Request

Request
by Lawrence Raab

For a long time I was sure
it should be "Jumping Jack Flash," then
the adagio from Schubert's C major Quintet,
but right now I want Oscar Peterson's

"You Look Good to Me." That's my request.
Play it at the end of the service,
after my friends have spoken.
I don't believe I'll be listening in,

but sitting here I'm imagining
you could be feeling what I'd like to feel—
defiance from the Stones, grief
and resignation with Schubert, but now

Peterson and Ray Brown are making
the moment sound like some kind
of release. Sad enough
at first, but doesn't it slide into

tapping your feet, then clapping
your hands, maybe standing up
in that shadowy hall in Paris
in the late sixties when this was recorded,

getting up and dancing
as I would not have done,
and being dead, cannot, but might
wish for you, who would then

understand what a poem—or perhaps only
the making of a poem, just that moment
when it starts, when so much
is still possible—

has allowed me to feel.
Happy to be there. Carried away. 

"Request" by Lawrence Raab, from Visible Signs. © Penguin, 2003

Different Drummer

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? 

. . .Walden by Henry David Thoreau 1854

Six Word Memoirs III

ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.

--- Jancee Dunn

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Wounds and deficiencies

One should conceal one's wounds and hide the crippling deficiencies of life -- poverty, misfortune, sickness, ill-success.  People begin by being touched and moved to tenderness by their friends' distress; presently this changes to pity, which has something humiliating about it; then to a masterful giving of advice; and then to scorn. 

--Senac de Meilhan 

Quoted in "The Far Side of the World" by Patrick O'Brian

Distance and a Certain Light

Distance and a Certain Light
by May Swenson

Distance
and a certain light
makes anything artistic—
it doesn't matter what.

From an airplane, all
that rigid splatter of the Bronx
becomes organic, logical
as web or beehive. Chunks

of decayed cars in junkyards,
garbage scows (nimble roaches
on the Harlem), herds of stalled
manure-yellow boxes on twisting reaches

of rails, are punched clean and sharp
as ingots in the ignition of the sun.
Rubbish becomes engaging shape—
you only have to get a bead on it,

the right light filling the corridor
of your view—a gob of spit
under a microscope, fastidious
in structure as a crystal. No contortion

without intention, and nothing ugly.
In any random, sprawling, decomposing thing
is the charming string
of its history—and what it will be next. 

"Distance and a Certain Light" by May Swenson, from Collected Poems. © The Library of America, 2013.

Six-Word Memoirs II

Memory was my drug of choice.

--- Pea Hicks

From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Six-Word Memoirs

Macular degeneration.  Didn't see that coming.

--Ian Gould
From Not Quite What I Was Planning,  Six-word memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.