Don't you love poems like that?)

God I love them

More than I can ever explain





This one is my very fave.

Haven't we all felt like this at some point?

Luckily its been a few years for me.