The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Month: April 2019

  • Ode to Joy

    Ode to Joy

    Old monk drunk walk garden
    olive way moon path nude
    blue light strain powder pouring
    bare feet stains red muscatel.

    On his rock sits Jesus eyes clear
    tell him of your life sans joy
    brave Brother Anhidonus oh
    fun monk too but without joy.

    Hung over herbs your Jesus praying
    not an only child was he
    resting for the weak of passion
    who find no joy in silent being

    feel no peace no happiness
    no light of joy no sound of joy
    for the ears no touch of joy no
    raised goosebumps on the skin

    no taste of joy sweet salty bitter
    no sour bites teeth the tongue
    no smell of joy stirs memories
    no prayer saturates the temperate.

    No joy found in going silent
    sing for your soup of certitude
    what has brought you not to
    here certainly cannot help now.

    “The cut worm forgives the plow”
    Blake sang now you at least may
    forgive yourself and drink to joy
    lost to joy abstained all these years.

    Walk out of this garden leave
    transcend all plants and animals
    there above where the angels sing
    awaits the turn of your perfect being.

  • This bud was for you

    Across the street from the Estate Sale,
    there’s talk if it’s a teardown,
    while a couple of bushtits build
    a hanging nest in a paperbark maple,
    coming and going through the perfect
    hole at the top of the sack woven
    with string, spider web, tiny twigs
    and grassy strands yarned around.

    “Go easy,” she yearned. “Go around.”
    Then came the night she won’t spring back.
    Some do not come back,
    even as the buds rise in the rows
    heatly lubricated by the bees;
    not all the plants pull through
    that inscrutable winter stare.

    But to turn under? Finished now.
    Not to worry, the sun is the poshest one.
    His light goes shallow, into the soil,
    as easily as through fish water,
    a clean singing glow.
    The days are gone
    this bud was for you.

    20190402_183653

  • Notes AWP Close: The 8th Day

    Wandering post AWP19 Portland town yesterday with entrepreneurial intrepid impresario Berfrois editor at large Russell Bennetts and his Midwestern sidekick Simon Calder, I had occasion to consider Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” in a contemporary context, where all the characters have cell phones, except one, who has lost theirs. But I can’t decide which Hemingway character would be cellphoneless: Jake? Lady Brett Ashley? Certainly not Count Mippipopolous, whose Twitter feed at AWP19 would be going nonstop. Maybe we would have Jake’s friend Georgette find the lost cell phone, but she would keep it hidden for a time, posting miscreant tweets and pics with her bad teeth.

    The idea behind Thornton Wilder’s “The Eighth Day” is that God, having created the world in 7 days, proceeds to take the 8th day off, during which what we now consider time takes place, such that we are all, since the beginning of time, living in the 8th day of creation.

    After their holiday in Pamplona at the festival of the bulls and all the bullfighting, “The Sun Also Rises” characters go their separate ways, Robert Cohn disabused of his romanticism, Jake cemented in his existential crisis, Brett off with the once untouchable but now touched and wrecked bullfighter Romero. It’s going to be a long 8th day.

    Now living in the 8th day of AWP19, at least one Berfrois character has decided to remain on in Portland town. Here they are, comfortably taking over the TV remote:

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    This is the eighth and last in a series with notes on AWP19 and the concurrent publication of the Berfrois and QM’sT books.