LAND OF LITTLE RAIN ~

Mary Austin

[The Land of Little Rain] "It aims to be, first of all, a meditation on place, though the place itself is also effaced a little, and is two places actually, which you can find by consulting a map: the arid country east of Bakersfield, California, where the San Francisco Valley ends in the transverse range of the Tehachapi Mountains, and the long narrow valley east of the Sierra Nevada that runs from Bishop in the north through Big Pine and Independence (note the name: the author of this book lived in these towns — Independence had a population of three hundred — at the age of twenty-six, having left her husband, and taught school to earn a living and tried to raise her retarded two-year-old daughter, without child care, while she worked, and tried to write) and Lone Pine, and south to the Coso Range and the Slate and Quail and Granite Mountains, places you cannot see much of now, since they are home to a U.S. naval weapons center and access is restricted. It is no surprise that the book she wrote is, save for the dreamy idyll of its last chapter, a cool-minded mediation on freedom and necessity, adaptation and survival."

~ Robert Hass, from his essay, "Mary Austin and The Land of Little Rain"

What Light Can Do

(Ecco 2012)

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people.  It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant: as if they moved on some stately service not needed to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls."

~ Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain







Owens River Gorge and the White Mountains looking SE from Swall Meadows in the Eastern Sierra foothills




 

Owens Valley

 Lone Pine Peak w/ the Alabama Hills in the foreground

Mt. Williamson, Owens Valley, California

Owens Valley and Wheeler Crest

Old wagon road down Sherwin Grade near U.S. 395, Mono County

RE THATCHER ~

Glenda Jackson 
 criticises Margaret Thatcher in Commons debate

DARK HOLLER ~

"Dark Holler: Old Love Songs and Ballads is a 2005 compilation album released by Smithsonian Folkways. The album is composed of Appalachian folk music 1960's recordings made and compiled by musicologist John Cohen in Madison County, North Carolina. Most of the songs are done in an a cappella style.

More than half of the songs on the album are sung by Dillard Chandler, a "mysterious" illiterate man who knew hundreds of songs. "Allmusic" writes that Chandler sings with "deft precision, often with the song's strong sexual undercurrents intact".

The songs contain several dark topics and themes such as murder, revenge, infidelity, and abandoned children. The New York Times describes the album as "traditional songs about love and murder usually traceable to England, a century or more before, but sung in a style rooted in the region: the singers all stretch out, irregularly, on vowels of their choosing, and add upturned yips to the end of stanzas".

Cas Wallin, who sings on two of the album's songs told North Carolinian author Sheila Kay Adams, "They’re studying this for a reason, Sheila, it’s because they don’t think it’s going to last much longer". Despite Wallin's fears, Cohen writes in his liner notes that traditional singing is still alive and well, and a source of pride in rural North Carolina. "

Track listing

"The Carolina Lady"     Dillard Chandler
"The Soldier Traveling from the North"     Dillard Chandler
"The Sailor Being Tired"     Dillard Chandler
"Young Emily"     Dellie Norton
"Pretty Fair Miss In Her Garden"     Dellie Norton
"When I Wore My Apron Low"     Dellie Norton
"Pretty Saro"     Cas Wallin
"Fine Sally"     Cas Wallin
"Neighbor Girl"     Lee Wallin
"Juba This"     Lee Wallin
"Gathering Flowers"     Dillard Chandler
"Gastony Song"     Dillard Chandler
"Cold Rain and Snow"     Dillard Chandler
"In Zepo Town"     Lisha Shelton
"Don't You Remember"     Lisha Shelton
"Awake, Awake"     Dillard Chandler
"Mathie Grove"     Dillard Chandler
"Scotland Man"     George Landers
"Love Has Brought Me to Despair"     Berzilla Wallin
"Johnny Doyle"     Berzilla Wallin
"Short Time Here, Long Time Gone"     Dillard Chandler
"Drunken Driver"     Dillard Chandler
"Jesus Says So"     Dillard Chandler
"Meeting is Over"     Dillard Chandler
"Little Farmer Boy"     Dillard Chandler
"I Wish My Baby Was Born"     Dillard Chandler

EARTH ~

Paolo Soleri

(1919~2013)

"Paolo Soleri was born on June 21, 1919, in Turin, Italy, the second of three children of Emilio and Pia Soleri. His father was an accountant. Paolo Soleri spent part of  World War II in a unit that built and maintained Italian military facilities.

In 1947, after receiving a Ph.D. in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Dr. Soleri traveled to Arizona to apprentice with Frank Lloyd Wright Wright at Taliesin West for 18 months. 

In 1949, he designed the Dome House in Cave Creek, Ariz., for a divorced woman from Philadelphia. Made from cast concrete and natural stone, the house featured a sunken living area and a glass dome overlooking the desert. He ended up marrying the client’s daughter, Corolyn Woods (known as Colly). 

In 1950, while the newlyweds were traveling in Italy, Dr. Soleri was hired to design a ceramics factory in the hillside town of Vietri sul Mare; he came up with the idea of using fragments of pottery for walls. Returning to Arizona in 1956, he designed a studio, gallery and foundry for a Scottsdale site he called Cosanti. In the late 1960s, he purchased 860 acres of desert north of Phoenix, near Cordes Junction, and began building Arcosanti. 

Dr. Soleri’s few buildings outside Arizona include the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, an eccentric performance space in Santa Fe whose stage design evokes Salvador Dalí. In recent years it has sat unused, and preservation groups have been fighting to prevent its demolition. 

Dr. Soleri hoped Arcosanti would show other cities how to minimize energy use and encourage human interaction.  “He was part of a flock of utopian dreamers who designed mega-structure cities in the 1960s, but he had more of a social and ecological agenda than the others,” said Jeffrey Cook, a professor of architecture at Arizona State University, in a 2001 interview. “When so many others were theorizing, Soleri went out into the desert and actually built his vision with his own hands. That’s the reason he became such a counterculture hero.” 

Some critics detected a contradiction between Dr. Soleri’s communitarian ideals and what they perceived as an authoritarian insistence on a singular aesthetic. Mr. Goldberger saw “an arrogance” to Mr. Soleri’s designs, “a certainty that he knows what is best for all of us.” 

But Dr. Soleri’s work also showed a generation of younger architects an alternative to corporate modernism. 

“Paolo’s mind was always going out into the cosmos,” said Will Bruder, a Phoenix-based architect who apprenticed with Dr. Soleri in 1967. “I learned how much you can do with very little, the potential of simplicity and the ability to make unbelievable things from modest means, to dream huge dreams.” 

Dr. Soleri is survived by two daughters, Kristine Soleri Timm and Daniela Soleri, and two grandchildren. His wife died in 1982 and, at his request, was buried on a hillside at Arcosanti in view of his studio window. His foundation said it would honor his wishes that he be buried next to her." 

the nytimes 

9/11 ~

Network (1976)

"Arthur Jensen" preaches to preacher "Howard Beale"

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?! Do you think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and You Will Atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel. … Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday. … You just might be right, Mr. Beale."

Network (1976)

Script : Paddy Chayefsky
Actors: Ned Beatty and Peter Finch
Director: Sidney Lumet

HAFIZ ~

At This Party

I don't want to be the only one here

Telling all the secrets —

Filling up all the bowls at this party,

Taking all the laughs.

I would like you

To start putting things on the table

That can also feed the soul

The way I do.

That way

We can invite

A hell of a lot more

Friends.

A Gigantic Ego

The only problem with not castrating

A gigantic ego is

That it will surely become amorous

And father

A hundred screaming ideas and kids

Who will then all quickly grow up

And skillfully proceed

To run up every imagianable debt

And complication of which your brain

Can conceive.

This would concern normal parents

And any seekers of freedom

And the local merchants nearby

As well.

They could very easily become forced

To disturb your peace;

All those worries and bills could turn to

Wailing ghosts.

The only problem with not lassoing

A runaway ego is

You won't have much time to sing

In this sweet

world.

A Gauge Of A Good Poem

The gauge of a good poem is

The size of the love-bruise

It leaves on your neck.

Or,

The size of the love-bruise

It cn leave on your soul.

Or,

The size of the love-bruise

It can leave on your brain.

Or,

It could be all of the

Above.

I Knew We Would Be Friends

As soon as you opened your mouth

And I heard your soft

Sounds,

I knew we would be

Friends.

The first time, dear pilgrim, I heard

You laugh,

I knew it would not take me long

To turn you back into

God.

The Subject Tonight

The subject tonight is love

And for tomorrow night as well.

As a matter of fact,

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

I Cherish Your Ears

Dear Pilgrim,

I love your shoes, your coat,

Your pants, your hat, your furry head,

Your cup, you bowl,

You messy closets,

And most of all — I cherish your cute ears.

Why? Don't ask!

Just speak what you love about me.

Come closer if you are feeling

A little timid today

Or dense

Because surely you would find something

Very endearing about

Hafiz.

Then

We can pass many years

Talking so silly,

Like two Highly Advanced Aspirants —

Like two Emancipated Holy Vagrants

Who are sharing His Bottle

Of Truth

And feeling so damn good

And Drunk and Free.

I Follow Barefoot

I long for You so much

I follow barefoot Your frozen tracks

That are high in the mountains

That I know are years old.

I long for You so much

I have even begun to travel

Where I have never been before.

Hafiz, there is no one in this world

Who is not looking for God.

Everyone is trudging along

With as much dignity, courage

And grace

As they possibly

Can.

A Suspended Blue Ocean

The sky

Is a suspended blue ocean.

The stars are the fish

That swim.

The planets are the white whales

I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light

Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon

My skin.

There is only one rule

On this Wild Playground,

For every sign Hafiz has ever seen

Reads the same.

They all say,

"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,

In the Beloved's Divine

Game,

O, in the Beloved's

Wonderful

Game."

____________

HAFIZ

The Subject Tonight Is Love

(Pumpkin House 1996) 

Seemingly forever, Hafiz (Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, 1320-1389) has been called "The Tongue of the Invisible" and is the most beloved poet of Persia (Iran). To many Iranians Hafiz is a dear and personal friend speaking to them now.


"The foundation of Hafiz's poetry is rooted in the beautiful human need for companionship as well as in the soul's innate desire for the complete abandonment of all experience except Light."



In many ways, Hafiz is playing music right next to us.

SWEETHEART'S 1ST TV ROLE MODEL ~

Annette Funicello

(1942-2013)

EARTH ~

Surgery




I just moved a curled up

woolly caterpillar from this

year's woodpile into next year's








___________________________


BOB ARNOLD
Beautiful Days
Longhouse 2013




photo © bob arnold

THEME SONG ~

Art by Ralph Steadman

Directed by	Bruce Robinson
Produced by	Paul Heller George Harrison Denis O'Brien
Written by	Bruce Robinson
Starring	Paul McGann Richard E. Grant
Music by	David Dundas Rick Wentworth
Cinematography	Peter Hannan
Editing by	Alan Strachan
Studio	Cineplex Odeon Films The Cannon Group
Distributed by	HandMade Films
Release date(s)	1986
Running time	107 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English Latin
Budget	£1.1 million
Box office	$1,544,889 (USA) £565,112 (UK) AUD 103,117 (Australia)

one of the beauties

EARTH BOUND ~

True Noir, A Letter To My Friend, John



Once upon a time, long ago, I heard Jim Koller read a poem on NPR. I still remember how he spoke about screwing hinges onto a gate for his sheep pen. It sounded both practical and mystifying, somehow. This would be early 1970s in my cabin in the woods when NPR was on all day — classical show with Robert J Lurtsema in the morning (out of his home!), more classical music in the afternoon and then Susan Stamberg and the news. Jazz at night, even very good rock 'n' roll and some other talk shows. Some ethnic world music wonders. Maybe even the infectious "Car Talk" got started then? I lost track. NPR became larger and more predictable, even snooty, and I stopped listening except to snips and snaps. I've got to think some young poet is now going to hear you and your Billy the Kid sequence of poems when you're on the air. Just the way it should be.

Sorry to hear about the TK murder case. If watching all the tv show "The Killing" from Seattle has anything to do with (it does), and the recent rampage of assassinations by supposed white supremacists onto lawmen and the like (in their house doorways!), then count on the TK case is ripe with injustice up and down the legal ladder. No on can die anymore — we're either thoroughly ignored and gone, fodder, shoveled away, or a tool for other things. Things that assist careers or end them. Let's hope the law at least has their killer, and then wait and watch what others in control do with the killer and the case. It sounds to me like it can be closed and re-opened at political whim at this point.

We finished with "The Killing" and two big seasons of "Wallander" this week. Ideal mud-season viewing. Barely no one cracks a smile in tons of episodes in a row, and now neither does anyone in "Top of the Lake" from New Zealand. In fact, the only 'normal' person in all of these shows — the realtor in Top of the Lake — he gets murdered, probably for smiling, as soon as we meet him. These are shows where people are miserable, wear the same clothes for weeks on end, never comb their hair or else pull it back severely, smoke lots of cigarettes, gulp down bottle after bottle, sleep on the fly, eat terribly, never look at a book, and only the Swede Wallander, living alone as a social misfit (with, I guess, a girlfriend next door) spends his free time on a 24-7 cycle of Be-At-Ready, swooning to classical music, walking his dog (man's best friend) and getting drunk. Id say, crossing the globe of hard crime theater, I'm most at home and invigorated by the Swedes.

In our own crime little theater here all last summer, with all the Sheriff's dept. in our house and visiting at all hours drawing a bead on the nonsense in the rural neighborhood, and we complying with nothing to hide, and nothing really came of it. All political. One chump after another trying to budge up the ladder, no one likes one another, secrets and lies. Sweetheart and I work best, it seems, now with all the old timers dead (or as Jim Koller said ten years ago when visiting us one more time, "You guys are now the old timers") at staying isolated in the hermitage, keeping our noses to the grindstone, tapping into social matters where it counts. Carson and Jocelyn will have a "baby shower" the end of May. Neither of us have ever been to one. Let's have a look.

The printer this week sent my proof for the new little book of prose poems (Sweetheart calls them "fables") completely backwards! It was impossible to get too upset and instead seen as a self-contained boo-boo by a professional momentarily out of whack, that we simply asked them, "Do over, please." They probably we're blushing and placing blame on their end as they had to in order to survive independently one against the other and together, no matter; they had a new proof in our hands within 48 hours. Looks good. We gave the okay to roll the presses after correcting a few typos, adjusting the titles, and brightening one or two of the maybe too many photographs. Too late now. It's part photo album. One more oddity in the secluded world of technology where no one looks at anything much any longer but a screen. We're noticing all libraries we've been in where we are the only ones searching in the book stacks. Come out for air into the high-ceilinged main assembly and its droves of people faced into computers. The book racks are thinning out to make room for more computer carols and terminals. It's only a matter of time books will be seen in libraries as a nuisance. We look very suspicious clomping in every two weeks with a big canvas satchel filled to the brim with CDs and books. Currently Patricia Highsmith, that Texas wreck, is our passion. We can't get enough of her. I just finished Strangers on a Train, returning after years away reading a lot of contemporary muck, to my once youthful wonder at reading when discovering a fine writer at work in craft, character, story and human psychology. No tricks. No compromising the story line. A writer who plows ahead, delicately. As if discovering along with us at the same time and yet being the creator herself. Spontaneity. Ah, what once the poet craved.

Real time — we still have snow up to our knees in the woods. In all towns, no snow, no mud. We look like freaks when we get to a town in our mud boots, thick pants, layers. Sweetheart has taken to wearing her mud boots out of here and sporting behind the seat fashionable wear to change into when she hits civilization. I, on the other hand, they get me as I am.

Say hello to Billy for me
all's well, Bob 

 photo from:

The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold and adapted for the screen by Richard Matheson from his novel The Shrinking Man. The film stars Grant Williams and Randy Stuart. 

"A Star goes through me in its
orbit" ~

Turtle Island


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the red fir trees and the snow
draw faces of feather


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the mountain lions are
and the falcons and the pumas


On Forty-fifth Street
the god Tezcatlipoca stretched out
his palms on the sidewalk, drank
alone from a beer can.




Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where giant willows spread
along the road to Saratoga Springs   


where there are herds and purple flowers
and apple trees and deer at sunset
where the cloudy currents
of the Hudson run toward the Ocean


On Forty-fifth Street
there was the corpse of a cat
flattened, wet on the asphalt,
colorless, indomitably haughty.


Look for Turtle Island
it's near, it's near
where the spiders' market
covers the black hillside


where drums of salt
beat diadems and necklaces
where swarms lift from the trees
distant lips and  eyes —


where the only survivors
shimmer motionless on the horizon,
where pyramids collapse
amid the budding branches of a grove


where rivers have stirrups and bridles
of light, where axes
cut waterfalls at the root and foam
where trout and salmon run


where Chief Joseph prayed to the Earth
where arrows and dawns pursue each other
and where each war is a flowery war
where seashells are born under the palm trees


On Forty-fifth Street
there were gratings, abandoned cars,
gutted buildings, viaducts,
and on the gratings Aztec warriors ascended —


the blue blossoms of the morning glories.


Look, Turtle Island
is near, is near


___________________

GIUSEPPE CONTE
The Ocean and the Boy
translated by Laura Stortoni
(Hesperia Press 1997)








GREETINGS TO MY AMERICAN READERS ~


From these Mediterranean shores, on a day when the sun rests on
the sea and these hills are tinged with gold, I send my greetings to
the American readers who will come upon this book. A book
written by a man of the Mediterranean who has often turned his
eyes and his footsteps toward the north, toward the ocean. I am
now fascinated by the idea that my book has crossed that ocean
and that thanks to the time—consuming, passionate work of Laura
Stortoni, it has found new clothing in its English translation, 
beginning a new life in the Bay Area, precisely the region to
which I am tied by dreams, friendships, and memories.

When I visited San Francisco for the first time in 1985, I went
into City Lights Bookstore as if on a pilgrimage: I could never have
imagined that just a few years later, I would enjoy friendly conversations
with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a nearby cafe, that I would
travel through New Mexico, visiting Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos
and Taos Pueblo, until I found the ranch and grave of D.H. Lawrence.
Later I returned, as if the United States, the boundless home of the
new muses, attracted me like a magnet, as if a part of my inner life
were unfolding there. In "Salut au Monde" Walt Whitman exclaimed,
"Oh take my hand" with his powerful and blessed voice. So "take me
by the hand" and hear my greetings to you, readers of the New World,
so distant and yet so like brothers and sisters to me.

Yours,

Giuseppe

TWO SHORTS BY MR. WALLACE ~

Mr. Cogito


The best book of 1994 is the first English translation of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito, a book of poems that came out in Poland in the mid-1970s, well before Herbert's justly famous Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems. Mr. Cogito's character who appears in most of Herbert's best poems—he's kind of a poetic Pnin, both intellectual and not too bright, both hopelessly confused and bravely earnest as he grapples with the Big Questions of human existence.

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the two or three best living poets in the wold, and by far the best of what you'd call the "postmoderns." Since any great poem communicates an emotional urgency that postmodernism's integument of irony renders facile or banal, postmodern poets have a tough tow to hoe. Herbert's Cogito-persona permits ironic absurdism and earnest emotion not only to coexist but to nourish one another. Compared to Mr. Cogito, the whole spectrum of American poetry — from the retrograde quaintness of the Neoformalists and New-Yorker-backyard-garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language Poets — looks sick. It seems significant that only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require. Maybe as political conditions get more oppressive here, we Americans'll get good at it, too.

(1994)



Just Asking


Q: Are some things worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Who's ready for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, "sacrifices on the altar of freedom"?** That is, what if we described that a certain minimum baseline vulnerability to terrorist attack is part of the price of the American idea? That ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our way of life — not just of our soldiers and money on foreign soil, but the sacrifice of our personal safety and comfort? Maybe even of more civilians' lives?

What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone's best efforts, some hundreds of thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are worth the price? Is monstrousness who no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned of more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin's time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice — either of (a) some safety or (b) some portion of the rights and liberties that make the American idea so precious?

Q: In the absence of such a conversation, do we trust our current leaders to revere and safeguard the American idea as they seek to "secure the homeland"? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for the moment that some of these really have helped make our persons and property safer — are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they're worth it? Was there no such debate because we're not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we become so selfish and frightened that we don't even want to think about whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

*Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here, let's all just agree that we generally know what this term connotes — open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency . . . the whole messy democratic roil.

** (The phrase is Lincoln's, more or less.)

(2007)

________________________

Both Flesh and Not

essays by ~

David Foster Wallace

(Little, Brown 2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?_r=0

ONE VOICE ~

Network 

(1976)

Dangerously not dated

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29

Paddy Chayefsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Chayefsky

EARTH ~

Amongst the Rocks





Just who are those women

bent over on the rocky

shoreline searching and

searching and seemingly

searching for more, a pail

at their feet, plastic and

colored, not a work pail,

and these women seem

from another place in

time, not in beach wear,

skirts and hair wild with

the wind




It was only days and

days later, when we

were off the road

back home in the

woods that we spoke

with our son who asked

"where did you go"




and we told him of our

travels from mountains

and streams and rivers

and finally to the sea

and about these women

one morning bent at the

shoreline, amongst the

rocks, that he told us,

years earlier, right there

amongst the rocks, he

had thrown his wedding

ring away





_________________________________


BOB ARNOLD
Beautiful Days
Longhouse 2013




photo © bob arnold