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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
 Posted - 05/16/2008 : 14:14:51
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That first year married, we lived in a shack...
No kidding, a shack. Your garage is probably
bigger than this was. And it was for two families.
A deluxe shack.
But, at that point, both of us fresh off the road and
twenty years old, it was better than a cave, on a beach
or the parents basement.
We'd met on the road in California and
came back to NY to get married;
just for the Hell of it...
and alot of it was,
Hell, caused by both,
to be fair and generous to,
well, me...
But, there was a fair amount of Heaven, too,
those twenty years.
I'm sorry, DD, wherever you are,
for the shacks and the bad jobs and
mostly for you never getting to see me
all grown up,
finally...
[almost]
It's been a long road without you.
You know,
that first year married I don't think we ever slept...
~*~
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 05/17/2008 : 00:05:24
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He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him, habit being so strong
Raymond Carver
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/17/2008 : 07:18:07
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Duke Ellington riding in the back of his limo,
somewhere in Indiana. He is reading by lamplight.
Billy Strayhorn is with him, but asleep.
The tires hiss on the pavement.
The Duke goes on reading and turning the pages.
-Carver |
Edited by - buckman on 05/17/2008 07:18:37 |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2249 Posts |
Posted - 05/17/2008 : 13:01:32
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Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.
Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love
these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.
~Raymond Carver~
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/17/2008 : 16:37:09
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Nothing cuts thru the nite like a solitary saxophone...
Slicing the divide between truth and lies,
solitude and solitary
fact and fiction
frailty and strength.
Peeling back the layers
built up by the day & the world.
Leaving nothing but
you and the truth...
HB |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2249 Posts |
Posted - 05/18/2008 : 17:31:36
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| The Magician moves to the foot of the stage. Sees the hopefuls in the front row lean closer. She knows it's his cracked-in-half laughter that saves them all. He tosses the Life Preserver into the crowd. Picks up the saw and steps forward. Her pins-and-needles sleeping limbs. Her wide-open unblinking eyes. "Pixels," the Magician offers, and begins sawing, "too close to the big picture to see." |
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Ailinn
Windchimer
2249 Posts |
Posted - 05/18/2008 : 17:34:40
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"Two tin cans and a thousand miles of string."
Maybe a little more string now, Baby. |
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Craig
Firefly
Kyrgyzstan
3794 Posts |
Posted - 05/18/2008 : 21:00:19
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She threw a rock then hid her hands...
~ Craig |
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BarbraG
Windchimer
1825 Posts |
Posted - 05/23/2008 : 22:19:06
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"Broken Toys"
Little broken hearts. "Such a pretty little face, with a heart
that's been torn .... Living in a borrowed space, from the moment
she was born . . How many tears she's cried, but never tears of
joy . . . Someone's taken a little girl and made a Broken Toy".
"Two sad little eyes, painted heartbreak blue .. the simplest of
his dreams.. never will come true ..someone elses pain fell on this
little boy . .. someone's taken a soldier, and made a Broken Toy"
"Broken Toys,.. for every one we break, a broken life takes its' place... that one day will break Toys of its' own . .Oh, Lord .. we have to mend these Broken Toys . . and let them be children again .. give back the innocence stolen from them..
These words are from a song that B.J. Thomas recorded. The video
is almost impossible to watch all the way through . . . but it
is worth the tears. This should be played on all of the radios
and televisions in the world all day and all night for just one day.
What am I saying ?? For just one minute to get some of the words in.
I'd settle for that.
BGee
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/24/2008 : 21:37:02
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Lemme see, it seems like the trailer was just outside of Washington, PA.
In a big, open field right next to the interstate.
We all piled thru the little door, snowcovered
shivering and laughing, falling all over each other.
We'd been out ramming snowbanks
with a VW bug, trying to get stuck and then
lifting it out when we finally did.
Anyway, the trailer didn't have much
but it did have a stereo and a recliner and a mirror.
I remember doing Crystal for the first time
and lying in that chair vibrating
to Emerson, Lake and Palmer's first album...
Sometimes you have to look back down the road
to see where you entered the tunnels...
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 05/30/2008 : 14:21:31
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Not for a moment,
beautiful aged Walt Whitman,
have I failed
to see your beard full
of butterflies.
Federico Garcia Lorca |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/31/2008 : 08:00:22
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In that last moment of clarity,
just before sleep
when all the busy-ness and fear have gone,
one thought stayed to play me off to dreams or nightmares:
Raised from the dead...
God might be able to do the trick in three days...
The rest of us take a little longer.
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/31/2008 : 13:36:38
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I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing,
laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm
ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment-
what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight-I swim in it, as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women,
and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of
them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
-Walt Whitman |
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 05/31/2008 : 18:03:20
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GENESIS
With what meagre space
remaining between his hands
he tried to reconstruct
a universe: with a tear
he drew a star, a moon with a glance,
and with a single touch, a sun.
When he closed his eyes
people commuted to their work
on the sidewalk of his eyelids.
Wadih Sa'adeh |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 05/31/2008 : 21:11:16
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Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.
-Rumi |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 06/01/2008 : 05:20:48
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"Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose from
all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.
Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell where it is, and you
can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path-but that's when
you get going best, glad to be
lost, learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again."
-William Stafford
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 06/01/2008 : 09:01:04
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What she made in her body is broken.
Now she has begun to bear it again.
In the house of her son's death
his life is shining in the windows,
for she has elected to bear him again.
She did not bear him for death,
and she does not. She has taken back
into her body the seed, bitter
and joyous, of the life of a man.
In the house of the dead the windows shine
with life. She mourns, for his life was good.
She is not afraid. She is like a field
where the corn is planted, and like the rain
that waters the field, and like the young corn.
In her sorrow she renews life, in her grief
she prepares the return of joy.
She did not bear him for death, and she does not.
There was a life that went out of her to live
on its own, divided, and now she has taken it back.
She is alight with the sudden new life of death.
Perhaps it is the brightness of the dead one
being born again. Perhaps she is planting him,
like corn, in the living and in the earth.
She has taken back into her flesh
and made light, the dark seed of her pain.
Wendell Berry |
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Doug L
Firefly
Canada
5446 Posts |
Posted - 06/03/2008 : 17:37:29
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AT A COUNTRY FUNERAL
Now the old ways that have brought us
farther than we remember sink out of sight
as under the treading of many strangers
ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while
they are cast clear upon the mind
as at a country funeral where, amid the soft
lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive
solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,
persist the usages of old neighbourhood.
Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,
knowing the extremity they have come to,
one of their own bearing to the earth the last
of his light, his darkness the sun's definitive mark.
They stand and think as they stood and thought
when even the gods were different.
And the organ music, though decorous
as for somebody else's grief, has its source
in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,
and on naked hillsides by the open grave,
eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,
and across the sea. How long a time?
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my
self in Thee. They came, once in time,
in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned
to the world. The fields and the work
remained to be returned to. Now the entrance
of one of the old ones into the Rock
too often means a lifework perished from the land
without inheritor, and the field goes wild
and the house sits and stares. Or it passes
at cash value into the hands of strangers.
Now the old dead wait in the open coffin
for the blood kin to gather, come home
for one last time, to hear old men
whose tongues bear an essential topography
speak memories doomed to die.
But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,
is one of the land's seeds, as a seed
is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,
to pass on into life the knowledge
of what has died. What we owe the future
is not a new start, for we can only begin
with what has happened. We owe the future
the past, the long knowledge
that is the potency of time to come.
That makes of a man's grave a rich furrow.
The community of knowing in common is the seed
of our life in this place. There is not only
no better possibility, there is no
other, except for chaos and darkness,
the terrible ground of the only possible
new start. And so as the old die and the young
depart, where shall a man go who keeps
the memories of the dead, except home
again, as one would go back after a burial,
faithful to the fields, less the dead die
a second and more final death.
Wendell Berry |
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buckman
Firefly
USA
2872 Posts |
Posted - 06/03/2008 : 18:35:52
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THE JOYS THAT STING
Oh do not die, says Donne, for I shall hate
all women so. How false the sentence rings.
Women? But in a life made desolate
It is the joys once shared that have the stings.
To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
To order one pint where I ordered two,
To think of, and then not to make, the small
time-honoured joke [senseless to all but you];
To laugh [oh, one'll laugh], to talk upon
themes we talked upon when you were there,
to make some poor pretence of going on,
Be kind to one's old friends, and seem to care,
While no one[O God] through the years will say
The simplest common word in just your way.
-CS LEWIS |
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aussiedave
Swinger
Australia
509 Posts |
Posted - 06/04/2008 : 04:59:58
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a
greater love
hath no woman
than to have
only ever loved
just the one
man
AD |
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The Nightly Vigil