Trapped and transformed

This one morphed out of some emerging ideas about reflections and mirrors and the passing of time and how perception warps reality sufficiently enough that we should be vigilant about what we tell ourselves.

I’m thinking about doing some art to harmonize with Theodore Roetke’s poetry. Roethke was mentally ill. (What is it with poets and madness anyway?) He has been my favourite poet ever since I first read The Far Field as a teenager. In fact, when I ran away from home I had three items in my wallet, and one of them was a verse from The Far Field:

I learned not to fear infinity
The far field
The windy cliffs of forever
They dying of time in the white light of tomorrow
The wheel turning in on itself
The sprawl of the wave
The oncoming water

The second item in my wallet – and this is a bit embarassing, but I guess it struck a chord in my 15-year-old soul – was straight from the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door

And the third item in my wallet was a photograph of Paddy Mitchell, torn from the newspaper.

I’m not sure why I took these things and not other things, but I suspect they gave me courage and made me feel less alone.

I also took my baseball glove, but not in my wallet of course.

On a completely different subject, I seem to have lost misplaced the usb cable for my camera, so all my recent photos are temporarily unavailable. I’ve got snowmen and birthday parties and banjo players and a loom all trapped inside my camera. I’m selling my loom: it’s huge, I’ve moved it three times, I’ve never used it, and it’s time to find it someone who can look at it without feeling guilty. Maybe we all have something like that. Mary Jane has a harp. She plays the harp about as often as I weave: never, not even once.

Today’s the first day of Daylight Savings Time. It’s 11:03 p.m and I’m having trouble figuring out whether that means it’s really 10:03 or 12:03.

Okay, I appear to be rambling, so I’ll call it a night now. Thanks for bearing with me.