i have been thirty now

i have been thirty now for one week. my grandfather has been dead a week and several days. those two facts meet up here upon the earth and bear witness to its great sorrows and wondrous joys. they hold hands. we. he and i. i drove the freeway today from San Francisco down to Woodside to have my teeth cleaned. my gums are sore. testament to the fact that i floss far too infrequently, but tell myself after every cleaning that i will change that. as i was driving they played "meat is murder" by The Smiths, on the radio. the whole sky opened up before me and i was sewn in with the land. remembering a story dana once told of music on that exact stretch of road and a premonition she'd had of an accident. butterflies about. oh, how often song can be a harbinger of our coming moments. a light amidst the vast and dark ocean. how glorious to hear that song sandwiched between such terrible art. some artists, truly change the world.

the first five of you who read this and send an address, [mentioning why your sending said address] i'll make you a mix cd beginning with the Smith's song.

and the sky will stay this way today. open and quiet...my grandfather lavishing the sounds of the birds overhead.

"I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread, truth, wine, dreams. If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his undertaking, his effort and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity. Only in this indispensable way of being ordinary people shall we give back to poetry the mighty breadth which has been pared away from it little by little in every epoch, just as we ourselves have been whittled down in every epoch."
~Pablo Neruda, from his Nobel Literature acceptance speech.

Posted by at December 10, 2002 02:58 PM

....................................