Body Parts

Knock Down

The flu. Had three versions of the flu, or three episodes of the same flu; does it matter? No orifice, no tract, no muscle, no tissue of my body escaped. For the last three weeks. Intestinal, three days. A brief break. Intestinal-head, three days. Brief break. Trip to Oklahoma, feel good, like a sunny clearing in a spell of gray stormy weather. Flight home. Southwest Airlines airplane packed full of coughing, hacking, invalids. Infected spume so dense that the flight attendants had to wear fog lamps on their heads to see up and down the aisle. Arrived home in Sprawling Suburb. Then: POW! Whole body experience. Fever, chills, shakes. Collapse onto living room couch. Sore throat. Coughing knifes chest with pain. I couldn't even get out of my clothes. Flat on back for two days. Wife has it, too; she, dropped motionless in bed. Malaise. No appetite. Struggle to drink water. Know I should. Fever broke after 36 hours. Yesterday - up and walking around, looking like death. Muscles rubbery and weak. I forced myself to wash sheets, towels, and clothes to rid house of hospital stink. I lost four pounds in two days; my wife, nine pounds. Today is the end of it maybe. Reduced to incomplete sentence blogging. Flagging concepts like a semphore. No point to this. No lessons. No analogies. No metaphors. No irony. Just flesh going rancid. Someone please sing to me of spring.

Oklahoma Bombing 1995

My wife and I visited my sister and her husband in Oklahoma. We drove down to Oklahoma City to see the memorial to victims of the 1995 bombing destruction of the Murrah Federal Building. Visitors enter the memorial site through one of the two "gates" at the ends of the reflecting pool.

Additional photographs are available in the photo album, "Murrah Memorial".

(Click the thumbnail image above to get the full size photograph.)

Some critics have complained that the memorial is antiseptic, unoriginal, and uninspiring. These criticisms disappear, in my experience, when the visitor has walked through the Memorial Museum, also located on the site. The museum is organized around the successive moments of the explosion, from the two minutes before (visitors listen to a recorded conference in a nearby building, which ends with the horrorific noise of the explosion), to the months in which rescuers and forensic detectives sifted through the rubble for evidence about the explosion. The museum tour includes a reconstruction of a toilet room, which was blown up and reveals the power of the explosion.

The museum intends to evoke sympathy for the victims amid the horror.  It does this very well, in part, I think, because it draws also upon the well of grief created by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 9-11. As a result, when the visitor returns outdoors, she is emotionally wrought up; at this point, the serenity of the memorial does - as it was intended - produce peace. As we look upon the field of chairs, as when we look upon a cemetery filled with monuments, we know that the suffering of the victims produced by the blast is ended; that is consoling.

Hiatus

I will be out of town for a few days, visiting family in Oklahoma. I might not have the opportunity to blog. According to the 5-day weather forecast, it should rain in Southern California for the entire time I am gone. I'm sorry I will miss it; but it is supposed to rain in Oklahoma, too.

Born To Get Wet

For my birthday last October, my wife gave me rain gear. The gear, made for serious wet-weather hiking, has many features to please a man--pockets inside and out with zip-up zippers, velcro straps to tighten sleeve and pant openings, cargo nets, rain gutters, scarf loop. All in all, perfect for the rains of December and this winter. I have looked forward eagerly to each rain storm, so that I would have an excuse to wear my rain gear. The more rain, the harder rain, the greater the downpour - the better, from my point of view. Want to test this clothing. So Bear and I were out early this morning, just as it was thundering. The rain poured down. I remained dry, except for my feet. Canvas jogging shoes were not meant for tromping through puddles and gutter rivers. But, at least, I can look forward to buying shoe covers! Bear loved the rain, the standing and running water, the sodden grass, the marsh that now covered much of the park. The storm water overflow swelled into the swale that runs through the middle of the park. Backflow ponds had built up behind the check dams by the time we arrived. I threw the ball for Bear to retrieve; she splashed across the ten-foot stream rushing across the park. But she was more interested in playing in the water. She would drop the ball and let it float away, pretending to ignore it. Then she would turn around and jump onto the ball, grabbing it in her muzzle. Holding the ball, she would plunge her whole head into the water and shake the ball. I had supposed she was washing it or playing with it. My wife - drawing upon a childhood on an upstate New York farm - demurred. She said Bear was trying to break the bird's neck, or drown it. Whatever! Bear loved it. She got so excited, later running around the marshy softball field, that she got loopy, with a look of ecstatic joy on her face. This is the world to which she was bred. And me, too, grinning foolishly happily walking her in the downpour, while I wore my rain cover-alls.

New Photo of England

I have posted another photo taken by my daughter on her 1,100 mile trek down the length of the UK (July-October 2004) and a suggestive text from Basho poetic journey at my Skin and Bones blog.

Moratorium

Dear MSM. I request a national moratorium on news on Black Men In Trouble (BMIT). I don't want any more coverage of news about Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, or Bill Cosby, or any other Black Man. Make this moratorium 1 years.

Dear Allegers, Complainers, Accusers, Victims, Supposed Victims, Putative Victims, Lawyers of Victims, Fantasy Addicts, Whiners. I request a moratorium on accusations against Black Men, no matter how famous or unknown, rich or poor, powerful and dominant or what failures they might be. Make this moratorium 1 month.

Dear Local News. Go to it. If you have a complaint, investigate it; if it is news-worthy, cover it. If there is a BMIT in your news area cover it. If it is not in my news area, I don't have to read it.

Thank you. A Viewer Who Is Boycotting MSM News on BMIT.  "I avert my eyes."

New Urbanism

USA Today (Wednesday) has an excellent survey of the "New Urbanism" in Southern California (Santa Ana). The label, New Urbanism, refers to legacy city cores being rejuvenated by young Latino families who like the dense, walking city, with services close at hand, with large public spaces and plazas. The article does not have enough sociological information for me to know whether the New Urbanism is an instance of middle-class gentrification of working-class neighborhoods; but certainly it is a kindred phenomenon. The article shows a reason for optimism regarding class integration.

New Poet

When I was a teenager in a rural New England village, I fell in love with poetry. That was my second falling in love. The first, of course, was a girl. I wrote her a poem. She was beautiful, charming, and bountifully endowed. Sandy bewitched all of us boys in 12th grade. In verse, I compared her to the Nile River. In retrospect, a false charge - she was not broad and flat. She took pity on me and went on two dates with me. It took only those two dates for her to discover that she preferred her boy friend, who restored cars, to this new - and desperately bad - poet. I didn't get to write a second poet to her; but my love of poetry was ignited. Talk about displacement!

In the subsequent years, I read widely in English language poetry. My French and German reading ability was much too limited to understand verse in those languages. I sought out and read poets who were associated with my village or who wrote about world in which I grew up. Poetry of the rural New England landscape has always been poetry of my home; I understand and respond to it intuitively, in ways that poetry of my other homes - upstate New York, Pittsburgh, Southern California, London - did not. At sixteen, I was thrilled to discover that Robert Frost supposedly wrote "The Road Not Taken," among other poems, while briefly living in my village. I researched what house he lived in. It was only four houses down the street from my parents' home. When I walked by it, I would look into the windows and wonder about the creative inspiration of America's great poet. After my son was born, my time for poetry became very limited. My poetry library, which was probably over 100 books, ceased to expand. I wrote almost no more poems. I ignored news of poets and reviews of new books of verse, simply because I had no time for them.

I did not return to poetry for over ten years. Then a reunion with college friends reignited my interest in it. I wrote a few poems - surely my best, even if very modest accomplishments. But I still could not find the time to expand my reading. Instead, I returned to poets I love and re-read their works. Over my life, since high school, I have particularly enjoyed these New England poets, whose books are in my personal library.

May Sarton, As Does New Hampshire; Maxine Kumin, Up Country - Poems of New England; Donald Hall, Old and New Poems; e. e. cummings, 100 selected poems; Shirley Barker, A Land and a People; and, of course, Robert Frost, Complete Poems. Of the Frost, I most love the North of Boston and Mountain Interval.

I was put onto Hall by a college friend who is a journalist in New Hampshire. My friend interviewed Hall for a newspaper article and recommended him to me. I instantly loved Hall's work. It was this love of Hall's poems that brought another regional poet into my library. A month ago, hungry for new literature, I went to Barnes and Noble with the intent of spending $60 on poets whom I had not heard of. I was exploring the shelves, picking up book after book and browsing the pages to see if I liked the verse, when I took out Jane Kenyon's collection, Otherwise. She was - I had not known - Hall's wife and a poet, too. I flipped pages. I became absorbed. Back home, I read the poems from "The Boat of Quiet Hours." These poems were written a decade or more before her leukemia began, but showed a prescience about human physicality. I was entranced by her fusion of concerns about her body, her spiritual struggle, and the rural New Hampshire landscape. The poem, below, reminded me of a natural spring behind my parents' house at the wooded edge of the village. Water bubbled up in a wood barrel, out of a clear white sand. A blue enameled tin cup hung from a nearby branch to scoop water out of the barrel. I early associated the spring in Frost's poem, "The Pasture," with the spring of my childhood. Both springs are about revelation, as in Kenyon's
"Drink, Eat, Sleep":

I never drink from this blue tin cup
speckled with white
without thinking of stars on a clear,
cold night--of Venus blazing low
over the leafless trees; and Canis
great and small--dogs without flesh
fur, blood, or bone ... dogs made of light,
apparations of cold light, with black
and trackless spaces in between....
The angel gave a little book
to the prophet, telling him to eat--
eat and tell of the end of time.
Strange food, infinitely strange,
but the pages were like honey to his tongue....

New Photo Blog at Skin and Bones

"Bear" invites you to visit our new photoblog at Skin and Bones, "Shrines - Mt. Rubidoux"

Prickly Happy Valentines' Day

On a walk today with my daughter up Riverside's Mount Rubidoux, we found this love graffiti carved into a cactus in one of the wonderful cactus fields that climb up the lower sides of the mountain.