michaelboy

It is closer inside
than heartbeats
where you grow



* * *

The will-o’-the-wisp
(willfully missed)
is wistfully wishing
on bits of your bliss


Source: Flammarion, L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888, p.749)




I enjoy poetry because it often uses the fewest number of words in rendering an expression. I'm not at all certain how others approach writing, but for me, I prefer to initially write way more words than I ultimately use. It is usually over half of what I've written that ends up being taken away in the process -- tossing many of words/parts.

* * *

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. "
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes, 1939

Crooked heart carved into glossy enamel (layers of paint and them, curing slow in a resin-alkyd coat)
Initials of desire, Could they really be his own
touching the scribble in a booth by the phone
Love made warm in ripe benches of well-worn wood
Delicately she wrote - what he had hoped and only now understood

***
Another form of delicate - Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan (her voice is slight but simply lovely)

When 60+ mph wind gusts block your only way in or out:



And take powerlines with them:



You get to have fun with a chainsaw and a tractor:


One day (soon enough), I'm going to be too old to be able to do this, but for now, I love being busy by doing.

This is the grave of my great great grandparents - through the maternal branch of my lineage. Isaac was a civil war veteran and only lived into his fifties. Tabitha lived significantly longer. I know very little about them other than a few newspaper citations from the early 1900's of her visiting with family. I wish I knew something more about them.

* * *

One of our hospice patients is 99. She is gracious, intelligent and a great conversationalist. It's incredible to me that she graduated from high school in 1945 and graduated from a state university around 1950 - long before I was born. Both her mother and grandmother graduated from the same university as well, with her grandmother being only one of the only two women graduates in 1897.

I'm always in awe of her and her roots...such a beautiful and powerful lady. She owned a newspaper and acted as an editor and writer for the paper for many years as well. Her vision is failing, so sometimes we'll read articles or other writings.

One we shared recently:

"I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one,
or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them,
and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;
All things please the soul—but these please the soul well."
From: I Sing the Body Electric , Walt Whitman

Each week, when we leave, she reaches from her wheelchair for our hands, to express gratitude. Yet, I feel like I'm actually the lucky one.

There was a place to where you led me (or at least I imagined it was so), that all clouds were turned with the dark-side up and the rest of the sky was rather like a castaway citrus - bobbing around the island in its own azure sea. Here the air was scented better than any dryer-sheet could ever imagine and the incredible wind in its whimsy; swept and tousled your hair (so bold as to even tatter your sundress - yet not in any forlorn fashion).