Weather Channel by Sheryl Crow

Weather Channel
by Sheryl Crow

Sunny morning
You can hear it
Siren's warning
There is weather on both sides
And I know it's coming
Just like before
There's a black dog
That scratches my door
He's been growling my name saying
You better get to running
Can you make it better for me
Can you make me see the light of day
Because I got no one
Who will bring me a
Big umbrella
So I'm watching the weather channel
And waiting for the storm
It's just sugar
Just a pill to make me happy
I know it may not fix the hinges
But at least the door has stopped it's creaking
I got friends
They're waiting for me to comb out my hair
Come outside and join the human race
But I don't feel so human
Can you make it better for me
Can you make me see the light of day
Because I got lab coats
Who will bring me a panacea
While I'm watching the weather channel
Waiting for the storm
You won't want me
Hanging around the birthday pony
Even though it's just a game
You know we are the same
But you're the better faker.

 

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Enjoying some cold weather here in the swamp today and cooking gumbo.  It's interesting to watch a hurricane that's not headed for us here in the Gulf.  Those of you on the East Coast, hunker down and beware of Frankenstorm Sandy.  

This is one of my favorite songs by Sheryl Crow.  She wrote it when she was going through a bout of depression.

PS:  The word "Panacea" is one of my favorite words on earth.  So full of meaning and fun to say.  (Pronounced pan-a-see-a with emphasis on the see).

Panacea:  a remedy for all diseases or ills; a cure-all;

 

xoxo,

Marion

Flowers are Earth's Poetry

A bee headed for my Confederate Roses this week.

 

Pink personified.

 

Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End by Mary Oliver

A 'trash tree' (Chinese Tallow) in my neighborhood all clad in yellow.

Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?
By Mary Oliver

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree–
they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of goldfluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

 

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"Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter."   ~Carol Bishop Hipps

 

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October, An Elegy by Sue Goyette

October Fairy by Amy Brown

October, An Elegy
By Sue Goyette

The whole month of October
is an elegy, a used bookstore
getting rained on.  This weather
makes me read endings first.  Partings
and farewells, the way we're baffled, startled
when happiness falls.  Let me tell you something about darkness, though,
because there's been enough about light.  But first
about the handwritten poem copied out in the back
of a Rilke translation.  It begins with beloved,
I'm tempted to tell you, or with rest,
and is written in the kind of couplets that are made
for each other, lines with stories of how they first met,
and I'm tempted to say that after I read it, light didn't matter,
nor darkness, that poetry somehow gathers
them both into one word.  O, how often we are baffled,
startled by our own happiness.  I read the poem
and kept its last three unresolved lines:  our
line break hearts.  There is a pause always around the word
heart, the history
of leaving, the small right-angled scars of loss.  Another line break
then into, a space, then the words:  like small trees.  We are made up
of small trees, limbs that reach for each other, forest
of longing, root systems of light, small blossoms of darkness
and there is a poem handwritten after pages of Rilke and, after Rilke,
how can our hearts be anything but small trees.  The book was used.  The lines
unresolved.  It was raining so I sat in the store and read
the ending first.  Here happiness falls, sometimes
the only difference between our
and hearts is a line break after a long elegy.  This is the season that begins
by ending.  The space between light
and darkness is unresolved
as the space between our hearts
and small trees.  Beloved, rest.  It's true.  I read the ending first
but I kept reading it until I got all the way back
to the beginning.
 
From:  "Undone" By Sue Goyette

Support Poets.  Buy Poetry!!!!!

Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert

Lizard eating a butterfly in my backyard.  I was following the butterfly around the yard with my camera to my eye and BAM! the lizard came out of nowhere and ate my butterfly.  Oh, what a metaphor for life.  :-)

Tear It Down
By Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

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I love the poet, Linda Gilbert, and Jack is her ex-husband.  (This poem is sort of a mindfuck, but I love it.)  I was reading some of her poetry online and found this poem several years ago.  It caused quite a lot of discussion when I first posted it. 

Enjoy! 

~Marion, enjoying rare, cool October weather here in the swamp on opening weekend of hunting season.

Dearest Rose

Woman Writing Letter by Henry O'Hara Clive (1881 - 1960)

Dearest Rose,

For the first time I understand why men mortgage their souls for a diamond the size of a skipping stone.  I understand why dragonflies mate on the wind, their abdomens a perfect flying heart.  I know the thrill of the match as it lights the fire---and the fire’s joy as it consumes all it touches.  I even know the ashes’ ache as it smears your fingertips and touches your face as you wipe away your tears.

For the first time I feel.

I am the needle on the Victrola and you, the record.  Together, we become music.

Rose, you are the elusive drop of joy wrung from the heart of the Poppy making my brain a dream collage.

My heart becomes heavy.  I know this can’t last.  I weep as you shake your head smiling and capture my tears in a tiny cobalt blue bottle.  You say you will use them to season your stuffed zucchini blossoms and feed them back to me to negate my sorrow.

Rose, you are a love alchemist.

Heal me.

Yours,

Lilly

By Marion:  9/25/2012

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Autumn by Amy Lowell

Autumn 2011 at Casa Dragonfly.

 

Autumn

By Amy Lowell 1874–1925
 

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

but each leaf is fringed with silver.

 

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Goodbye summer.  Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, you hot, mean bitch.  Adios!!  ~Marion

Reading Mary Oliver...

Storm clouds over Casa Dragonfly

 

 

From the poem, ‘Work’ by Mary Oliver

And how shall we speak of love
except in the splurge or roses, and the long body
     of the river
shining in its silk and froth;

and what could be more wonderful

than the agility and the reaching of the fingers of Hannah,
who is only seven days old;

and what could be more comforting than to fold grief

like a blanket---
to fold anger like a blanket,
with neat corners---
to put them into a box of words?

 From:  “The Leaf and the Cloud”, page 13

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Another raggedy dragonfly visiting me, 2012

 

From the poem “Gravel” by Mary Oliver

The high-piled plum-colored storm-heavy clouds

are approaching.
The fly mumbles against the glass.

This is the world.
The hot little bluebirds in the box are getting ready to fly.
This is the world.

The sweet in the parsnip
waits for our praise.

The dragonfly lives its life

without a single error, it also
waits for our praise.

The pale-green moths are pressing

against the screen, fluttering, they are
dying to get in to press their papery bodies
into the light.

This is the world.

From:  “The Leaf and the Cloud”, page 43

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I love Mary Oliver.  She has a grasp on the natural world like no other poet I've ever read.  She speaks to my heart today from her book, "The Leaf and the Cloud", an amazing book length poem in seven parts. 

xo,
Marion

"Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are." ~Osho

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"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

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

"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes." ~e.e. cummings

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

As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light by Charles Wright

Sunlight spilled, 2010 by Marion

 

 

As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light

By Charles Wright

 

The sky unrolls like a rug,

                                                unwelcoming, gun-grey,

Over the Blue Ridge.
Mothers are calling their children in,

                                                mellifluous syllables, floating sounds.

The traffic shimmies and settles back.

The doctor has filled his truck with leaves

Next door, and a pair of logs.

                                                Salt stones litter the street.

The snow falls and the wind drops.
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.

January hunkers down,

                                                the icicle deep in her throat---

The days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold,
Single grain by single grain
Everything flows toward the structure,

                                                last ache in the ache for God.

1995

 

---------------------------------------------

 

I awoke shivering this morning because I went to bed with all the windows wide open last night.  It was a luscious, humidless 57 degrees.  I felt as if I'd been transported to another place and time.  It was near 100 degrees all last week. 

 

My orange cat brought me a baby rabbit almost as big as he was to the back door.  I thanked him, then rescued the poor, scared little bunny.  I sat in the cool sunlight and picked up my heavy "Norton Anthology of Poetry", all 1,376 pages of it, and it fell open to this poem.  Poetry has saved my life over and over and over again.  Few understand this, but the ones who do have also changed my life. 

 

Happy almost Autumn,

~Marion

 

--------------------------------------------

 

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

 

The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry With Us by Richard Hugo

A battered, tattered, curious old river dragonfly visiting me last summer.

I've spent most of my life along the Red River in Louisiana and this poem just brings out the river-love in me.  My uncle who raised us was a carpenter and fisherman and made a living from the river.  I often went with him to run the nets and he'd drop me off at a sandbar to play while he baited lines.  Today I live a few miles from the river but I think of it every day.   ~Marion, reading Anne Michaels on this rainy day in Louisiana.  xo

The Towns We Know and Leave Behind,
The Rivers We Carry with Us - By Richard Hugo
— for James Wright

I forget the names of towns without rivers.
A town needs a river to forgive the town.
Whatever river, whatever town –
it is much the same.
The cruel things I did I took to the river.
I begged the current: make me better.

Your town, your river, or mine –
it is much the same.
A murdering man lives on the land
in a shack the river birds hate.
He rubs the red shriek of night from his eyes.
He prays to water: don’t let me do that again.

Let’s name your river: Ohio.
Let’s name all rivers one in the blood,
red stream and debris in the blood.
Say George Doty had a wrong head.
Say the Ohio forgives what George did
and the river birds loved his shack.
Let’s name the birds: heron and sweat.
Let’s get away from the mud.

The river is there to forgive the town
and without a river a town abuses the sky.
The river is there to forgive what I did.
Let’s name my river: Duwamish.
And let’s admit
the river birds don’t hate my home.
That’s a recent development, really
like mercury in the cod.

Without a river a town abuses the air.
The river is there to forgive what I did.
The river birds hate what I did
until I name them.
Your river or mine –
It is much the same.
A murdering man lived on the bank.

Here’s the trick;
We had to stay drunk
to welcome the river
to live in a shack
to die on the bank
beneath the bigoted sky
under the river birds
day after day
to murder away
all water that might die.

A murdering man is dead on the bank
of your new river, The East,
on mine, The Clark Fork.
It is much the same.
Your river has gulls and tugs.
Mine has eagles and sky.
I rub last night from my eyes.
I ask bright water what’s happened.

The river, I am not sure which one,
Says water has no special power.
What should I do?
Or you?

Now water has no need to forgive
what shall become of murder?
How shall we live
when we killed, when we died by the word?

Whatever the name of the river,
we both had two women to love,
one to love us enough we left behind
a town that abuses the day.
The other to love the river we brought with us,
the shack we lived and still live in,
the birds, the towns that return to us for names
and we give them names knowing the river
murders them away.