04 April 2010

(enters sipping Dalwhinnie) Here's a toast ...













... to a Spring Break lived well:

- writing and reading
- bike rides
- a stone table base agreed upon
- a home-made storm door installed
- winter tires changed for all-seasons
- a new (used) truck
- a bottle of 15 yr old Dalwhinnie acquired
- and so on

Having returned from the final family experience of the Easter extravaganza -- dinner with the Manitoba Krahns in Winnipeg -- I turn once again to my weekly, my week-daily question: What am I to do tomorrow during those four classes wherein I seek to affect the young, expectant, if not entirely refreshed, minds of the next generation - to keep them from mad, starving hysterics? It's a hard one to be sure. Allen was probably right: write poetry.

So I must turn myself over to this occupation, my constant study and, if not to it, then to the reading of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Barbery) in bed. But first, for you, some freshly wrung verse:

Hydrophilic

In what we once called our car
we motored away
along the road open
the flood before us and we five
insistent that what's been
watered and wet
today cannot but desiccate
the wind's the world's constant
it would dry to a husk of itself
were it not for these rivers

In Morris they employ
great gas-buzzed mechanisms to pile clay
before the bridge, to block
the entrance, to keep
the town dry

Are we not born of water?
Still, we devise many-a-thing to stay
out of it: hip-waders, boats, sandbags, dams
Like Noah, only the rain and the wind
may defeat us


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