October by Robert Frost & Charlotte the House Spider

Charlotte, still in her web early last week.  I had her dead and gone and she's still hard at work!

My front yard.  Charlotte lives in front of the carport.  We have to be careful not to bump into her web.

Charlotte, full of eggs, still.  She looks pretty scary here, but she's a garden orb-weaving spider and is harmless to humans....unless you run into the web at night and she walks across your face and gives you a heart attack.  LOL!  I warn people who come over to duck under her web.  I ran into it one night, but luckily she was up high.  It still creeped me out.  I love spiders, just not to touch!!  Garden spiders usually live about one year.

An early evening shot of Charlotte, defying gravity.

First foggy morning last week.  Looking up my street.

Morning Glory in the fog.

OCTOBER
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

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Are you scared of spiders or do you let them live around your house?
 
Happy Monday!  I hope you all enjoy this last week of October! 
 
Blessings,
 
~*~ Marion ~*~
 

Synchronistically, my neighbor has a Halloween display full of giant spiders.  Tee-Hee.  Very spooky!!

"Things fall apart...the centre cannot hold...."

http://scienceblogs.com/chaoticutopia/2006/11/friday_fractal_xxiv.php

As often happens to me,  I was reading a novel ("The Owl and Moon Cafe" by the amazingly talented Jo-Ann Mapson) that mentions this line from a poem. . . "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..." which lead me to find the poem from which it was quoted.  I've been fascinated by spirals and fractals in nature for years and this poem spiraled itself right into my blog.  I'm not sure I fully understand it (even after reading the commentary from Sparknotes and a few other sites), but I love the language and the overall feeling of the poem.  I firmly believe we don't have to understand another person's poetry to appreciate and enjoy it.   The beauty of poetry is that it can mean different things to each person who reads it. 

I haven't read much Yeats, but I try to be open to the classics.  I love mythology and he draws heavily from it.  Check out this awesome quote from his story, "The Celtic Twilight" written in 1893:

"Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.—ch. 1, “A Teller of Tales"

Kind of makes you feel your own mortality, no?

Blessings & Happy Reading,

~Marion


THE SECOND COMING
By William Butler Yeats

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Commentary on this poem from:  Sparknotes.com:

"Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development)...."

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Have you read much of Yeats' work and, if so, what are some of your favorite poems of his?

The Panic of Birds by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Olena K. Davis

"And Her Soul Out of Nothing" by Olena K. Davis

^   ^   ^   ^   ^

THE PANIC OF BIRDS

By Olena Kalytiak Davis

The moon is sick
of pulling at the river, and the river
fed up with swallowing the rain,
So, in my lukewarm coffee, in the bathroom
mirror, there's a restlessness
as black as a raven.
Landing heavily on the quiet lines of this house.
Again, the sun takes cover
and the morning is dead
tired of itself, already, it's pelting and windy
as I lean into the pane
that proves this world is a cold smooth place.

Wind against window---let the words fight it out---
as I try to remember: What is it
that's so late in coming? What was it
I understood so well last night, so well it kissed me,
sweetly on the forehead?

Wind against window and my late flowering brain,
heavy, gone to seed. Pacing
from room to room and in each window
a different version of a framed woman
unable to rest, set against a sky
full of beating wings and abandoned
directions. Her five chambered heart
filling with the panic of birds, asking: What?

What if not this?


###############################

My thoughts exactly.  There's a poem for every feeling on earth.  Always.

Love & Blessings,

~*~ Marion ~*~

__________


"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be." ~Don Quixote

__________

"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness." ~Aristotle



__________

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life." ~Simone Weil

__________

A Prayer to the God of Ebb and Flow

Catfish, amazed to be in a tree.  His first successful attempt last week. 

Another luscious October Morning Glory

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A Prayer to the God of Ebb and Flow

by Henri Nouween, (1932-1996), a Dutch Catholic Priest who authored 40 books on the spiritual life.

Dear Lord, today I thought of the words of Vincent van Gogh: “It is true there is an ebb and flow, but the sea remains the sea.”

You are the sea. Although I experience many ups and downs in my emotions and often feel great shifts and changes in my inner life, you remain the same. Your sameness is not the sameness of a rock, but the sameness of a faithful lover.

Out of your love I came to life; by your love I am sustained; and to your love I am always called back. There are days of sadness and days of joy; there are feelings of guilt and feelings of gratitude; there are moments of failure and moments of success; but all of them are embraced by your unwavering love.

My only real temptation is to doubt in your love, to think of myself as beyond the reach of your love, to remove myself from the healing radiance of your love. To do these things is to move into the darkness of despair.

O Lord, sea of love and goodness, let me not fear too much the storms and winds of my daily life, and let me know that there is ebb and flow but that the sea remains the sea. Amen.

October speaks yellow fluently.

Only a Poet Can Interpret a Man and a Woman

"The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt, painted 1907 - 1908

A Man and a Woman
By Alan Feldman

Between a man and a woman
the anger is greater, for each man would like to sleep
in the arms of each woman who would like to sleep
in the arms of each man, if she trusted him not to be
schizophrenic, if he trusted her not to be
a hypochondriac, if she trusted him not to leave her
too soon, if he trusted her not to hold him
too long, and often women stare at the word men
as it lives in the word women, as if each woman
carried a man inside her and a woe, and has
crying fits that last for days, not like the crying
of a man, which lasts a few seconds, and rips the throat
like a claw---but because the pain differs
much as the shape of the body, the woman takes
the suffering of the man for selfishness, the man
the woman's pain for helpnessness, the woman's lack of it
for hardness, the man's tenderness for deception,
the woman's lack of acceptance, an act of contempt
which is really fear, the man's fear for fickleness,
yet cars come off the bridge in rivers of light
each holding a man and a woman.

From:  "The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present", page 135

Kept Burning and Distant
By Linda Gregg

You return when you feel like it,
like rain.  And like rain you are tender,
with the rain's inept tenderness.
A passion so general I could be anywhere.
You carry me out into the wet air.
You lay me down on the leaves
and the strong thing is not the sex
but waking up alone under the trees after.

From:  "The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present", page 128

Anne Sexton - The Black Art & The Addict

Anne Sexton at her typewriter with her cup of coffee, cigarette in hand.

The Black Art
by Anne Sexton

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren't enough; as if machines and galleons
and wars were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hats,
we love each other, precious , precious .
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.


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

Anne Sexton

The Addict
by Anne Sexton

Sleepmonger,
deathmonger,
with capsules in my palms each night,
eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles
I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.
I'm the queen of this condition.
I'm an expert on making the trip
and now they say I'm an addict.
Now they ask why.
WHY!

Don't they know that I promised to die!
I'm keeping in practice.
I'm merely staying in shape.
The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I'm on a diet from death.

Yes, I admit
it has gotten to be a bit of a habit-
blows eight at a time, socked in the eye,
hauled away by the pink, the orange,
the green and the white goodnights.
I'm becoming something of a chemical
mixture.
that's it!

My supply
of tablets
has got to last for years and years.
I like them more than I like me.
It's a kind of marriage.
It's a kind of war where I plant bombs inside
of myself.

Yes
I try
to kill myself in small amounts,
an innocuous occupation.

Actually I'm hung up on it.
But remember I don't make too much noise.
And frankly no one has to lug me out
and I don't stand there in my winding sheet.
I'm a little buttercup in my yellow nightie
eating my eight loaves in a row
and in a certain order as in
the laying on of hands
or the black sacrament.

It's a ceremony
but like any other sport
it's full of rules.

It's like a musical tennis match where
my mouth keeps catching the ball.
Then I lie on; my altar
elevated by the eight chemical kisses.
What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum-
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.

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

If you're interested in a good online biography of Ms. Sexton, check it out here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6163

I also highly recommend the book, "Anne Sexton, A Biography" by Diane Middlebrook.  It's an enlightening book about Ms. Sexton, one of my favorite poets of all time.  I've read it many times.  Also, "Searching For Mercy Street:  My Journey Back to My Mother" by Linda Gray Sexton, Anne's daughter, is a fabulous read. 

It's a cold (!), totally stoned, humidless morning here in the swamp:  magical and rare.  The light....O, the perfectly crystalline, translucent October morning light!!  Would that I could bottle it and save it...

We're in the midst of a drought, though.  No rain going on 2 months so I'm praying for some sky tears. 

Love & Blessings,

~Marion

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

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard

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

Full Moon Arrives With Friends... Happy Autumnal Equinox!

Jupiter will be making its closest approach to Earth Monday night since 1951, and for about the next four months the giant planet will be teamed up with a distant relative: Uranus.  The fun part is that they'll be all lined up in a row.  I'm mixing my star-gazing and moon-bathing with that phenomenal full moon tonight.  I have a few Moonflowers left and am just seeing the Sphinx Moths coming to drink from them.  A few leaves are changing to yellow or brown, but not many.  It's been dry for the whole month and my grass is crunchy and dry.  We need a few days of long, slow showers.......

A photo of my Moon playing in the leaves of my Water Oak.  The Moonlady gets shy sometimes.

Pearl in Black Velvet

By: Marion

For September Full Moon
Shining in my picture window,
mistress of the night---
Full of ethereal mystery
and pearlescent, ambient light.

My life’s one devoted
and constant, dutiful love,
a beautiful, blameless being,
my soul’s not worthy of.

Others were never faithful,
their hearts---seldom true,
but every month, throughout my life
your presence leads me through.

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

Another delicate, luminous Moonflower from last night, fully opened.  I can't resist their delicate blooms... I found this poem below by a new poet and I share it here.  Happy sky gazing!  Love & Blessings----

MOONFLOWERS
by Karma Larsen

For Milly Sorensen, January 16, 1922 - February 19, 2004

It was the moonflowers that surprised us.
Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.
She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.
Never knew what she did with them.
Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.
I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,
a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers
shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.
A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,
that manicured lawns don't surround me.

Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,
sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.
Gaudy and awkward by day,
by night they were huge, soft, luminous.
Only this year, this year of her death
did they break free of their huge, prickly husks
and brighten the darkness she left.

 ^^^^^ +++++^^^^^+++++^^^^^ +++++^^^^^

October's Party

October gave a party;

The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.

The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.


~George Cooper, "October's Party"

+++++*****+++++*****+++++*****+++++*****+++++

The Autumn of My Life

The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix, one of the greatest poet/songwriter/singer/guitarists who ever lived.

+   +   +   +   +   +   +   +

The Wind Cries Mary

By Jimi Hendrix, 1967 from “Are You Experienced” Album

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary

The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
'Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it's old age, and it's wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I love every song on the "Are You Experienced" album, but this one is a favorite.  Hendrix had no equal as a a poet and guitarist.   If you've never heard this song, you can check it out at YouTube.

What's your favorite Jimi Hendrix song?

Two Poems to Welcome September

My Cockscomb bloomed!

Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

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

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?

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

The Hummingbirds are emptying my 3 large feeders twice a week now.  They're fueling up in droves for the trip further South.  I can feel them taking Summer with them, bit by bit, on their tiny, strong wings.  I'm already nostalgic for summer and she hasn't even gone...

Happy September.

Blessings,

~Marion