HAPPY HALLOWEEN!


I am home from work today because the boy had a check up this morning and Kate's last Halloween parade at the elementary school is today. Jack is dressed as a banana and Kate is a video character named Link. Kate does not want me trick or treating with her because I am an embarassment. Guess she'll be embarrassed cause I'm going. Tempted to dress up as something really bizzare to humiliate her even further! Other mom who is going, Alison, is dressing as Sara Palin. Apparently other people's mothers don't embarrass little missy.

How fast my babies are growing up. The boy seems to have a girlfriend, although I'm not supposed to know about this. Her name is Ashley. Jr. insists the boy has probably kissed a girl by now. I refuse to believe he has done more than hold hands!

Ghostly tidbit: Jr. has a ghost, a new one, that clomps around upstairs in boots!

The Moon and the Yew tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritious mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky -
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence."

Sylvia Plath

Say Cheese EVP



Here is a picture taken at my sister's house of the ghostly former owners, the Ziefels. They are the balls of sparkly light next to the yappy white dog. That's part of Jr in the corner.

Ghost House

I DWELL in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me--
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,--
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

Robert Frost

Missing LC


LC has gone off to the wilds of Washington D.C. and on a journey to find a new home. Jr. and I miss him terribly and this blog is just not a home without him. LC please check in and tell us how it is all going! The holidays are coming and they won't be the same without you. We propose that you come to L.I. for Thanksgiving. I am making the turkey again. Velmar and I have once again fended off Jr.'s hideous suggestions of goose and pigeon. Jr's side dishes, though, will be as heavenly as usual. Planning a sleepover bad movie Thanksgiving night, everybody squeezed into my micro apt. You come too! Segue into poem...

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

Robert Frost

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINDER LOO!



Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas

Mommy Takes Manhattan



Going to NYC for the weekend...friends in Arizona booked a room at the Sheraton on Times Square for a wedding, wedding got cancelled, they gave me the room! My good friend Strawhead Burton will be meeting me for whatever madness we can manage to get up to...I'm thinking mojitos and jazz clubs for starters...hurray for a good time, good friends, my lovely sister Jr. for taking the kids, and for Fall in Manhattan...planning Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art roof garden on Sunday. (Staying till Monday morning!!!)

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Frank O'Hara

Movie Pie


I saw two movies today, Waitress and The Duchess. They both rocked, but Waitress is completely pie-centric and a must for everybody who wants pie! Buddy, if you have not seen Waitress, go to the free movie site and watch it now! You will be in pie heaven, AND Andy Griffith is in it!

Cottleson Pie

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

A. A. Milne

God and October


This is my favorite month. Jack was born in October and the trees are at their most gorgeous in October. I got married on October 2, and while you might think that would ruin the month for me, it does not. Every October 2nd I congratulate myself for escaping a very BAD marriage. Imagine what October 2nd would be like if I was still married to BFI, a day of handwringing and regret. I was also baptized on October 2nd, which seems like a good thing for no reason that makes sense. I am going to the movies tonight to see Religulous. Jr. thinks I am going to burn in hell. I think I am going to laugh a lot and have my feelings about religious zealots reinforced. And yet I still believe in God. I attended a christening last Sunday in the church I attended as a kid. Realized I love the church itself while feeling contempt for the priest who stands at the front like a little god sermonizing at me. My favorite time to be in a church is when it is empty. You can feel god then. When there is a service, all I can think is where is the feminine in all this, the power of the female? I can't bring myself to feel reverence for christianity, although the jury is still out on Christ.

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

Philip Larkin

Vroom Vroom



Today I am free! Endless traffic court is finally over and my lawyer, god love him, got everything dismissed this morning. Life is good. Today is Joyce's birthday which I took as a good sign for a court appearance. I bought roses after court and left them for her as I suspected a little celestial help this morning. Planning driving trips in my head, to Amherst to Emily Dickinson's house, or maybe the Berkshires and Edith Wharton's mansion in Lenox. Nothing is more beautiful than the Berkshires in October.


AUTUMN

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

Emily Dickinson