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and here is one of my favorite moments from that book:
The Joads are leaving their farm to go West.
"The rest? Leave it-or burn it up...How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it."
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I've been scanning negatives. all day.
here is a picture followed by a poem:
(poem by Ted Kooser)
Walking to Work
Today, it's the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody,
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.
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totally unrelated to the picture above is this poem by George Bilgere:
Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel
Instead, we sit together beside the fountain,
the important novel and I.
We are having coffee together
in that quiet first hour of the morning,
respecting each other's silences
in the shadow of an important old building
in this small but significant European city.
All the characters can relax.
I'm giving them the day off.
For once they can forget about their problems—
desire, betrayal, the fatal denouement—
and just sit peacefully beside me.
In the afternoon,
at lunch near the cathedral,
and in the evening, after my lonely,
historical walk along the promenade,
the men and women, the children
and even the dogs
in the important, complicated novel
have nothing to fear from me.
We will sit quietly at the table
with a glass of cool red wine
and listen to the pigeons
questioning each other in the ancient corridors.
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It's spring break.
I wish I was doing this:
But the reality is more like this:
(although I'm not entirely sure what this is..)
These are both incredibly old pictures, so I think that dictates exactly what I'll be doing for the next week.
(not such a terrible fate)
before I disappear and load film and take pictures and drive my family crazy- a poem by Ted Kooser.
Father
May 19, 1999
Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day--the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
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