Dammit
Willamette
works if you know
the proper pronunciation
Islesboro Light and island
Long, thin wedge in the bay
Hollywood stars summer palaces
Somebody’s mansion and grounds all alight
Phosphorescent water
stirred up into tiny fireflies,
sparks
plankton summer
a summer home
on an island in Maine
is here
and there, too
So far, no lipstick. And then? Zip, zip, zip!
After a week or more of finetuning the ridgepole and columns, Adam was ready for more drama. It was time for the old roof and rafters to go.
By now, much of the time the work was mostly loud reverberations punctuated by pounding and thuds within the top half of our house. Most of it mystified me. It often sounded like a war zone, especially when the air compressor kicked in. Not that I’m complaining.
Here we were, six weeks and thousands of dollars later and nothing we’d done was of the sort that would appear on a flip-this-house kind of a video streaming channel – the superficial changes that one local inspector we know dismisses as “lipstick.”
You do have to love an old house. Or, for perspective, an old lover.
Now we faced the decisive moment. Off with the back half of our upstairs!
A large, “rolling” dumpster was in place.
That saw appeared like the fin on a shark.
And then the roofing was removed in panels.
We got an idea of what a deck up there would be like.
The dumpster quickly filled.
On the importance of personal means
In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 79
Let me tell thee
Since coming among Quakers, I’ve known the last of what my grandpa called the old-order sort. Almost all of them, in fact. The ones who dressed in Plain-style clothing and used the thee-thou everyday speech.
My, that seems like a long time ago now.
Crane Brook
In Whiting
Ten random questions
- So what if it’s NOT historically true?
- Is there any egg in a Chinese egg roll?
- Who was Jack Russell?
- Has anyone used “Jack Russell Terrier” as a nom de plume?
- Can brilliance compensate for lack of depth?
- Enemies? Present within? Or without?
- How are you supposed to answer, “How ya doin’?”?
- What’s that noise?
- What do I have to do to get my books banned?
- Is it better to have no taste than bad taste?
Irish bar in an old dining car
Finn’s in Ellsworth is bound to be getting crowded this time of year.
Acid test poet: Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
Levertov is a poet I began reading the summer after I graduated from college. There was something in her work that seduced me, something along the lines of Brahms and Rilke, as one early advocate said of her. (It was Kenneth Rexroth, whom you’ll meet later in this series.)
What I didn’t see straight-out was the religious underpinning of her work, even in her atheist phase.
I do remember an encounter after a poetry reading in Baltimore, where one audience member approached her and asked how one could sustain a pacifist stance while remaining an atheist. She replied that without faith, the practice was very difficult. A few minutes earlier, I had asked how she had come to become a pacifist and she replied it was through her first lover, who was a Quaker.
Kinisi 200
BALOON
BROOM
BLOOM
Jnana's Red Barn 