Gilead (a novel)

This is one beautiful book. Marilynn Robinson, where have you been all my life? Here are a few quotes from this afternoon's reading.

"I could never have imaged this world if I hadn't spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me every day. Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable." (p66)

"In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try." (p57)

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection." (p63)

"...There is nothing more astonishing than a human face. . . It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant." (p66)

To Wake Up

Reading Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Wow.

"We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use." (pp22-3)

poem 6 for April

This is kind of cheating because it isn't really complete. But I'm not sure what to do with it right now. And I am thinking of my grandma, who has been asked if she was a sun worshiper because of how brown she gets in summertime. Ergo, hic est.

Summer Affair

her skin was that of one
acquainted with the sun
and theirs was no casual flirtation

Rosi Golan song

It's Been a Long Day is a beautiful song.

Clouds on Paradise Ridge

Apple Pie: poem #5 for April

Apple Pie

Into the oversized silver bowl
nearly-translucent half-moons falling,
thin pieces stacking themselves haphazard.
At the first few a faint ringing
vibrates the stainless steel, as a voice
rings the guitar when it's just the right tone
Next to the bowl, discarded bits of skin
a colored-and-pale curve of debris, shaven
deftly from flesh bound for glory, like the pile
of wood and and bark by a carpenter's bench.

Scents deepening with the cutting and stirring,
first the faint, lively smell of cool fruit,
then the quiet sweet of grains of sugar
and the brown strength of ground cinnamon
and finally the heady anointing droplets
of pure vanilla, dark as midnight.

Past the white-on-white dance uniting
dry dust of wheat and salt from the sea,
the slick of lard and cold of water;
and the draping and crimping of crust
over the edge of slant sides of glass;
and past the moment the filling,
faintly colored and gathering juices,
slips and drips from bowl into pan.
Past the covering, the pricking design,
and step away for sixty minutes, until
at last the door swings down and open.

Pale brown crust, puffed and settled
around and over its treasure, breathing nectar,
the overflow-puddle of juice blackening
in the floor of the oven, dark souvenir –
and you, reeling in the rolling heatwave
heavy like summer, bee-glad, swelling with sun,
suddenly smitten with heavenly grain
and heaps of glorified fruit.