heron’s cry –
in the falling darkness
two blossoms

autumn thunder, evening
a branch trembles
as crow goes wandering
the petals alight
on mountain snow

heat-faded remains of daffodils,
their journey withered
in inches

Snow comes early in the mountains, but dried flower petals retain the memory of summer’s heat. And everything has its own journey to make, whether long or short.

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was giving up control, writing a poem by pulling randomly from a bag of words that had been cut up from a different source — another poem, a newspaper article, or even a memo from the boss at work :-).

I randomly selected words from some of my favorite haiku from Basho. Here they are as I pulled them from the bag (highlighting the phrases that I used for my poem):

heron’s cry falling darkness two blossoms field echo lightning above nightfall temple autumn thunder evening branch trembles wandering goes crow petal alights mountain snow leaves shimmering heat faded remain daffodils journey withered inches dead silence one into perfect fragrant enough waterfall’s rose barely dried bells sick first bend dream grass stabs

Then all I did was add some line breaks and a few tweaks for grammar. If you are going to try to make a poem from words pulled from a bag, you could do worse than starting with Basho’s words!

(You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the readwritepoem blog too.)

My brother Tom sent me a card for my birthday recently. Well, I presumed that it was a birthday card but it was all in Russian so for all I knew it was a lost set of nuclear launch codes from Siberia!

Когда ты улыбаешься,
Становится светлей,
Когда ты появляешься,
Всем сразу веселей!

И просто замечательно,
Что есть на свете ты,
Пускай же обязательно
Исполнятся мечты!

I did take two years of Russian during my misspent college career which sadly has almost entirely rusted away from disuse. Still, I love the sound of spoken Russian and I can still phonetically sound out the words (if you want to try this at home, put some marbles in your mouth to be truly authentic!) :

Cogda tee oolibyeshsya, stanovitsa svetlei,
Cogda tee payavlyaeshsya, fsyem srazoo veselei!

Ee prosto zamechatyelna, shto est na sveteh tee,
Pooskai zhe obyazatyelna eespalyatsya metchtee!

With the help of Wikipedia’s Russian alphabet page I manually copied, letter by letter, the words from the paper card into a text file. Then I tried Google’s online automatic translator:

When you smile, becomes brighten.
When you appear, all at once is more cheerful!
Also it is simply wonderful, that there is on light you.
Start up dreams will necessarily be executed!

So, not Russian launch codes after all :-).  The last line would be more poetically translated as “May all your dreams come true!”, but there is a certain Russian-ness to the way the automatic translator rendered it.

Tom, may all your dreams be necessarily executed too!

Update (2009-10-29) Thanks to commenter Natalia, I finally have a faithful translation, which is nicer and more lovely than Google’s machine translation:

When you smile, everything becomes brighter.
When you appear, everyone is more cheerful!
Also it is simply wonderful, that you exist in this world!
And may all your wishes absolutely become true!!!

It’s been a busy spring for getting back to the midwest for family events. Most recently, we flew to Missouri for Nancy’s niece Shelby’s graduation.

After the ceremony and big dinner, Shelby went off for the seniors’ overnight event at the school. Grandma Neva, proud papa Robert, Nancy, I, plus Aaron and his girlfriend Amanda settled into the hotel’s lounge for a friendly poker game. Amanda turned out to be a pretty cool card sharp, so it’s a good thing we weren’t playing for money or Nancy and I might not have been able to get back home! :-)

Last month Nancy and I flew back to Iowa for my family’s big event. My family sure do love a party, so this was a combination 50th anniversary for my folks, pre-graduation celebration for niece Margie, and birthday party for niece Hannah! As you can see, we were all on our best behavior :-)

A quick look through the wayback machine at Ma ‘n’ Pa:

Not far from our house is a steep hillside, and of course some people like to build houses on them. One such house stabilizes their slope with very large rocks. (For scale, these rocks are probably a foot or two across.)

There is what looks like a kind of pressure-release pipe near the bottom of the slope, with a styrofoam cap duct-taped on. Some wise guy (not me! :-) added a few extra touches for a stylish look.

Bonus neighbor-of-the-week:

Visiting Portland’s Japanese Garden with Bo & Amber and Chris.

(For our earlier visits to the Japanese Garden, see this post and this one too.)

Spring has fully sprung here in Portland. with our dogwood and cherry trees in bloom. On a neighborhood walk with the pups I noticed the tiny little daisies scattered through the lawns, so I took out the camera and turned on the “macro” setting for an extreme closeup.

Those little daisies inspired me to look for more tiny things during the rest of that walk.

Here’s an experiment in 3D: cross your eyes until the two pictures merge.

It’s amazing what you can miss if you don’t take the time to look up close.

Returning home, I finished up with a pair of final extreme closeups — the dogwood and cherry blossoms right outside my own front door.

simile: a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced by like or as.
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.
– Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

life is like a simile
i compare yours to mine
pretending they should be the same
why aren’t you more like me?

life is a metaphor
if i see the world through your eyes
if i walk a mile in your shoes
who will meet me when i arrive?

life is a deep snow-covered hillside pasture
at twilight as the first stars appear,
where dozens of laughing dogs leap and run in circles
with sparklers

April is National Poetry Month, and on the ReadWritePoem blog  a bunch of poets more dedicated than me :-) have taken on the challenge of writing a poem-a-day for the whole month — check it out!

Most people, I think, are familiar with the saying “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. But I learned today from Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac that the full quote is

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

said by Elie Wiesel, who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp as a teenager in World War II. American troops entered the camp on April 11, 1945.

desert sky circles:
sunset’s red rainbow beckons
as the moon rises

Lost in the desert, Throws-his-words and Fierce Cat heed Raven’s sign, a red rainbow surrounding the rising full moon, that leads them to water. The haiku is how I would write it; here is Throws-his-word’s song:

In the land of hard stones,
In the land of painted giants,
In the land of angry trees,
In the land of parched lips,

Raven, where is the laughing grass?
Raven, where are the sleeping trees?
Raven, where are the deer and the buffalo?
Raven, where are the singing streams?

“Wait for the sunset”, Raven whispers.
“Wait for the moonrise”, Raven whispers.
“Look me in the eye”, Raven whispers.
“See what I see and come to me.”

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was collaborative, to write a poem using the first line donated from another poet’s poem. I selected my line from a lovely poem by jone.

(You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the readwritepoem blog too. By the way, red rainbows are a real phenomenon, and the one Nancy and I saw during a neighborhood walk last weekend was the inspiration for this poem.)

As part of the prompt, I also donated the first line of one of my own poems, and I was delighted to see how other poets took it and made it their own. Check them out!

pre-dawn dark silence,
looking at my (almost) face
in the bathroom mirror.
through the washcloth
my hands see more clearly

Is it just me, or maybe it’s because I’m so near-sighted without my glasses, but I know my own face much better by touch than sight. I’ll often get up early in the morning, especially in winter, wash and dress quietly, deliberately, without turning on any lights. It’s a very different place than the everyday world dominated by sight and sound.

I linked this poem to the readwritepoem blog, where there is a weekly poetry “prompt” inviting people to submit poems on a new theme each week. This week’s theme was to write a poem literally in your face. (You can read other poets’ submissions on the theme at the blog too.)

In today’s installment of our ongoing lecture series, here are six additional uses for a chair:

The yoga “cat pose”, demonstrated by an expert:

(This last chair was previously seen in this blog almost two years ago, here.)

Typical sights out and about walking the dogs down by the river and through the neighborhood.

Hank: “I can has treats?”

Mount Saint Helens in the distance, seen over the Ross Island Bridge

Spring may not have fully spung yet, but it’s definitely springing.

The aerial tram seen above the Ross Island Grocery, a great little deli with a long history.

One of my favorite things about our early 1900’s neighborhood: the sidewalk makers’ marks.

These embedded marks are so old that they’ve nearly weathered away. But even the slightest indentation retains that little bit of extra moisture that lets the moss thrive (extreme close-up!)

Having a great time, wish you were here!

Daddy Ladder, Mommy Ladder, and all the Ladder children out for a stroll in the neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon.

I heart the “obamizer“:

Ain’t I cute? :-)

Here’s what I believe in:

Everyone has a dream (remember this guy?):

Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac reminded me that today is Imbolc, the Celtic festival marking the 1/2 way point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. According to Wikipedia, during Imbolc the common folk celebrate the “onset of lactation of ewes, soon to give birth to the spring lambs”.

“St. Brigid is said to walk the earth on Imbolc eve. Before going to bed, the head of the household will smother the fire and rake the ashes smooth. In the morning, they look for some kind of mark on the ashes, a sign that Brigid has passed that way in the night or morning.”

It’s possible that we had our own sanctified visitor last night, although I suppose it is also conceivable that the marks have a more terrestrial (ie, canine or feline) origin:-)

Get Fuzzy, 2009-01-07:

Satchel (the dog): I wrote my first haiku!

Rob: Awesome. Let’s hear it.

Satchel: ahem

one, two, three, four, five . . .
six, seven, eight, nine, ten, e . . .
leven, twelve, thirteen

Satchel: How’s my haiku?

Rob: Technical perfection, Satchel. Technical perfection.

What snowplows Portland does have were busy keeping downtown open for business, but fortunately our Subaru’s four wheel drive let us get out of our snowbound neighborhood to see the city’s 75 foot tall Christmas tree.

Old Man Winter hit us especially hard recently, with the worst series of snowstorms in 40 years over almost two full weeks. We ended up with 16 inches or more of snow on the ground, with a couple layers of ice thrown in just to add more fun. That may be business as usual for our midwest family and friends, but Portland just isn’t prepared for such sustained snowfalls and pretty much just has to shut down until it melts.

Fortunately (or not, depending on your perspective :-) Nancy and I mostly work from home, so we actually weren’t that affected ourselves. The puppies love the snow and we’d built up a good stock of firewood and groceries so we were in good shape. We did have one bit of excitement — our furnace decided to take a vacation, and we had a couple of days of keeping warm by space heaters until the repair guys could make it across town to fix it. But all’s well that ends well.

Below: yup, that’s really a car entirely buried in snow and not from a snowplow!

Update (December 28, 2008): After 4 days of temps in the 40s, the snow has finally all melted, and we’re back to our regular Portland winter weather of continuous rain :-).

The Grotto is a local landmark in Portland, a beautiful botanical garden and Catholic shrine. A yearly event every Christmas season is the Festival of Lights, which Nancy and I visited with Bo and Amber. There was a very light snow falling through the tall evergreens, which was magical in the glow of the lights. This was our first visit to the Grotto, but I think it’ll be a Christmas tradition for us from now on :-).

Above: a little snowman someone made on top of a newspaper machine, seen when Nancy and I were strolling around the Hawthorne district with Chris on a cold, windy day after the first snowfall.

To get warm we stopped into one of our favorite restaurants for lunch. I idly took this shot of an air duct running along the ceiling, but when I looked at it days later it reminded me of one of my brother Tom’s abstract paintings so I decided to keep it. What do you think, Tom? Is it art? :-)