News

There’s a lot going on in my life as of late.  Let me share a few items with you: 

First off, I moved at the end of June, which was, as you might imagine, a rather exhausting affair.  Nevertheless, I am getting settled nicely.   I moved in with a friend from my church in order to slash the costs I had been paying to keep my own apartment whilst unemployed.  I finally realized I didn’t need the space and shouldn’t be wasting the money.

(We Americans have a love affair with large spaces for private uses, do we not?  —Why should I, one single person, require an entire apartment for my own self?  Why, indeed.)

Second, I got a job today at Mast General Store  in downtown Greenville.  I’ll be working in the mercantile section (that’d be candy and housewares), which is slightly different from the shoe/ outdoor department where I interviewed, but a job’s a job.  Anyway, I start in August.

I think these two events are critical in initiating the transitional phase I hope to effect over the next few months, as I prepare to go overseas.  With this move across town, and the new job, I’ll be able to sock away the cash needed to get out of Dodge, hopefully late this fall or early next winter.

So, that’s the lastest from my end of things.  Hope yours are going well.

M B H

Motoring

I park my car in the drive,

It is clean and washed

And the tires are glossed,

I don’t jive

With junk tossed

Behind my seat,

Or dirt ‘neath my feet

My mats are swept

And in my trunk are kept

Only the things I need

To ride.

Summer

I like summer.  It makes me happy.  It makes me feel alive and optimistic for the future.  I don’t get sad in the summer.  I don’t get lonely.  I am not, usually, depressed by the warm air, the gorgeous breezes, the sun-dappled water, or the grand mountains.  Summer here is an amalgam of childhood memories and later-life remembrances, all at once ten and then thirty-something.  My soul lives here; it haunts the side streets and corner benches of small towns along the line.  It grows old at the soda fountain.  It rests by the stream.  I need not grandeur nor renown; I have the summer.  (2006)                   

Soliloquy

Delightful

Dappled

De-lovely,

Ritual rite of spring

Really quite red and rosy

E’en enough to sing

Richer, rarer

Than golden gossamer wing

Cherish ye it, young-lightly

Like nature’s wedding ring.

Spring

Marvelous

Miraculous

May-middle cold

Makes me think that

Maybe the minor matters

Mean more than mine alone.

Sequitur

I sat alone in somber wakeness

Perfectly aware of my innate weakness

Too frail for frankness

Too scared for greatness

 

And pondered then my thankless

Though every so often, painless

Act of remaining gracious

In the defeat of my own candór.

Something

I like pregnant evenings like these

It might rain

I hope it rains

Let’s get inside before it rains.

Admonition

Woe to he

Who buries his head

In the summer sand

And does not know

The hour of high tide.

Labor

Long, languishing, leery days,

Determining dream or detriment,

Requiring nearly next to nothing

But the sweat of your brow

And the ache in your back; ——

Why to noonday swelter

Must we ever surrender

Our well-deserved slumber

Under cooler covers?

Music

A poem by Anne Porter:

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I’ve never understood
Why this is so

But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.

 

“Music” by Anne Porter from Living Things: Collected Poems. © Steerforth Press, 2006.  As heard by me this morning on “The Writer’s Almanac,” on NPR.  This poem struck deeply within me, and echoes my own ‘musical reflections.’  MBH