Well see— he’d already named the animals!
I didn’t really have anything to do, yes we did
Walk in the garden every evening..
I must admit maybe I was bored & the serpent
Was an intellectual & he made me laugh & I was laughing when I tasted it.
I wanted to change names of some of the animals,
I must admit I never asked if I could,
Neither of them said I couldn’t..
Just seemed like it was a bargain already made, oh he would do anything for me!
& well I didn’t even know that he hadn’t named all the animals
Didn’t find that out til, well
after we were outside & some of these other animals seemed to be intent on eating us
Oh this surprised me, this thing called fear, but I like eating meat!
& now I’m not bored with him any more I must admit
He protects & takes care of me, but these children, oh if I didn’t
Have him, as much as I love them, it would be impossible..
But you know I think someday one of them will kill the other
& I cannot imagine this..
I do miss those walks
When it was that love was as constant as air..
Now there are only times when I look at him & vaguely remember..
Still he can be bad
Now he growls & once after drinking he hit me & this was not like him &
I bled, & now I bleed regularly &
What have we done?
I killed the snake last week & after I did
I heard him laugh from the grove in the garden we can’t go into any more,
But then again maybe it was from the forest beyond,
& I’m afraid of that place..
I couldn’t tell & anyway I saw the snake again the next day
I know where there are flowers by a quiet pool
Perhaps I could go there and come back?
If I leave him it will be dangerous
Perhaps I’ll go there and come back..
Oh, my heart breaks when he screams in the middle of the night!
Category / Poetry
I will continue to seek visions and count on my friends to know everything
I dreamed I was in 1962, in a department store dressing room
w/ Lana Turner, who told me she had to adjust
her nylon stocking and didn’t mind
if I looked–and I awoke and remembered that year
I had been in a desk behind the cloak room in my
eighth grade English teachers classroom
(who hated me, and whose name I’ve long ago forgotten)
where I’d been put for being a smart ass
& was napping & it was really Joanie
& Janet that I had known since they were girls
but but that year they were no longer girls & they really were letting me watch,
skirts hiked up athletic like race horses
w/ black back seamed nylons w/garterbelts
and just above were taught tight heavenly white thighs
pure as driven snow & I remembered that dream ended too…
Love may be
Love may be a greybearded old man
giving great belly laughs out of
a tobacco stained yellow shirt
while small birds light and perch
and small children play in vacant
lots and an osprey fishes in cold
northwest waters with its aerial
view of trout making headway against
currents & we in complacency
think of all the sane reasons not
to watch the six o’clock news as
three women in Puerto Vallarta wrap
crayfish with cornmeal in husks
to steam into tamales for their
children to sell on the beach, all
for what we have to have..
C.S. Lewis – from Atheism to Theism – YouTube
No. 6 by Charles Bukowski | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Above Lyman’s riffle
Above Lyman’s riffle
At the old man’s house,
Falling down a little more a year
After his death, in the
Hot August now cooling dusk
I waited for the red glow
Down river &
Swallows… swallows in the evening light!
I can see to my right the
100 year old black walnut
& cherry orchard
Across the road, up the hill Ernie’s hard rock mine
& Sardine Creek trickling
In through the willows upstream
That held specimen nuggets as big as your thumb!
I’m watching the old chimney’s brick
That juts upward from the tin roof
Below Lyman mountain,
The old man wasn’t born in this house
They built it when he was two, he was born
Across the road near where
I tore the apple packing shed down two years before,
Full of 19th Century artifacts, a “Coolerator”
Icebox, with only three bullet holes &
Behind the siding on the inside wall
Written in pencil, was a scribe from 80 years ago,
“Amen, Brother Ben,
Shot at a Rooster and hit a hen!”
From a ladder I sided my cabin
With those old Douglas fir lap boards,
While my own children squealed
& ran across my side hill
& now the wary Table Rock Black-tail deer
Are waiting on after dusk for a drink of river,
& now swallows begin to draw close
& for one minute come together
In ever tightening circles & swirl together
Then as one & into whirling black-funnel-down-cloud
Fifty feet in height above the house
& they are into-the-chimney
In one second &
Full of this days hatch
Settling for brick gripped sleep
This is what I waited for..
All pretty much at once it happens
On these August evenings
& the thirsty bucks stop their pant
& began to move & will slake their thirst
& I have taken a 10 pound steelhead from the riffle
On wet fly, a Teeter’s weighted-woolly-worm,
Ernie, gone about a year–had told me it was an evening riffle
Returning to my cabin I fed my family steelhead fillets
& read the Gospel of John
One more time..
Love is…
Love is like a changing
flight of small birds
through a snow flurry,
that though it is,
they’ve never paid
the rent two days late,
or had a shut off notice
for a late electric bill
appear on the front door,
yet it is–they know of unseen seeds
amid whiteness and moisture,
there but to be looked for,
unworried in the finding
and its integrity,
as confusion becomes
what the wind whips
and not the wind itself,
so much is taken care of
in the on rush of life,
making doubt and insecurity
a snowflake
dissolving beautifully
on your arm.
Bill Smith
When
I was in the army
I came across one
Bill Smith,
who had lived
on Main Street
in Pleasantville, New Jersey
and was no ordinary man,
other than that,
there was nothing
remarkable about him.
On Praise–C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
from Reflections on the Psalms C.S. Lewis pp.96-97
… “We are not riders but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster. To see what the doctrine really means, we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God–drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds. The Scotch catechism says man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”
C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien
From C.S. Lewis through the Shadowlands by Brian Sibley pp 51-52
“What Dyson and Tolkien showed me,” he [C.S.Lewis] wrote, “was that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.”
With Tolkien’s help , Jack [Lewis] began to see Christianity in relation to the myths he already loved, began to believe that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.”
Several years later Tolkien was to develop this argument in his essay “On Fairy Stories” in which he defined the special quality of fairy stories as being the Consolation of the Happy Ending. This quality Tolkien called the eucatastrophe (the “good conclusion”).
“The gospels he [Tolkien] wrote “contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving: ‘Mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe…The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in Joy…There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits… To reject it leads either to sadness or wrath.”
This was the somewhat cerebral process by which Jack made his way to a belief in Christ, “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken,” he was to write in his autobiography, It happened on a bright, sunny morning in 1931. Warnie (C.S. Lewis’s brother) and Jack visited Whipsnade Zoo, Jack traveling in the sidecar of Warnie’s motorbike. When we set out recalled Jack, “I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion…It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake…”
St. John One: One 