east of the fog

Posted an audio file in the Not Much Podcast of this Stephen Spender poem. – The Truly Great

Today I move into my fourth year of retirement, a day for some looking backward as to what has been accomplished and what might need to be adjusted moving into the autumn. i am both a restless and a time-wasting person or one who values both accomplishment and idleness. so it has always been for me – intense focus coupled to looking out the window. This is not the place to list accomplishments, chastisements, goals – just a notation along the way.

Reading a review of a book titled “The Memo” which imagines women sending a message back to an earlier self with a warning that seemingly fits on a post-it – example after example, mostly warnings. I have often heard men say, too, I wish I had known; perhaps I have thought this myself on occasion, but really I feel so far removed from myself at twenty as to have no idea what to post, let alone warn myself of. No matter what, choices go awry, serendipity lifts the soul. Life has to be lived to be appreciated and lamented

The thing is that the world I grew up in is gone no matter how hard people struggle to bring it back, it is gone.

Yeats wrote,

The Collar-Bone Of A Hare

Would I could cast a sad on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king's daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.