The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
I lost a poem last night. Traveling down the great San Joaquin with my parents, under a thirsty waxing crescent of the moon, it appeared in my mind large and promising. I typically get 3 or 4 words of an idea if I’m lucky – just a tiny fuse to light in a stiff wind of distractions. But this was a complete thought, a compound sentence of maybe 10 words. A small stanza, if I’d been in a position to save it. But I was driving. Otherwise, I could have typed it into my iPhone and tonight or tomorrow I might have a new poem to share with you.
“As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.”
I’ve had that quotation of Thomas McGuane floating around in my mind for several days.
A language for the real. OK. I like that. But what’s real?
Is it real to say that my life is a continuum of bird-dog training, or sleep, or eating, or music, or silence, or suffering, or joy, from the spring of 1961 to the middle of December 2014? No, that is not what I see as true. I see fragments. And what I believe is real about my life – and possibly about yours – is that reality cannot be very simply said.
We had rain two days ago; a great big storm of it pushed into southern California. It was great. And all that day and into the next, this little line of old poetry kept dripping through my mind:
That small rain down can rain.
It’s from this fragment of anonymous 16th century poetry:
O Western wind when wilt thou blow
That small rain down can rain —
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
Wonderful, isn’t it? It makes you believe what Stephen King says about writing being a kind of telepathy; that thoughts can be transmitted from one mind to another, across centuries, by means of writing. There is so much longing in those four short lines.
How far we can wander from our purpose, from the home of our hopes, from the elusive moment when we last held ourselves in love and hope of love. Our soul cries out to the God of our understanding to guide us home again.
Anyway, I’ve heard there’s more rain on the way. So here’s a poem I posted a couple of years ago, when we were between storms.
Metaphor 