Not mine, but...

[Gracie]

....words to live by. At least most of them.

Poem: "How to Live" by Charles Harper Webb, from Amplified Dog. © Red Hen Press.

How to Live

Eat lots of steak and salmon and Thai curry and mu shu
pork and fresh green beans and baked potatoes
and fresh strawberries with vanilla ice cream.
Kick-box three days a week. Stay strong and lean.
Go fly-fishing every chance you get, with friends

who'll teach you secrets of the stream. Play guitar
in a rock band. Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka,
Shakespeare, Twain. Collect Uncle Scrooge comics.
See Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, and everything Monty Python made.
Love freely. Treat ex-partners as kindly

as you can. Wish them as well as you're able.
Snorkel with moray eels and yellow tangs. Watch
spinner dolphins earn their name as your panga slam-
bams over glittering seas. Try not to lie; it sours
the soul. But being a patsy sours it too. If you cause

a car wreck, and aren't hurt, but someone is, apologize
silently. Learn from your mistake. Walk gratefully
away. Let your insurance handle it. Never drive drunk.
Don't be a drunk, or any kind of "aholic." It's bad
English, and bad news. Don't berate yourself. If you lose

a game or prize you've earned, remember the winners
history forgets. Remember them if you do win. Enjoy
success. Have kids if you want and can afford them,
but don't make them your reason-to-be. Spare them that
misery. Take them to the beach. Mail order sea

monkeys once in your life. Give someone the full-on
ass-kicking he (or she) has earned. Keep a box turtle
in good heath for twenty years. If you get sick, don't thrive
on suffering. There's nothing noble about pain. Die
if you need to, the best way you can. (You define best.)

Go to church if it helps you. Grow tomatoes to put store-
bought in perspective. Listen to Elvis and Bach. Unless
you're tone deaf, own Perlman's "Meditation from Thais."
Don't look for hidden meanings in a cardinal's song.
Don't think TV characters talk to you; that's crazy.

Don't be too sane. Work hard. Loaf easily. Have good
friends, and be good to them. Be immoderate
in moderation. Spend little time anesthetized. Dive
the Great Barrier Reef. Don't touch the coral. Watch
for sea snakes. Smile for the camera. Don't say "Cheese."

[carolion]

"mail-order sea monkeys for once in your life" -------LOL and "oh, my!" at the same time - who among us has ever ordered them, FESS UP - I want to hear all about it.

[hartlikeawheel]

I ordered an ant farm and some kind of a Japanese garden thing but no sea monkeys. What I really wanted was one of those jobbies that would increase your breast size enormously overnight.

Gracie's poem calls to mind the Red Hat poem and another which I am very fond of that has a line in it which goes something like, "And you learn that holding a hand doesn't mean holding a heart. And you learn and you learn. With every goodbye you learn." Too lazy right now to go after and post them

[Gracie]

I like those, too. Both of them.

I love ANY words that remind us to LIVE every moment.

[Jane]

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
Emily Dickinson

[Gracie]

Now Jane, you have me thinking of "Our Town." Sigh.

We had a day like this yesterday. Grizzy walked down to the bakery with BetsyO's and they brought back doughnuts and a cookie Betsy chose for me, with an autumn leaf air-brushed into the icing. It looks so beautiful and will probably taste like sawdust frosted with plaster of paris, but never mind.

Then we went to church, where it was baptism Sunday, and we saw our new pastor very tenderly brushing back the wet hair from the faces....it was as loving as any parental gesture I've seen and reminded me of the many nights I've held Betsy while she sleeps, running my fingertips through her hair in a move I called 'gentling.'

And Betsy astounded one and all when she A) pulled her latest loose tooth just before the benediction, and B) announced that she knew it didn't hurt OR bleed because we were in church!

Grizzy took us to this great place a half hour from here that is called the Old Bag Factory, which really WAS a bag factory when I lived in that town many moons ago. Now it's filled with all kinds of cool little shops and cafes and there was a Ren Faire going on so lords and ladies abounded, with glorious music and much bowing and scraping. Lunch was great, even though it took 25 minutes to get it, and the host complimented Betsy several times on her nice manners and patience while we waited.

Our favorite shop was called TenThousandVillages (they have a website! check 'em out! http://www.TenThousandVillages.com) filled with gorgeous things from so many countries...jewelry, baskets, clothing, pottery, glassware, brass, musical instruments, toys...you name it....all beautifully made. Betsy said it was her idea of heaven. I LOVE seeing the living embodiment of 'we are all in one house here.' Had a great talk with the manager, talking about missionary work, and about a paper I wrote a few years back on world hunger and the Heifer Project--it was cool to see the look in her eyes go from interested participant to flashing with connection that 'this woman GETS it.' (And yes, I do. You can't love Harry Chapin and John Denver as much as I did and do and NOT get involved in world hunger.)

We had ice cream cones on the way home and it was so sunny and the sky so blue and the few leaves left so golden and the air smelled like apples and pumpkins and leaf smoke and I just sighed....utterly content. One of my favorite lines, ever, from a movie, is Al Pacino telling Michelle Pfeiffer that 'everything I want is in this room.'

I know that feeling.

Namaste, friends. Got to run get the kid from school!

[carolion]

You guys and Betsy are a dream team - sweethearts and poets of true delight.

[slb2]

jane said:

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
Emily Dickinson

Jane, dear. I have that very quote engraved on a tiny pewter book made into a keychain. Bought it at Emily's house in Amherst.

[carolion]

When I went up to Hampshire for my freshman daughter's parents weekend, it poured rain the whole time. So she and I went to the old cemetery to find Emily's grave. There it was, surrounded by a black wrought-iron picket fence. In the very same cemetery, just a few feet away from the Dickinson plot, were the Mathers.......

[Jane]

I may well have posted this before, but, appropos of the shortness and sweetness of life, I offer this poem:

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

[carolion]

Oh, oh, oh.
Thank you.

[hartlikeawheel]

When I read "Mr. Flood's Party" I shed a tear for my dad, the last leaf on the vine, even though he was not a drinker. It's a tender poem about how things change. Well. And more.

[slb2]

by Jude Nutter



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


HORSES

Still, the horses are beautiful and their grace
keeps me occupied.
—Linda Hogan
We pass them being wheedled
and cajoled around small corrals, a confetti
of spit across each wide breast and the sweat
between their legs worried up into foam.
Their hooves flash in the dirt like polished bells.
We pass them as they sleep, standing up,
among the dandelions and tasseled grasses
gone to seed. They enter our lives

like fragments of Eden: the place that's always been
our most difficult, elaborate dream; and once seen—
even from a freeway when you're doing sixty,
aware of your own peril—it's an effort of will
to take your eyes from a horse
in a field. Grace is like that. No other animal

occupies its skin so precisely, or walks forward
so carefully, as if pushing through great hauls
of dark water, chest deep in a stiff current.
I don't believe we are meant to think about death,

even on those evenings
when a thin mist rides on the fields and their hooves
waver beneath them like votive flames. A horse

becomes its own myth and religion: out from the dark
machinery of its body something better,
and more beautiful, is always about to begin;

and if you ever need proof that it's good
to have a physical body, touching
a horse in this life is the closest you will get to it.

To catch grace off guard: a lone horse
dozing in a field with the long reach of its neck
presented to the world, its thick
bottom lip fallen away from the fence of its teeth
and there, beguiling as god's empty pocket,
pale skin of the inner mouth. Before you die look
into the eyes of a horse at least once
and discover how each is an immense, empty room
lit by a single candle. The emptiness of waiting.

Because if the gods ever come down to walk among us,
this is where they'll live. And so when a horse,
seeing nothing about us it can recognize, lowers
its soft, deep mouth to the grass, and when that grass,
appearing wet in the sunlight, rises to greet it,
as if the lips of the dead were puckered skyward

for its kiss, it should be no surprise. How can we not
love an animal that spends so much of its life
with its mouth so close to the dirt. That they take,
with such tenderness, the mints
and the carrots we offer—as if the world

were ours to give—is the miracle; that they let us


slip on the sky-blue halter and lead them
through the cool of the evening.

[hartlikeawheel]

Not mine but . . .

There is a cemetary high above our valley. It is a place which doesn't permit markers with lavish displays.

Yet in a small corner, nearly in the woods which are on the perimeters, a small spot has been cleared out.

In the summer it is alive with wild flowers, choke cherries and trees. I don't know how the family managed to convince the owner of the cemetary to allow them to "break the rules."

It has been decorated with angels of all sorts.

The gravestone has an opening on it with a picture of the beautiful occupant.

And there is a perpetual lamp which is occasionally alight. Windy up there.

A wooden park bench provides the setting to look over the river valley and in the summer the view is at its most lush and greenest.

On the armrest of the bench the deceased's teddy bear is fastened to watch over her for as long as it is able with its own fragile life span.

This spot is not mine. But often in the summer I take a book or just a soda and go sit with her and the bear, look over the bountiful gifts and feel grateful for our lives.

I don't think her family knows I've ever spent time with her. I didn't know her in her life. She was a classmate of my daughter's and died so tragically young of an eating disorder, denying the food which would have sustained her life.

Her place of rest is not mine, but she and her sisters in pain are mine in my heart.

[joew]

Somebody on another website posted this poem by Robert Frost.

As an experiment, try reading it aloud twice.


"Out, Out--"

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them 'Supper'. At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh.
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little -- less -- nothing! -- and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

[slb2]

What's suppose to happen? Didn't happen here.

[joew]

I guess I'm a sentimental old fool. The first time I read it (silently) it started out feeling cheerful. It was only at the last two lines that the tragedy sank in. Then, I tried reading it aloud, and knowing what was coming, the lines "Call it a day, I wish they might have said," "…'Don't let them cut my hand off / The doctor when he comes. Don't let him, sister!," and "And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright," were such tear-jerkers that I couldn't get through them without pauses for sobbing.

[booklady]

I can't read that poem. My eighth grade teacher was the first to introduce me to it, and I found it horrible then and still do now. Whatever was he thinking, writing that thing?

[joew]

In the Æneid there is a scene where a work of art is described. I forget specifically what, but in describing what is depicted Virgil says "sunt lacrimæ rerum," "there are the tears of things." I think Frost was giving us an image of the tragic side of life — tragedy which can't be healed, only survived.

The bitter irony is that, the first time through, up to the contact of hand with saw, it reads like another of Frost's cheerful, if somewhat wistful, scenes of country life. In that, it is realistic.

[booklady]

Yes, that's about how I feel about Sophie's Choice, except for the part about the cheerful beginning.

But Joe, you are not a sentimental old fool.

[slb2]

I Should Have Known

The hole you left
in the bathroom door reminds me
of California on a map. I trace
a crooked crack down
to my own childhood, the holes
left in doors, the misery of love

trapped in a sad house.
When you were born I thought I could remake
the world. I looked out the hospital window,
at the stifling August heat, the sparrows
with their tiny mouths asking for relief,
the intricate lace of my mother's sadness, a veil
over my eyes. I would lift my arms
and gently rock us into a better

world. I should have known
when your dad came to pick us up,
our old car clanking and coughing, nothing
would come easy. I wanted to tell the nurse
to take us back into the cool
walls of the hospital, but I brought you home
to that cramped apartment, sat holding you on the edge
of the bed, and let my tears fall

on your forehead like a baptism.
Flesh of my flesh, bones
of an old anger rattling around
in your head, seventeen and wanting
to be anywhere I am not,
I sit here in the silence
you left, eating my mother's tears
and saying your name.



Michelle Patton

[Gracie]

Wow....just wow. Read all these again and, well, now you can, too.