joann renee: something’s been stealing eight pound squash from the garden

Thursday, January 08, 2009

something’s been stealing eight pound squash from the garden

For the sake of the public, I am post this. About a week ago I posted two poems almost simultaneously on facebook. The one I loved received zero comments and the one I found silly got rave reviews. Many of my faithful blog followers/family have already read and commented, but here it is for the rest of you to enjoy. It just goes to show that an artist often has a quite different view of their work than does the rest of the world. Clearly the rest of the world is wrong. :)

Something’s Been Stealing Eight Pound Squash From the Garden
by Joann Renee

New Year’s Eve
Where did you go?
The dog’s barking
Again

Porch light flashes
Flooding clarity
Across the snow-laden field

There abandoned
Like twin beacons
Side by side
Whispering consolation
Two eight pound squash

Icy ground rejects
Footprints
And the culprit escapes
Again

It can’t last, though
Bear or Coyote

Next time I’ll be ready
Over-Sized Beaver or Mischievous Neighbor

You’ll slip up—leave a clue
Sasquatch or Martian

Your days of Curcurbita Maxima
Collecting are numbered

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more quotables

"I was the sea, longing for the shore. I made waves." - Thomas Schmidt

"You smell like sweet red plums and grilled cheese sandwiches." - Jennifer Lopez

"Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time." - Margot Fonteyn

"A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless." - May Surton

"I watched the trees tossing...as though they were flung together in an eager embrace, carressing each other branch to branch." - Louise Erdrich

"I'm looking for corny in my life." - Kate Winslet

"You're a prodigy, a doodle prodigy." - Jack Black

Marginalia

by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

the continuation of quotables

"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song." - Louis Armstrong

"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." - Charlie Parker

"Music is just a means of creating a magical state." - Robert Fripp

"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians." - Frank Zappa

"I think the greatest performances always elude the camera, the tape recorder, the pen. They happen in the middle of the night when the musician plays for one special friend under the moonlight, they happen in the dress rehearsal just before the play opens." - Stephen Nachmanovitch

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley

"The world is the theater of God's glory." - John Calvin

"He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon goodness will dislike no one." - Ancient Chinese (Analects)

"One should never strike a woman; not even with a flower." - Janet (Hindu)

"Is not the love of Wisdom a practice of death?" - Plato

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it." - Jesus Christ

"I wish I had a podium instead of just my thigh." - Corey Parnell

"Once I saw you were a woman of profound static cling I wanted to be that force around you." - Gabriel Macht

"Where's God at Red Robin? He's in the cheeseburgers!" - Michelle Miller

"Purity isn't just for people who can't get a date." - Bo Stern

"I shall never be too much of a woman to find comfort in mother's hugs." - LM Montgomery

"Some people are like slinkies. They're not really good for anything but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs." - Unknown

"You must immerse yourself in an unfamiliar world in order to truly understand your own." - Unknown

Wool-headed

Beside the Point

by Stephen Cushman

The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn't say my work,
thank goodness.

The rock in the creek's not so productive.
The mud on the bank's not too pragmatic.
There's nothing useful in the noise
the wind makes in the leaves.

Buck up now, my fellow superfluity,
and let's both be of that worthless ilk,
self-indulgent as shooting stars,
self-absorbed as sunsets.

Who cares if we're inconsequential?
At least we can revel, two good-for-nothings,
in our irrelevance; at least come and make
no difference with me.

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
Jacques Crickillon

by Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

george macdonald quotables (via cs lewis)

"Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe."

"Nothing is inexorable but love...For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds."

"When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more...The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear."

"It is the law of Nature--that is, the law of God--that all that is destructible shall be destroyed."

"In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter."

"There is a chamber also (O God, humble and accept my speech)--a chamber in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man--out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren.This is that for which he was made--to reveal the secret things of the Father."

"Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits..."

"We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet...instead...lift up our eyes to the glory which alone will quicken the true man in us, and kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self."

"Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God loves thee whether thou feelest or not...Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work."

"Obedience is the opener of eyes."

"When a man is...one with God, what should he do but live forever?"

"The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of His Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in."

"...to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask."

"For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be in teh gift--as God always is, for He is love--and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift."

"There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves."

"Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it."

"...self is but the shadow of life."

"All that is not God is death."

"We must not wonder things away into nonentity."

"Shut...your mouth until the truth opens it."

"What idea could we have of God without the sky?"

"Is oxygen-and-hydrogen the divine idea of water? God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows His child to pull his toys to pieces..."

"The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for..."

"The one principle of hell is--'I am my own!'"

"Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth."

"Live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now."

"...all that is not music is silence."

all which isn't singing is mere talking

by ee cummings

all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)

gush to it as diety or devil-
toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else

drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone

but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence

the brilliance of douglas adams

"He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."