January beckons from across the year-divide.
She is strong, and she pledges herself to the bold.
She is not easy. She is no tender bride,
But her charms are deep; her dowry, rarest gold.

A poem without much verse to it; lines tied together at the ends like shoestrings, with little to no attention paid to line-length or regularity of meter, like as one in haste snatches two socks from the drawer.

For Jennifer

A new December dawns today, new to all the world,
And tightly in the fog above are precious seconds furled,
Or falling all around us with the virgin snowbuds bright.
Cloud-cloaked is the sun; its hidden store of beams of light,
Is planted in the soil beyond the reach of human eyes.
Look! Snowflake upon snowflake rings with splendor as it flies,
Catch one on your tongue; it melts and others drown away:
And so is every second of the time we call today.

My most exuberant thanks to Unknowing, who can speak of poetry. I am learning to learn.

Something of a little more consequence: I recently had the chance to visit my favorite place in the progressing city of Willmar. And arriving, I laughed! Amid the muddles of my memory, my description of that certain “Favored Crossing” was grossly mistaken. I remember now–after the truth of my error has had its fun at my expense–that as I wrote it, I was thinking how cleanly each of the four branches from the intersection contrasted with its opposite along the same line, how like to semi-illuminated moons were the perpendicular streets, darkness on one side, light on the other. . . . How wrong I was!

Anyone who has seen the intersection of which I spoke (Litchfield Ave. SW and 4th Street SW, I believe.) knows that it is really very unlike my description. It is so unlike that I am in no small way embarrassed that I had believed for so long that it indeed was like my description. I guess in my case, when fancy and memory compete, fancy wins.

I intended that post to be an approximate–if somewhat romanticized–description of that real place in a real city. I failed, building instead an imaginary picture from collected puzzle-pieces of visual data. And now that picture is shaken again to pieces: The edifices before which I seemed to stand in awe are now a disjointed body of random buildings, their histories, forgotten, their characters, shattered.

But such is the meeting of the imperfect world and an idealistic imagination, is it not? Art in any form sees what is in the world and, instead of showing it “like it is” in all its bleak candidness, beautifies it by painting the perfection it approximates, the real reality it represents.

Now I really should find a copy of a certain book by Roger Scruton. Then I might know what I’m saying . . .

Active bees of swarms produce;
Roving tight battalions loose,
Hunger on the meadow-flower.
‘Neath that army’s massive power,
Shyly slouching Beauty’s-Child,
Bends herself submissive, mild.

Thence to home they bear the prize.
Fierce, the works ‘fore secret eyes:
Crawling, making, toiling on,
Cease not till the work is done.
Ancient, soulless soldier-farm,
Gathers gold and does no harm.

Sweet sleep which guards the tranquil night,
Is like this trove of bounty bright.
For sleep will fell,
Sharp fears, and quell,
Our swarming thoughts grown big by day,
And lay them resting, tucked away.

Upon hearing a pun that my brother made.

Clauster, as he lay one night,
Within his tiny bed,
Got up to get a tiny drink,
But banged his tiny head.

He hollered for the piercing pain,
And made up quite the din.
And thus poor Phobic’s woken up,
And walks on Clauster in.

“Hey, Clauster!” cries indignant Phob’,
“Why for make all this fuss?
Your baby’s cries and madman’s howl,
Will be the death of us!”

Now Clauster’s head was small to start,
But now with this dumb dent,
Poor Clauster’s addled all his wits,
And all his reason spent.

He leaped up from his crouchy pose,
And clung to Phobic’s head,
And swore that never, never more,
Will he go back to bed.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John Gardner

For years (two or three) I have mowed lawns. I have dressed in green, sung “Greensleeves” while cutting the green, cared for the green, yes, and at the end of the workday I have worn more green than at the start.

I met the Color Green for the first time today.

The world is full of color. Everything is colored. (Yes, white isn’t a color; yes, black isn’t a color, but they do not exist in purity perfect enough for that here, so we must stick with calling the slightly colored off-white and off-black by the names of the real ideas which they approximate.) But how often do I think of the images before my eyes as such? Indeed, I do not even think of what I see as images, much less as colored shapes–which, by the way, is what makes drawing so much harder than it need be.

I met the Color Green for the first time today.

I was mowing in the heat of the day, pondering whatever I would, when the grass ahead of me seemed to jump from the lawn and into my vision as nothing less than the Color Green! Thenceforward until I finished I could not look at the grass as only grass: I saw it as grass-and-green. Green grass it was, and green it had been, but I had never known.

I met the Color Green today.

Green!