God's Providence

The providence of God is like Hebrew words—it can be read only backwards.

-John Flavel

This Keeps Happening

Do people purposefully go to a public place and discuss private problems, as if being in public will keep things quiet, calm, from exploding? Or are they not meaning to tiff, but happen to bring their troubles wherever they go, and just happen to be where I am - I, unfortunately noticing the tenseness in their demeanors as I walk by from the counter to my table, as I wait for my coffee, as I sit and read in the corner half a room away from them?

(A rather poorly-written poem without a title, which should be revised before long)

You can see from across the coffee shop

there is link between these two people,

but broken, or at least rusting, grating,

people so beautiful, so once-right,

so pretending to be right still.

-

Your headphones fill your ears but your eyes

see the words unspoken as her glance

flits to his and back away, so quickly,

her mouth shaping phrases short, hesitant.

-

You’re not eavesdropping. You wouldn’t want to

hear the sounds of those sharper hand motions,

his eyebrows lowering, her attention

on her food for a long five minutes.

-

You see them turn and twist their cups,

their voices, on either side of the table, unsure

if their link will hold, or if it, too, will crack,

and spill something all over their world

in a mess that won’t be easy to wipe up.

His Hands Have Learned What Cannot Be Taught

This poem by Martin Espada was featured on Poetry Daily today.

What do you think about taking an emotionally-charged situation and stating it quietly, matter-of-factly, like this?

Do his simple lines minimize the sadness of this truth in their lives - the woman's recurring siezures - or do they

help us understand this kind of grief?

His Hands Have Learned What Cannot Be Taught

My wife has had another seizure,
the kind where she seems to be dead,
her eyes open and unseeing,
like jellyfish dangling
in the ocean at midnight.

My son, not yet seventeen,
leans across the table
and shuts her eyelids
with the V of his fingers.

When she wakes,
she will not know why she dropped her coffee.
She will not know his name, or mine, at first.
She will not know that he closed her eyes.
I will know that his hands have learned
what cannot be taught, that now
I can leave the table.

Three Days in the Wordsmithy

This is something I would love to do. Oh yes.

www.threedaysinthewordsmithy.com

"Name Gourmand"

A poem that has some really splendiforous lines!

"...the susurrous

and rattling runs of consonants, the shallow
and broad bellow of vowels, all that music..."

You should read it yourself on Poetry Daily:

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14953

Language

Today I used an adverb I hadn't used in probably 6 or 7 years. And it came out so easily that I sat and admired it for a minute and wondered why I'd neglected it for so long. It was French, the language I studied for about a year in high school.

Three days ago I started taking Latin again. It's a good year and a half since I took Aesop's with Mr. Griffith, and it's obvious I haven't done a whole lot since then. It has been sneaking away, one little verb ending at a time, and I find that I need to start scouring the countryside to re-collect everything I once owned.

Tonight I need to translate Numbers 1:1-21 from the Greek. It sounds fabulous to be doing both Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuagint - reading and translating Scripture for homework. This is a beautiful kind of work, and I just want every word that I note and look up to be written in my mind with an iron pen and lead forever.

I want to know all of these languages well. I want to keep a journal like Gerard Manley Hopkins of words and their origins and even make up a few of my own; I want to choose the word I say because little strings connecting it to other words tug and ease and twist and tease it to mean exactly the right thing. I want to savor their long vowels and roll their R's and dwell on the silent letters hanging off the ends of the French words. I want to eat these words and let their shapes change me as they enter me. I want language, like food, to not be merely fuel for energy and efficiency but something that alters, shapes and remains with me, and those I share my words with. I want words for the Eschaton.

"As if talk were a dance"

According to Bede, Caedmon, a herdsman at a monastery, would leave the monks celebrating with feasting and song to join the animals, because he had no talent with songs. There, one night, he had a dream or a vision, in which he was given the gift of poetry and told to sing principium creaturarum, "the beginning of created things." He is the earliest-known English poet.

Caedmon

Denise Levertov

All others talked as if

talk were a dance.

Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

would break the gliding ring.

Early I learned to

hunch myself

close by the door:

then when the talk began

I’d wipe my

mouth and wend

unnoticed back to the barn

to be with the warm beasts,

dumb among body sounds

of the simple ones.

I’d see by a twist

of lit rush the motes

of gold moving

from shadow to shadow

slow in the wake

of deep untroubled sighs.

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

but the cows as before

were calm, and nothing was burning,

nothing but I, as that hand of fire

touched my lips and scorched my tongue

and pulled my voice

into the ring of the dance.

philology... mmmmm

What is the connection between 'smart' the adjective and 'smart' the verb?

Where does the phrase 'fit me to a t' come from or what could it have originally meant?

Regarding centrifugal and centripetal forces: one trying to get away (fugere) and the other to come close (petere).

If we feel blue if we're sad, green if we're envious or puke-sick, are there any other colors we can 'feel'?

Are 'creek' and 'crick' the same word pronounced by different people? Or is a crick a smaller stream, possibly from a spring, possibly more meandering and muddy than a creek?