New Business

Happy Birthday, My Love!!!

 

Happy November! (Halloween Flashback)

 

 

Happy Father’s Day, Eric

“The child is father of the man.”
–William Wordsworth

for him

Poem 50 (“I lost my way, I forgot …”) by Leonard Cohen

I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.

~~~~~

The Phoenix Bird

by

Hans Christian Andersen

(1850)

N the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one—the one solitary Phoenix bird. The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg.

The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant’s cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant’s head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and England’s coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymnbook that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindoo maid gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan’s red beak; on Shakspeare’s shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin’s raven, and whispered in the poet’s ear “Immortality!” and at the minstrels’ feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? He sang to thee the Marseillaise, and thou kissedst the pen that fell from his wing; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance thou didst turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise—renewed each century—born in flame, ending in flame! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth—“The Phoenix of Arabia.”

In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee—thy name, Poetry.

~~~~~

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
  

doom

i have a very cliche sense of  foreboding, accomanied by a very cliche lump in my throat (but that could just be sleeping sans cold pills and the difficulty in that). woke up all the way with eric this morning, had much conversation and um, yeah, so we talked for awhile and i told him i didn’t want him to go – i don’t know if it’s because i was awake with him and that caused a sense of gravity for the 5am time, or if i was awake because of the gravity of the sense of foreboding. i told him as much but he said he just had too much to do. it occurred to me that the delay of him could not only have offset the schedule of real/imagined doom, but may have in fact SET OFF the schedule of real/imagined doom.

i fell back to sleep hearing him taking out the trash and thinking what an awful last thing that would’ve been to do at your home if you never came back, and wondering if he’d looked in on adam before he left.

then dreamed. dreamed i was scully, and mulder and i were investigating murders at a trailer camp rental motel type place – we got there at night and got seperate trailers (seriously rancid little boxes with no water or bathrooms) in the mulder and scully style, and i inspected the whole place – dark blue dirty curtains in a square sort of habitat, with a kitchen-like area to one side with gold/yellow dirty linleum counters and an unconnected sink, empty cabinets, and a living room area to the other side, with a foot wide strip of brown shag and yellowed curtains above a tv that didn’t work, the kind with rabbit ears on a tray. but it was all just indications of seperate rooms to give the illusion of an actual suite – it was really just an unmade bed in the center of the small place with the purely decorative “other room” areas flanking the unmade bed in the couple feet of space on each side of the bed. the door to the bathroom opened to outside, to a field behind the trailer park.

i undressed and got into bed (with my gun on my chest) – the sheets were green flannel and the pillowcases were faded pink flowers – it occurred to me after i was already in that the sheets were probably dirty and i wondered what in hell had made me get down to my skivvies and into the damned bed in the first place, but a lucid me-voice inside my scully-head reminded me that i was in the x-files and mulder was in the next trailer and the episode was probably constructed in a way that mulder would see me in my white undies at some point. i was lying there on the dirty pillow contemplating the pros and cons of getting back up to dress (i had already touched the sheets) and trying to remember if i’d deadbolted the door, and was thinking the door should have a chainlock instead of a deadbolt, when i started hearing noises under the trailer. i got up and dressed quickly, pointing my gun at the floor and doing other scully-like things, and there was pouding on the door and i yelled asking who but couldn’t hear through the door, was afraid to open it with no chain lock, more pounding under the floor, and at the door, i finally opened the door and it was mulder, and we immediately began yelling at each other about the ridiculousness of no chain locks being on the doors.

there was some sort of transition that was very spooky, walking across the field and there was fog, a few fireflies scattered, and a big house. it was unlocked and sort of hotel-like, very modern functional, browns and tans that don’t show dirt. we immediately became seperated.

i ended up at the top of a long staircase and knocked on a door, and when it opened it was billy c– and i was me again, but still had a gun. he was surprised to see me, but told me about some sort of event going on that i don’t remember now that made it not THAT odd to run into each other.  he was playing a game on a huge flatscreen and had an open suitcase. there were photos in it, and he said he’d brought them to have copies made and wanted to know if i wanted copies as i was in all of them. they were candid group shots, and i didn’t recognize anyone in the photos, and didn’t see myself OR him in any of them, until he pointed me out in the corners or between people or behind people, just a shadow or fraction of me, like in every movie that the killer is discovered in a stack of photos. above his bed was a row of photos, all of girls we went to highschool with, all in the same position, stretched on their backs with their ankles folded and one arm up by their heads, face toward the camera. all the pictures were of the bed and sheets in my trailer (i know- dunh dunh DUNH!), and i asked billy where they came from and he said they were up when he got there, and i became immediately certain all the girls were dead (and not necessarily SAD about that, there wasn’t a lot to lose in those photos, just to be perfectly honest about my internal shrug in the dream about the deaths themselves) but i was already changing back into scully, and i turned to billy very dramatically and yelled “WHERE’S MULDER?” and he cracked up.  i ran into the hallway and was pointing my gun left then right down the hall when i heard adam say “mommy, it’s time to wake up.”

still the lump in my throat, and no email back from eric but that’s not odd if he is where i think he is and there are no computers or time to check them.

i blame jane s– for the dream but not the foreboding. the dream was just a very interesting and layered manifestion of dread feelings and many X-files conversations over the last few days.

i wish eric had stayed home. i’m off to make more coffee.

eric’s birthday & adam’s letter to santa (photos)