An Embarrassment

by Wendell Berry

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party
a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

VII

by Wendell Berry

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

Half the Truth

by Jack Gilbert

The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies
are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over
high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound
of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains
and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless,
the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left
in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible,
the architecture of the soul begins to show through.
God has put off his panoply and is at home with us.
We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.
We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now.
We make love without rushing and find ourselves
afterward with someone we know well. Time to be
what we are getting ready to be next. This loving,
this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down
roots and comes back again year after year.

Happy Valentine's Day

http://youtu.be/u-5DXLgGyFM

Ducks at Peace

by Hal Sirowitz

I'd like to take my family to the lake,
Father said, so they can see how well
the animal & fish kingdoms get along.
You hardly ever see ducks fighting.
If they do, it's done in private.
We should follow their example,
& not air out our dirty laundry in public.
That was what I told your mother
at the restaurant, that she should
save her complaints for when we
get home. She said she had already
complained there. She was hoping
she'd get better results if she changed locations.

The End

by Victoria Redel

At the end of the marriage they lay down on their big, exhausted bed.
It was crowded with all the men and women they had ever loved.

Of course their fathers and mothers were there and a boy in uniform
she'd kissed on a stairwell. His first wife spooned her first husband.

Ridiculous Affair held hands with Stupendous Infatuation.
There was a racket of dreaming and, though both were tired

from the difficult end and in need of sleep, neither could sleep,
so they began telling each other the long, good story of their love.

She was wearing the red dress. The white boat hitched to the wood dock
filled with rainwater. The swans were again teaching the young to fly.

The story went out to nice dinners, took summer holidays, and by the time
they were done, the old loves rolled over in a jumble on the floor,

and, because this is what they knew to do well with one another,
they made love, and then without thinking it was the last time, said,

I love you, and fell asleep under the heavy, blue coverlet.

A Monorhyme for the Shower

by Dick Davis

Lifting her arms to soap her hair
Her pretty breasts respond—and there
The movement of that buoyant pair
Is like a spell to make me swear
Twenty-odd years have turned to air;
Now she's the girl I didn't dare
Approach, ask out, much less declare
My love to, mired in young despair.

Childbearing, rows, domestic care—
All the prosaic wear and tear
That constitute the life we share—
Slip from her beautiful and bare
Bright body as, made half aware
Of my quick surreptitious stare,
She wrings the water from her hair
And turning smiles to see me there.

Romantics

by Lisel Mueller

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

The Blue Dress

by Freya Manfred

I don't recall pain, or joy, only the blue dress
I wore, and the door open to the sea,
and the liquid sun across the floor beside the bed,
and our crooning sense of having climbed Everest,
undaunted, undeceived.

I didn't know who I was or who you were,
or even what we hoped for, in that slow, rushed,
soft, harsh, pretend, real, world. Even now,
I don't know how to devour love like a golden apple
stolen from a teacher who gives too many tests.

So tell me what you remember,
and who you think we were,
and I will nod and agree, though I doubt it happened—
beyond the sea, the sun, the open door,
the blue dress, and the dream.

Sonnet XVIII

by Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly, without complexities or pride;
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
than this: where I do not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep and dream.

Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
     I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Happy Valentine's Day

http://youtu.be/Gaid72fqzNE

More Than Life

http://youtu.be/eR9Kubfe0QU

B.S.U.R.

http://youtu.be/8kNZ3zAeI14

20th Christmas

I am still trying to figure out what to get the wife for Christmas. This is our 20th Christmas together so I googled "20th anniversary gifts" and here is what came up:

The twentieth year of marriage is one of the big milestone anniversaries. As you celebrate this special 20th wedding anniversary, reflect on the commitment to a lifetime marriage the two of you have made.

Here are some twentieth wedding anniversary ideas and symbols to help you choose china or platinum gifts associated with your 20th marriage anniversary.

20th Anniversary Traditional Gift:

China. It symbolizes the beautiful, elegant, and delicate of your love for one another over the past 20 years.

20th Anniversary Contemporary/Modern Gift:

Platinum. Platinum is strong and enduring, just like your 20-year old marriage.

20th Anniversary Gemstone:

Emerald or a yellow or golden diamond.

20th Anniversary Color:

Emerald green or white.

20th Anniversary Flower:

Day Lily: The meaning of a day lily is that of coquetry such as flirting, playful behavior towards one another.

I was thinking more along the lines of a flak jacket, helmet and a bottle of vodka . . . . .

A Big Ole Brew

A line from this song popped into my head today "One of these days everything I want is going to be mine" . . . blah blah something about it not and sunshine . . .

I had no idea who sang the song, what the other lyrics were or where I had heard that line but thanks to the internet, I was able to look it up. I have never heard of this singer and had no idea what the name of the song was but it was a delightful find.

Enjoy!



http://youtu.be/MMd54N4fqJ4

Hoses

by George Bilgere

I love the hoses of summer
hanging in their green coils
from the sides of houses,
or slithering through lawns
on their way to the cool
meditations of sprinklers.

I think of my father, scotch
in one hand, the dripping hose
in the other, probing the dusk
with water, the world
around him falling apart,
marriage crumbling, booze
running the show.
Still, he liked to walk out
after dinner and water the lawn,
fiddling with the nozzle,
misting this, showering that.

Sometimes, in the hot twilight,
my sisters and I would run
in our swimsuits through the yard
while he followed us
with a cold beam of water.

And once, when my mother
came out to watch, he turned
the hose on her, the two of them
laughing in a way we'd never heard,
a laughter that must have brought them
back to the beginning.

Quote of the Day

"Son, this is a big day for you. Today, you become the man of the house, because, when we get home, your mother is going to kill me."

- The Family Guy

"Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him."

- H. L. Mencken

Quote of the Day

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."

- Socrates