Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
  club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
  with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
    on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
  to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
    in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
  when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
    my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
      my life when they murder by means of my
        hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
    frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
      waves call me to folly and the desert calls
        me to doom and the beggar refuses
          my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
  come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
  humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
    would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
      one face, a thing, and against all those
        who would dissipate my entirety, would
          blow me like thistledown hither and
            thither or hither and thither
              like water held in the
                hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

–Louis MacNeice

 

Poetry in its earliest form was exclusively spoken word. The purpose of rhyme and meter and all those other neat elements we associate with poems were created to make it easier to memorize important things. Prior to writing, the laws of a particular tribe were passed down from generation to generation through spoken word poems. Two of the most famous poems of all time, the Iliad and the Odyssey, most likely existed in spoken word form long before they were committed to writing. Despite this immutable fact, today’s spoken word poetry movement is looked upon with derision by many in the “academic” poetry world. Such things as the Def Poetry Jam are dismissed by many “real poets” as a low brow form of poetry.  This is really unfortunate because the spoken word movement has reached a significant portion of the population that would have otherwise not been reached, and has produced many fine poems that would have never made it as strictly “written word” poems.

Right now is this strange contraption:

And playing on it is an Elton John record. I almost want to break out my mood ring and pet rock. Almost . . .

In a letter to a friend, Monet admitted that while he was at his wife’s deathbed he found himself making mental notes on the light and shadows, the colors and composition, for the painting he would  eventually make. That revelation speaks to something those outside of the making of art don’t ever quite realize: even though art evokes great emotion and may be the product of great emotion, the making of it is very much an emotionless process. TS Eliot alluded to this when he said “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” This is not to say that artists are emotionless, or that the emotion expressed in a particular piece is fake or contrived, but that an artist must be able to remove himself from the influence of the emotion in order to make the necessary critical decisions in his own work to express that emotion. 

Now, with that bit of textbook nonsense out of the way here is an excerpt from Donald Hall’s book of poems titled “Without,” which is a chronicle of his wife’s battle and eventual death from leukemia. This piece moves me as much as any ever written and I am constantly amazed at the amount of dispassionate control Hall had to maintain in the writing to produce such an effective piece. 

 

“Dying is simple,” she said.
“What’s worst is… the separation.”
When she no longer spoke,
they lay along together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread.

One by one they came,
the oldest and dearest, to say goodbye
to this friend of the heart.
At first she said their names, wept, and touched;
then she smiled; then
turned one mouth-corner up. On the last day
she stared silent goodbyes
with her hands curled and her eye stuck open.

Leaving his place beside her,
where her eyes stared, he told her,
“I’ll put these letters
in the box.” She had not spoken
for three hours, and now Jane said
her last words: “O.K.”

At eight that night,
her eyes open as they stayed
until she died, brain-stem breathing
started, he bent to kiss
her pale cool lips again, and felt them
one last time gather
and purse and peck to kiss him back.

In the last hours, she kept
her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched
at cheek level, like
the goddess figurine over the bathroom sink.
Sometimes her right fist flicked
or spasmed toward her face. For twelve hours
until she died, he kept
scratching Jane Kenyon’s big bony nose.
A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.

Because I had little else to do this weekend other than iron my socks, I decided to cruise on up to Niagara Falls for a mini-vacation. What a mistake that was! My weekend is completely gone and my damn socks still need ironing. Lesson learned there. And for what? Just this:

and this

and this

and a little of this

and a significant amount of this

and way too much of this

I’m seriously contemplating writing a book with a title along the lines of “Aphorisms, Platitudes and Cliches–How to Live Your Entire Life Without a Single Original Thought.” I asked a friend recently how work was going and he said it was “going to hell in a handbasket.” My boss constantly wants to get the “ball out of our court” so we don’t get “stuck behind the eight ball” in the “eleventh hour” and be left “holding the bag.” My father was famous for mixing cliches, which at least made them fun. His best, in response to something catching on quickly, was “Man, that snowballed like a house on fire!”

So, anyway, a buddy of mine recently broke up with his girlfriend, which led to ruminations over beers. At one point he sighed and said “Well, I guess it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I restrained from reminding him that he has “loved and lost” about two dozen times since I’ve met him and instead asked him if he knew where that cliche had come from. He didn’t.  I figure most people probably don’t know, so I’ve decided to post the poem it was originally borrowed from.

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods;

In envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth:
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘T is better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all.

–Alfred Lord Tennyson

One of them is the best in the world, and so is the other one.

I’m fascinated with frozen moments in time. That one, razor thin instant after a gun goes off, just before the world sets itself back in motion, or the almost impossibly brief glimpse of something between the trees in the forest, gone nearly before it was there. I like to take that “snapshot” and explore it in my own poems. So today I’m going to stroke my own ego a little and post two of my own poems, each of which speaks to that revelatory moment that often occurs immediately after something unpredictable happens.

Threshold

And then the slap that draws a red
salt seam along his lower lip.
He tongues the sudden swell,
tastes her anger in his blood.

What came before was talk,
and the uneasy feeling
that all there was was talk.

But now the strike lingers in the charged air;
the hollow ring in the ear, the thread
of blood mingling among his teeth,
and the space between them left empty
of words, but quickly filling
with what neither anticipates is love.

Report

You, who did not think
this weight could speak,
still hear its single word
inside your inner ear. Now,
heavy and dumb, it presses
down against your palm,
the distal voice whose sound
you can’t recall.

Anyone who has read my blog knows that one of my favorite hobbies is homebrewing. I derive a lot of pleasure from creating something of quality like that, especially when my efforts are as good as or better than what I can buy at the local store. In all fairness, my homebrewing efforts have been as good as some of the better beers you might find at your local liquor store, but they don’t quite reach the level of quality you’d find in serious craft brews like Dogfish Head, Deschutes or Allagash. (What? You’ve never heard of any of those? Heathen!) Fortunately, I can’t say the same for my other hobby, which is coffee roasting. I’ve been roasting my own for years and there’s almost nothing commercially available that comes even close. OK, to be honest. there is a little roasting company in central Maryland that produces some of the best coffee I’ve ever had. As far as I’m concerned they’re the gold standard and I give The Daily Roast all the credit they deserve. I wish you guys still sold small lot wholesale.

But enough about somebody else. Today, for the first time in a while, I had a chance to get some serious roasting  time in. I use a machine call the i-ROAST, which is a fluid bed roaster. There are two basic techniques for roasting coffee–fluid bed roasting and drum roasting. Drum roasting consists of heating the green coffee beans in a rotating metal drum. The actual roasting occurs through contact with the hot drum’s surface. The single biggest drawback of drum roasting is that beans tend to scorch if they remain in contact with the drum too long. Fluid bed roasting consists of heating the green coffee beans with a steady flow of very hot air (think hot air popcorn poppers). The airflow is great enough that the beans are kept in constant motion. The heating in a fluid bed roaster is more uniform than in a drum roaster and, because the beans are kept in motion, the possibility of scorching is greatly reduced. The drawback of fluid bed roasters is that they  typically have a much smaller capacity than drum roasters do.

So, anyway, today I broke out the trusty i-ROAST and spent a few hours on the back patio. The coffees of the day were a Sumatra Blue Batak Peaberry and a Costa Rica Dota Tarrazu. (What? You’ve never heard of either of those? Heathen!) Here is a picture of my results, with the Sumatra on the left and the Costa Rica on the right:

It may not be very easy to see in this photo, but the Sumatra has been roasted about one step darker than the Costa Rica has ( A Full City+ versus a City+/Full City). In addition to being a little darker, the Sumatra beans have an oily sheen to them that the Costa Rica lacks. This produces a slightly heavier, oily mouth feel in the cup. The darker roast mutes the bitterness–called “brightness” in roasting terms–a bit and brings out caramelized, chocolate tones in the coffee. I prefer darker roasts in general, so I tend to push my roasts a little further than might be recommended. I’ve yet to cup these two coffees, but when I do I’ll post my cupping notes here.

Of all the great mysteries in the world of driving (what is the difference between a traffic circle and a roundabout?), the one that seems to baffle Southern Maryland drivers more than any other is the four-way stop. The rules are actually pretty simple: the vehicle that comes to a stop first has the right of way. In the case of a tie, the car to the right has the right of way. If four cars manage to come to a stop at the exact same time, a quick game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is used to work things out. Coming to a stop for one or two seconds and then proceeding forward without regard to what any other car at the intersection is doing is not the proper technique. Nor is running the stop sign at full speed  because you think you can get through it quicker than the other car can stop and go. Which is exactly the technique my son and I saw twice in succession at the intersection of Billingsley and Piney Church. Had I been driving it wouldn’t have been so bad, because I could tell by their approach they weren’t stopping. But my son was getting his pre-driver’s test hours in behind the wheel and nearly pulled into the path of the second stop sign runner. What was a lesson in proper driving almost became a physics lesson on inelastic collisions.

So, to the two drivers on Billingsley Road that day, I wish for you only that the next four way stop the two of you approach simultaneously finds the two of you driving perpendicular to each other.