Burger King staff tricked into smashing outlet's windows 'to release pressure'
Prank caller posing as a firefighter told workers that dangerous levels of gas had built up inside the restaurant
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Saturday, April 9, 2016
JOSEPH STROUD ~
The Potato
Three days into the journey
I lost the Inca Trail
and scrambled around the Andes
in a growing panic
when on a hillside below snowline
I met a farmer who pointed the way —
Machu Picchu alla, he said.
He knew where I wanted to go.
From my pack I pulled out an orange.
It seemed to catch fire
in that high blue Andean sky.
I gave it to him.
He had been digging in a garden,
turning up clumps of earth,
some odd, misshapen nuggets,
some potatoes.
He handed me one,
a potato the size of the orange
looking as if it had been in the ground
a hundred years,
a potato I carried with me
until at last I stood gazing down
on the Urubamba Valley,
peaks rising out of the jungle into clouds,
and there among the mists
was the Temple of the Sun
and the Lost City of the Incas.
Looking back now, all these years later,
what I remember most,
what matters to me most,
was that farmer, alone on his hillside,
who gave me a potato,
a potato with its peasant face,
its lumps and lunar craters,
a potato that fit perfectly in my hand,
a potato that consoled me as I walked,
told me not to fear,
held me close to the earth,
the potato I put in a pot that night,
the potato I boiled above Machu Picchu,
the patient, gnarled potato
I ate.
________________________
JOSEPH STROUD
Country of Light
Copper Canyon, 2004
Friday, April 8, 2016
Thursday, April 7, 2016
THE GREAT CLOD ~
In Burton Watson's analysis of nature imagery in T'ang poems he finds more references
to non-living phenomena than living, and over half of those looking upward to sky, weather,
wind, clouds, and moon. Downward: rivers, waters and mountains predominate. Among
living things willow and pine are the most-mentioned trees, but the specific names of
herbaceous plants and flowers are few — with "flowers" usually meaning the blossoms
of trees like cherry or peach. Wild goose is the most common bird, associated with
being separated from a friend; and monkey the most common mammal — because of its
mournful dry. Cicada and moth are the most common insect. The point is made that many
natural references are used for their symbolic or customary human associations, and not
for intrinsic natural qualities. No doubt the oral poetry of a pre-literate people will have
more acquaintance with the actual living creatures as numerous intelligences in furry or
scaly bodies. But this does not detract from what the Chinese poems are, highly disciplined
and formal poems that open us to the dilemma of having "regard for the myriad growing things"
while being literate monks or administrators or wives of officials in the world's first
"great society." The reign of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung (712-756) is considered one of
the highest points of Chinese cultural history: the poets Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu were
at the eight of their powers during those years, and so were the brilliant and influential
Ch'an Masters Shen-hui, Nan-yueh, Ma-tsu, and Po-chang The national population may
have been as high as 60 million.
I first came onto Chinese poems in translation at nineteen, when my ideal of nature was a
45 degree ice slope on a volcano, or an absolutely virgin rain forest. They helped me to "see"
fields, farms, tangles of brush, the azaleas in the back of an old brick apartment. They freed
me from excessive attachments to wild mountains, with their almost subliminal way of
presenting even the wildest hills as a place where people, also, live.
G A R Y S N Y D E R
Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia
T H E G R E A T C L O D
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
NEW JAMES KOLLER ~
James Koller
Selected Poems 2003-2004-2005
Longhouse 2016
72 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 6.25 inches
$12.95
order here through Paypal, plus $3.95 (US shipping only)
international shipping, $12.95 plus $15
Check or money order to
Longhouse
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, VT 05303
Check or money order to
Longhouse
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, VT 05303
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Monday, April 4, 2016
LAMP ~
Lamp
After
supper
No
longer summer
A
windy night ahead
We
sit in the kitchen
One
lamp
Read
before the fire
Nothing
else in our lives
Boots
drying
Rain
on the windows
Finding Open Water
There
are these things
That
make lovely creatures
More
lovely —
A
red-tailed hawk sweeps
From
one moment of the hillside
To
another
Rising
mist will not lose him
3
deer wade into the shoulder of a field
They
feel safe in the holler of rain
Then
you, rolling up your pants
Before
a bicycle ride
Your
hair just touching the ground
I
tell you I will do something with that
Your
smile makes the beginning of all this
Loss
Put
no trust in nothing, not even yourself
Yesterday
was like summer, today snow blows
I’ve
walked six miles with an axe and wedge
Actually
make my living near a river running bright water
Home
to a small hawk found mangled in the woodshed
Eyes
opening, I load my rifle but won’t use it
Instead
talk with the closest thing to me right now
Heavy
gloves moving back short feathers
The
break in its neck, claws no use, eyes closing
Rope of Bells
It
is the
Rope
of bells
You
have put behind the door
That
let me know
Whenever
one of us goes
To
the privy
The
woodshed
The
outdoors
Lovely
_____________________
Bob Arnold
some of these poems were first published in
Rope of Bells
CHERRY VALLEY EDITIONS
some of these poems were first published in
Rope of Bells
CHERRY VALLEY EDITIONS
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Friday, April 1, 2016
Thursday, March 31, 2016
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