The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider

Rose after rain.

The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
how the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
how the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
or toes. How soles of feet know
where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
of ordinary things, how clothes
wait respectfully in closets
and soap dries quietly in the dish,
and towels drink the wet
from the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

from 'Another River: New and Selected Poems'

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The secret of life:  there are no ordinary things.  xo

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"Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."  ~Grandma Moses

Dinner Plate Hibiscus

The first bloom. . . there is hope!!  I planted four colors: white, dark pink, light pink and red.  No matter how many flowers I plant, it always amazes me when they actually come up and grow.  :-)

 

 

Another miracle flower, my first Hibiscus.  It's magnificent in the morning sunlight.

 

 

Like magic...one day it's not there, and the next, this glorious flower.

 

 

Sun-dappled and juicy, it fills me with wonder.

 

 

 

As long as there is life, there is wonder:  flowers, birds, dragonflies, cicadas, cats, trees, clouds, sky, stars, moon, words, books, poetry, family, friends, love. . .

 

xo,

Marion

 

 

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud

was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."  ~Anais Nin

 

 

Grief by Stephen Dobyns

 

GRIEF
by Stephen Dobyns

Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance
across sand. Somewhere people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.

Your name was the food I lived on;
now my mouth is full of dirt and ash.
To say your name was to be surrounded
by feathers and silk; now, reaching out,
I touch glass and barbed wire.
Your name was the thread connecting my life;
now I am fragments on a tailor's floor.

I was dancing when I
learned of your death; may
my feet be severed from my body.

"Grief" by Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities

 

 

If You Forgot Me by Pablo Neruda

My ferns, blocking the heat and shading the carport.

IF YOU FORGOT ME
By Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.       
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Daylily in my front yard.

 

My favorite Rose.

 

Happy Summer Solstice in Pictures

a quote I liked and copied into my notebook

storm coming - for Annie Marie

my favorite new watercolor paints from dollar tree

a little redhead checking out my miniature typewriter table

my hood, more or less

angel-wing begonia's blushing flowers

one of my many to-be-re-read piles

Molly (Blythe) with her new John Lennon tee-shirt

a rose is a rose is a rose...

Love Poem to No-One In Particular by Mark O'Brien

photo from Pinterest

Love Poem to No-One in Particular
By Mark O'Brien

let me touch you with my words
for my hands lie limp as empty gloves
let my words stroke your hair
slide down your back
and tickle your belly
for my hands, light and free flying as bricks
ignore my wishes and stubbornly refuse to carry out my quietest desires
let my words enter your mind
bearing torches
admit them willingly into your being
so they may caress you gently
within

 

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This movie is about the poet, Mark O'Brien, who lived most of his life in an iron lung after contracting polio at the age of 6.  It's based on an article he wrote for "The Sun" magazine  about sex and the disabled and about his experiences with a sex surrogate.

 

The article is here if you'd care to read it:

 

http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/174/on_seeing_a_sex_surrogate

 

 

I laughed and cried through most of the movie.  It's the most touching, beautiful movie I've seen in a very long time.  It'll change your life...for the better. 

 

xo,

Marion

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

"For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time." ~Isabel Allende

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

"A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face and the egg is frowning and looking put out. The egg mutters to no one in particular, "I guess we answered that question." ~Author Unknown

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

Elegy for the Personal Letter by Allison Joseph

 

 

Elegy for the Personal Letter
by Allison Joseph
 

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages—
can't much write now—thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at—
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far—
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.

from My Father's Kites.

 

=====================

 

Oh, how I love letters!  I try to write them often, but I've slacked off.  Nobody seems to write by hand anymore.  I mourn future generations who will have no letters to read from their lovers or loved ones.  I remember as a child writing to my cousin and we'd write SWAK (sealed with a kiss) on the back of the envelope and then kiss it wearing some of our mothers' red lipstick.  I wish I still had those letters, but sadly, they're gone.  Who could have imagined that people would stop writing letters?  I have a notebook full of missives & cards from friends.  They're treasures.  My favorite is a postcard from Renee with the sweetest note on back...I still find it hard to believe she's gone.  But I have her letter with a photo of her to look at and remember her precious, giving soul.

 

Write someone a letter today. 

 

xo,

Marion

 

P.S.  Been busy gardening, reading and photographing flowers.  I have huge tomatoe plants in pots and some cucumbers, too.  I laugh with delight every time a seed sprouts and makes a plant.  It's a miracle I'll never get tired of watching every Spring.  I have several families of Bluebirds in our yard.  One is sitting on 5 little blue eggs.  Another miracle of Spring. 

You Know Who You Are by Naomi Shihab Nye

You Know Who You Are
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.

Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.

Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
Everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
Light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn’t work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying “This is what I need to remember”
and then hoping you can.

from:  "Words Under the Words" by Naomi Shihab Nye, page 22

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Wild Spring storms here in the swamp today.  So far, Spring has been violent as if the earth is giving birth...not an "easy" birth, but a difficult, excruciating, wildly harrowing birth. 

Today is "Poem in Your Pocket" day.  April is National Poetry Month which I don't celebrate because every single hour of every day is Poetry Day here at Casa Dragonfly. 

xo,
Marion

PS:  Congratulations to the illustrious, amazingly brilliant Sharon Olds for winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2013, for her book "Stag's Leap".

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You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert

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Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest

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Mules of Love by Ellen Bass

One of my favorite books of poetry:  "Mules of Love" by Ellen Bass.  I've been away gardening, sprouting seeds, reading, writing and being depressed.  Not necessarily in that order.  xo

God and the G-Spot
by Ellen Bass

“He didn’t want to believe. He wanted to know.”
--Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife, on why he didn't believe in God.

I want to know too. Belief and disbelief
are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet
in the Prado--I don't like it.
I do.--before the Picasso.

Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud
in her full red executive lips,
who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said,
I think the G-spot's one of those myths
men use to make us feel inferior.

God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round
and spinning, the galaxies speeding
in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion.
I'm an East Coast Jew. We all have our opinions.

But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach
where I gave her the thirty tiny red glass hearts
I'd taken back from my husband when I left.
He'd never believed in them. She, though, scooped
them up like water, let them drip through her fingers
like someone who has so much she can afford to waste.

That's the day she reached inside me
for something I didn't think I had.
And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river
she pulled the river out of me. That's
the way I want to know God.

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Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One
By Ellen Bass

When I wash myself in the shower
and afterward, as I am drying
with the terrycloth towel,
I love the feel
of my vulva, the plump outer lips
and the neat inner ones
that fit together trimly
as hands in prayer.  I like
the feel the slick crevice and the slight
swelling that begins
with just this casual handling.
So eager, willing as a puppy.
When I was young I could
not have imagined this
as I looked at women like me,
my waist thickened like pudding,
my rear end that once rode high
as a kite, now hanging like a
sweater left out in the rain,
skin drooping, not just the dewlaps
or pennants that flutter
under the arms, but all over,
loosening from the bone like boiled
chicken.  And it will only
get worse.  But that fleshy
plum is always cheerful.  And new.
A taut globe shining
in an old fruit tree.

From:  "Mules of Love" by Ellen Bass

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"For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time." ~Isabel Allende

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Litany by Billy Collins

This 3 year old recites my favorite Billy Collins' poem, "Litany" from memory.  Be still my poet-heart.  You are all my bread, knives, crystal goblets and wine....xo

LITANY
By Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.   

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"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." ~Robert Frost

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"I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests." ~Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985

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