I don’t mind that you think slowly but I do mind that you are publishing faster than you think.
-Wolfgang Pauli, physicist, Nobel laureate(1900-1958)

I’ve been cataloging my poems — all the poems I’ve written since my little book was published about a decade ago. I’ve got about 120, approximately 80 of which are in a folder called “Finished,” and the rest in “WIP.” Work in Process.

Does that seem like a lot? Not to me. But it’s more than enough to go another small book, and to send pieces out to journals. Why haven’t I been doing that? A friend says I’m not good at promoting myself. True. I have the self confidence of a bar of soap. When I’ve been published, it’s usually been with the help of friends.

The last poem I had published was Shadow of Ferns, in 2000, in Pembroke Magazine. That’s a bit of a hiatus. And as I recall, I actually submitted to them in 1998. So it’s been seven years since I sat down with envleopes and stamps and printed things and mailed them out. Ouch.

Well, I’m going to try to turn this around. I’m actually not a bad poet, notwithtanding the meager responses my stuff gets on this blog. Some of you are as bad at expressing your reactions to what you read as I am at dealing with envelopes and stamps. I don’t hold it against you. But if you have any suggestions on where I should submit, please leave them in comments, or use the e-mail link. I’d be grateful.

THE SHADOW OF FERNS

Some night you will be cold
and alone. Maybe an animal
is crying outside or the wind
is dragging a branch of palm
across the roof and it wakes you.
If you love me, say my name aloud.

There is no ceremony.
Just say it once or twice
into the darkness, or into the cool
electric glow of your lamp.
Say it slowly to a patch of moonlight
on the rug.

Maybe I will hear it, as I stare
at the vague shadow of ferns
cast by the moon on my drapes.
Then say it for hope, for life,
for the distance between us.

Kyle Kimberlin
Copyright

Tasha’s leg is OK. Her severe limp went away after an extra long good night’s sleep. Thank you for sending e-mails of support and good wishes. I love my little dog, and I hate it when she’s not doing well.

This just arrived from Joseph at Drachenthrax .

I know that he didn’t post it on his blog because he fears Their scrutiny. I am not afraid. Dog is stronger than Zogg. Nevertheless, you must be made aware: Resistance is futile. … Really, this is the kind of stuff that makes my overpriced Net connection worth it.

LONDON (Reuters) – A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales beating England at rugby, the Daily Mirror has reported. Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win Saturday’s match he told fellow drinkers at a social club, “If Wales win I’ll cut my balls off”, the paper said on Tuesday.

Friends at the club in Caerphilly, south Wales, thought he was joking.

But after the game Huish went home, severed his testicles with a knife, and walked 200 meters back to the bar with the testicles to show the shocked drinkers what he had done.

Huish was taken to hospital where he remained in a seriously ill condition, the paper said. Police told the paper he had a history of mental problems.

Wales’s 11-9 victory over England at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff was their first home win over England in 12 years.

[News Links]

I read a fine poem today, called For My Daughter in Reply to a Question, by David Ignatow. Here’s a bit:

We’re not going to die.
We’ll find a way.
We’ll breathe deeply
and eat carefully.
We’ll think always on life.

If you’d like to read the poem, go to this page at Writer’s Almanac and scroll down to the section for February 11. You can click a link there to hear Garrison Keillor read it, if you’re so inclined.

We’re not having fun tonight, my dog and I. My poor little friend is 14 and arthritic. Tonight, she’s done something to one of her front legs. She’s limping like crazy. It happens from time to time, (a leg just sort of goes out on her, like what happens with a person’s back) and when it does, I usually give her a dose of Rimadyl, a pain-reliever and anti-inflammatory. But I can’t, because she was itchy earlier today and I gave her prednisone. The two drugs don’t mix. So we have to wait out the night, and hope that she’ll feel better in the morning.

Getting older absolutely sucks.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

He always had a hard time facing his complicity with the world when things went bad and failed. It wasn’t his fault, being mostly just caught up and swept along. He got out of bed and opened the blinds. The sun was up and he saw the window was dirty and spattered, giving him a sadly marred view of the old clothesline and broken concrete patio, the budding plum tree. Any other day, he would have denied his part in all this. Not his fault that God insisted on driving the rain at an angle to the glass, nor that the man who used to come and wash the windows died last year on a cot in the YMCA. But just at that moment of dawning denial, he remembered the day.

It was Saturday, and it was his birthday. And it was his custom, on this one day every year, to admit that he was, after all, the one guy who was always around when things started going bad. Other people were around for some it, and some were there for most of it, but when the rubber met the road, he was the greatest common denominator. So he blinked through the grime and thought of the Windex under the sink, and the paper towels hanging there.

What he really wanted was to sit on the edge of the bed for two hours or three, watching CNN Headline News, to see if he could spot variations in the news from one half hour to the next. He always hoped that it would change, that he hadn’t already missed everything that was going to happen. But since it was a special day, he needed to get moving. He was burning daylight.

He ate oatmeal with honey and raisins, listening to a country station. Heard a song about a long haul trucker whose wife died home alone, while he pulled a long load of pipe through a cold Georgia rain. All the trucker had was a photo in his wallet and the dog they got together at the pound, who dozed in the sleeper while he drove and drove, trying to outrun his grief. Despite the comfort of oatmeal and coffee, he thought he could relate.

With his face shaved, belly full and shoes tied tight, he felt damn near heroic. Fit to go forth and stand fast to the winds of personal responsibility. On the hall table, he found the video he had to return. He went out, and behind him there was commitment in the sound of the lock.


by Kyle Kimberlin
Copyright Information

Here’s another in my periodic posts about The View From Here. You might think, based on the title of my blog – Metaphor – that it refers to my ontologic perspective, or my take on the putrifying human condition. Aw, no. It’s meant quite literally. I can sense your relief.

Opening my front door this morning, dog in my arms and backpack replete with freshly slaughtered English, I was met by this wonderful rainbow.

~ click to enlarge ~

I hoped this rainbow portended great things for my Friday. But a day is as a man does. … I didn’t hurt anybody, and that’s what counts. Right?

You know that new term, “ear worm?” I guess it’s a song that gets stuck on your mind. I get word worms – words that won’t go away. I’ve had Irony on my mind all day. It’s ironic that I’m not entirely sure what it means, though it seems to inform a great deal of my existential perspective.

I looked it up, and that’s not much help. I guess we know it when we see it. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Romeo & Juliet, the deafness of Beethoven. And of course we’re hearing stories of soldiers surviving the dangers of Iraq, only to die in a traffic accident while home on leave.

OK. I’ll give you ironic. Writing is ironic. We who do this throw our best hours of vision and skill into choosing the best words and the best order of them, in the belief they will stand and survive. Then what do we do? We carry them like water in a bucket to the end of the wharf, and heave them into the cold and truculent sea.

Google is searching eight billion Web pages. Have you been in a Barnes & Noble lately? Am I wrong, or is it an ocean of paper and ink, uniform and rolling in gray distances? … Oh, I know! It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark of the Covenant is nailed up in a plain box and trucked away into that vast warehouse.

“The saint proves his vision by stepping cheerfully into the fires. The poet, somewhat less spectacularly, proves his vision by submitting it to the fires of irony, in the hope that the fires will refine it. In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the contradictions of experience.”

-Robert Penn Warren

So why do we do it? It’s a psychic itch that’s gotta be scratched. It’s a message in a bottle, dispatched in the hope of finding a commonality of mind or heart. It’s the threadbare faith that someone else out there has seen the ecstatic dance of eucalyptus leaves, and walked on into the evening overjoyed.

And see, that’s ironic: I knew what it meant all along.

“What [I] would write if [I] could… would be something… that, once it began to flow from [my] pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky.”

J.M. Coetzee