The Eagle: A Saturday Poem

The Eagle

Remember the paddle-boat and the eagle?
Some people might call it serendipity.
Not me. I call it a memory.
Ours, and no-one else’s.
Serendipity seems to happen to other people, too.
And I don’t like that.
What I mean is I don’t like the equation the word
implies.
As though one experience is as good as another.
Theirs, as ours.

We rented that contraption, not someone else.
We did.
We commandeered the bastard. “Paddled” it.
Got out there and floated.
My Huxley’s “Island” and your I know not what!
But we read, and drifted. Until the thing appeared.
Magnificent as ten kings of Jericho.
I would have capsized the both of us but for your
wise counterbalance.

Leaning out, I wanted to touch the creature
standing taller than eight likenesses of itself.
Gripping that branch, and my heart, before both
things bounced and tossed as thrown about
by the waves I made, ascended
as you, laughing, laughed.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009

Splash du Jour: Friday

I have this picture above one of my chest-level bookcases.
That tree-thing reading a book in the right corner? That’s supposed to be an Ent [Lord of the Rings]… given to me by my beloved nephew, Chris.
The inscription, at the top of the picture, is as follows:

The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
-- John F. Kennedy, Amherst College, Oct 26, 1963 –

Have a great Friday!
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That Moment In Dallas

November 22nd, 1963.
President Kennedy is gunned down in his motorcade.
The book I am currently reading refers to that moment as “seven seconds that broke the back of the century.”
You know how everyone tends to remember where they were at that specific time? As though a portion of time is frozen in our consciousness? I suppose a more updated version of the same sort of cataclysmic “moment” might be September 11, 2001.
At any rate, guess where I was when JFK was assassinated?
I was peaceful and warm, unaffected whatsoever by the events unfolding on our Canadian television.
I was floating around in amniotic fluid.
In twelve days, I would be born.

So I must say, I recall very little of the actual day’s events.
And even now, as an adult who has focused his entire life on the reading of literature, November 22nd, 1963 is immortalized in my mind and heart as the day that C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died.
I am very JFK-challenged and/or ignorant.
I haven’t even seen that Oliver Stone movie!

But now I am reading Don DeLillo’s excellent fictional [emphasis on fictional] account of the events leading up to that fateful day.
← The book is called Libra, which was the astrological sign of one Lee Harvey Oswald.
Heard of him at all? Sure you have.
But the jury is still out on who the actual gunman was.
Or if there were several gunmen. How many shots were fired, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
The lore, the mystery, and the endless conspiracy theories, live on. All I really know is that I myself have the perfect alibi.
I WAS A FETUS AT THE TIME OF THE INCIDENT.
My entire modus operandi on November 22nd, 1963 was just to lie around and do some serious placenta-suckin’.

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
-- Don DeLillo --

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Have a great Wednesday!
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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Tobacco is my favorite vegetable.

-- Frank Zappa --

Have a great Tuesday!

[Don't] Raise My Rent

I love iTunes.
What I mean is… I have not actually handled a CD in ages!
And why should I?
I have thousands of tunes in my Mac’s iTunes.
The stuff will play forever if I just click on one song…
I know that you know what I mean, dear Reader.
But seriously, it’s got to be one of the greatest innovative inventions of our time… iTunes©.
And I just wanted to mention a certain phenomenon that has been happening now for oh……. about four or five months, maybe longer. It seems that every time I sit down to my desk and have the computer running, I begin my musical journey with a certain song by David Gilmour. [Pink Floyd].
The song is called “Raise My Rent”.
It’s an entirely instrumental song from his 1978 solo album…. the whole album is pure genius.
And as most of you already know, I am a thoroughly baptized [full-immersion] Floyd devotee.
So, I click on Raise My Rent [a phrase which, sadly, annually applies to me in a personal way… curse the landlords!] and I sit back and listen until my playlist ends at his latest solo release, On An Island. [Where I will surely end up one day -- if they keep raising my rent!]
At any rate, I just wanted you to also be able to hear the song, and I can see no other way than resorting to YouTube yet again.
Thank [the non-literal] God for YouTube.
Thank [the figurative] Jesus for iTunes.
Thank yourself for clicking on the arrow.
Listen to Gilmour.

Splash du Jour: Monday

Questioner: As a scientist, would you deny the possibility of water having been changed into wine in the Bible?
Carl Sagan: Deny the possibility? Certainly not. I would not deny any such possibility. But I would, of course, not spend a moment on it unless there was some evidence for it.

Have a great Monday!

Let The Game Begin --

Well, every year my three friends and I [you only have three friends, Cippy?]… yeah, pretty much these three friends are the only people that can tolerate me… we get together to watch the Super-Bowl. And so… in a little bit here, we will be beginning our afternoon of eating and drinking and eating some more and being heavily engrossed in burly lads tossing leather around even though none of us really care who wins the game.
But before I mention more about this ritual of ours, I just want to say I finished the Geraldine Brooks book [People of the Book] and it is truly fabulous.
To borrow the reviewing world’s most hackneyed and cliched phrase → it was an “intricately woven story.” It really was, though.

It follows the history of a revered ancient [500 year old] Jewish text known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. This was a richly illustrated [the novel constantly refers to it as “illuminated”] book used on the occasion of the Passover seder meal. Modern-day book expert Hanna Heath is called upon to analyze and conserve the book before it is to be re-displayed in the Sarajevo Museum.

By the way, book “conservation” is different than book “restoration” and Dr. Heath takes her job extremely seriously. In her meticulous work on the Haggadah, she finds four anomalies that obsess her about the book’s history. In the binding and on its pages, she discovers a butterfly wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, and a white hair.
As Hanna chases down the significance of these clues, these harbingers of history, Brooks lifts the veil of time and shows us, as readers, how these four items made their way into the book.
Chapters weave between the centuries, and the author shows us that Hanna’s own life is filled with nearly as many previously unknown mysteries as that of this ancient text.
The book is beautifully done, and I highly recommend it as a worthwhile, engaging read.

And now…. for football!
From using terms such as “harbingers of history” to… “Hey,Tim! Throw me another Budweiser!” Followed by an earth-shattering belch.
Ahh, yes. Life is moods.
As I hinted above, none of us [Canadians] really give a fiddler’s fart [does the eloquence ever end?] as to who wins this game. The important thing though is that you watch it all happen! And you shout things now and then. And keep eating stuff.

For forensic proof that I myself utilize the most Arbitrary Methodology Imaginable as to who I cheer for, you can click → HERE, but for now, for today’s events, I must say that I am rooting for Arizona. And here’s why.
Because I think I would rather live in Arizona than in Pennsylvania.
See what I mean?
My choice is based on SEVERE OVERALL NFL© IGNORANCE.
For me it’s all about location, location, location.
What does Pennsylvania really got going on? Besides the Liberty Bell, and Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater?
Not much.
Snow, Amish people, and smog? A town actually called Bird-In-Hand?

But Arizona!
Now we’re talking. They’ve got canyons all over the place. And copper. They’ve had the modesty to immortalize the cutest, most unpretentious bird ever, the cactus wren.
Plus they’ve got the ORIGINAL London Bridge© , I’m not kidding you.
And tons o’sunshine. More than they need.

So, I’m saying Arizona is the way to go, this year.
Go CARDINALS Go!
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The Countdown...

→ CLICK

Tell Me: A Saturday Poem

Tell Me

Turned away, my lover murmurred,
I actually think that others often see us
more clearly than we see ourselves.

Into her neck I agreed.
How can any of us do otherwise?

A story is a re-telling, every word a reflection
of something other. Little good it did Narcissus
to stare and stare. And stare.

My lifetime, I wonder, and have wondered
how it shall end. Holding I am lovely!
to a mirror.

!ylevol ma I
Better that someone else should see this.
And tell me.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009

Splash du Jour: Friday

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.
-- Sarah Waters, in Fingersmith.

Have a great Friday!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

I have no big plans.
I think I might have to make some, and they might have to involve some champagne.
-- Geraldine Brooks –

Have a great Thursday!

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that's what He's getting!
-- Jack Handey --

Have a great Wednesday!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

When writing, I am on the edge of myself, whetting away so that I have the 'sharp' needed to cut deeper. My edge doesn't need someone else’s balance to prove its solidity. I can sharpen where I need to sharpen, where only I can see to sharpen. Your edge may be honed truer than I can even fathom to aspire to, or you may be waving around a crooked stick with some scrap of a white flag snagged onto the tip. Either way, it's irrelevant. When I write, it’s my edge, and the mirth of the reader is of little consequence.
-- My nephew Chris / Hakone Lake, Japan --

Have a great Tuesday!
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The Dip & The Book

See…. [he takes a deep breath…] umm… when I was back on the cold prairies a few weeks ago I was invited out to these real nice people’s place for supper and their name was The Burgesses well actually their name is just “Burgess” but if you are talking about both of them at the same time you would use the plural as I just did and so anyway Maria that’s the female half of the Burgesses she sets out these appetizers and one of the things was some hunks of bread and this dip stuff and WOW I started eating it like there was no tomorrow so I asked her where she got it and she says COSTCO so I made a mental note to seriously pick some of this stuff up as soon as I got back here to Ottawa and so today was the day so I hop in the car and I go to COSTCO on my lunch break from work and I’m looking for this Artichoke and Jalapeno dip and by golly I found it but as I passed by the book section of COSTCO I couldn’t help but notice this book by Geraldine Brooks called People of the Book and ever since I first saw it way back when I have wanted to pick it up because the cover of it really intrigues me and so I go to the cashier now with this tub of Artichoke dip and this new book and now I am sitting here reading the book and it is fabulous and as soon as I can pry myself away from the thing for a minute or two I am going to rip up some hunks of bread and eat half of this tub of Artichoke dip and it just occurred to me that if Maria Burgess had not served this crazy stuff a few weeks ago I never would have discovered Geraldine Brooks or at least not today and so there are times when you really don’t know what’s going to happen next and if you also get the urge to go and get some of this Artichoke stuff I’m going to warn you right now that after you eat a hefty pile of it your breath will smell like a baboon’s backyard.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
-- Dave Barry –

Have a great Monday!

Wherein I Post Yet Another Video-clip...

Dear friends.
I know I promised not to do this... I promised to be more "LITERARY" in my postings, but I can't help myself.
This video-clip came to me, and I must share it with you:

Dance at Bougival: A Saturday Poem

Dance at Bougival

Please, steer me clear of Juliet if you must speak so –
[and he does] -- she leans away, but her ears are like
pincers, and nothing escapes them, my darling.

Why must we care, why? Oh love, I would declare unto
the entire drunken fleet, “I have fallen, thrice-stricken
by Eros, Venus, and Aphrodite.”

Please, your right hand above my sash if you will –
[and he does] – that’s better, we must for the sake of
appearances if nothing else, maintain some decorum.

Why must we do so? Love, I would trace with my tongue
the red trim of your bodice against this very poplar in the
presence of these witnesses that worry you so.

Please, that may well be, but if you do so love me –
[and he does] -- you will lead me from here, even now,
that thine impropriety may be properly, received.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2009
→ CLICK ←

Splash du Jour: Friday

You ever find that your personality takes on some of the air of books you have read recently? I’m sure you do. If there is a word for that, let me know, and if not, let’s make one up. Something like “literated”.
It`s like being freed, and you run out in glee, only to realize that the cell is now only bigger. So you pick up a new book…
-- My “literated” nephew Chris, via email from Japan –

Have a great Friday!
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