These Are the Words That the Voice Was Repeating

This year's edition of the traditional post. Here what I wrote last year:

Fifty-three today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade forty-four years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2013.

So this year it's been forty-five years since we met, and this year makes last year look normal, though I'll add this reminder this year: Landru was the first human not Earthgirl not me not a doctor or nurse to hold Planet.

   
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Prick of the Thistle, Queen of the Weeds

Loved ones, there is an Earthgirl story I'd love for Earthgirl to tell you from last night, ask her, it's not my story to tell. Today is 25 years, 300 days. I need post the gif more than once a year.









IN PERPETUAL SPRING

Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt   

there is a leaf to cure it.

Waking You at One A.M. to Say the Hamster Is Back

• Happy Birthday, Hamster! Pick a cool concert - any format - and I'll buy the tickets.
• Neko Case's Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum.
• Hamster's Birthday card from Landru. Not sure if the title is an intentional Pixie's allusion but regardless it put this in my head.

YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL

Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

Steven Jackson

My former colleague and still friend and good guy Steven Jackson posted that photo Monday (and you can see many of his amazing photos here) and he died yesterday morning of a heart attack. It needs noting here. He wouldn't mind if I stole another photo. Both are the best desk backgrounds ever.