We Are The. . .

We are the fatherless

battalions

charging head forth

into the

valleys

of our own creation.

My father died in battle,

yours in surrender.

We follow their bloodless bodies

to revenge,

through dunes of grime and grit,

and clouds of fractured wit.

After The Storm

After the storm, I took to cleaning. I swept the hardwood floor and shook the thread-bare carpet outside. I made my bed and straightened my books.

After breakfast, after doing the dishes, I set out to work on the garden path – a task bestowed upon me by my hostess. The night before had been splintered by heavy southwesterly winds and thunderous rain descending on the roof of my cabin. I awoke on numerous occasions and couldn’t sleep for fear of being whisked away by these winds. The roof of the cabin was pummeled by branches that were violently torn from the surrounding pines, oaks, and maples.

My first procedure, then, was to sweep all of the fallen twigs and pine needles off of the path. This took some time, but was also highly gratifying. Sweeping the small plastic broom back and forth, swiping aside the needles, exposing the stones beneath. The path itself was a curved, drystone affair that led from the dock, around the garden, and to the back of the boathouse. It had been constructed by a previous guest and it was horribly irregular. My task was to rearrange it so as to assure that it was even and that it had smooth, regular sides.

Oh catharsis! To straighten a path – to rationalize a form, so! What a perfectly simple and clear problem! To take the world as you find it, and by moving earth and stone with your hands – with your arms and back and legs as well – to perfect its form, for firmness and delight- this is worthwhile!

And so, after the storm, I picked up my shovel, and my trowel, and my pick, and set hard to work rationalizing the surface of the earth.

Sun In . . .

Sun in melancholy morning

makes everything beautiful even

my cold hands as they clean

last night’s smudgy literary

coffee pot

swirling the grains with hose water

and splashing them

across the earth

where they desperately cling

to grass petals

but by afternoon are

gone.

SWTMM

I wrote this when I was living on Georgian Bay at the beginning of Autumn and I would swim each morning before work.

Swimming with these morning mists

I blend my body with such beauty.

This water, black velvety ink,

bends to my fingers.

I would I could cast it

in vast, flowing caligraphy

across these golden skies:

a Haiku, for God and

for You.

A Poem?

The clouds are heavy, perhaps fecund. They no more threaten

than a teenage mother. More, they loom complacently and

full. They brood over the landscape like office clerks brood

over fingernails.

Silouettes

I see your face as

if through thick

foliage and you aren’t

smiling.

Your frozen expression looks off towards

a horizon

not my horizon.

I am standing on my horizon! Where are you

looking? Who is it there that stands in sillouette?

Cosmos Continued. ..

Further to that last posting, here are some more large numbers for comparison. They are taken from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_E9:

- Chance of getting heads 40 times
in a row in a coin toss _______________ - 1 in 10⁺¹²

- Chances of being dealt a royal
flush in Poker _____________________- 1 in 10^+5.8127

- # of possible 5 card hands______________- 10^+6.4148

- # of distinct astrological objects
in the the observable Universe __________- 10^+8.9993

- approx. # of neurons in the
Human Brain_______________________- 10⁺¹¹

- # of different positions offered by
a Rubik’s Cube _____________________- 10^+19.6334

- # of different 9x9 Sodoku grids
possible __________________________- 10^+21.8242

My uncle tells me that there are approximately 10⁺¹²⁰ different possible games of chess.

Given a 26 note melody such as Mary Had a Little Lamb, and allowing the whole scope of the 12-note chromatic scale as possibilities, there are 10^+28.0587 different possible melodies. Hence, anyone who claims that all of the melodies are already taken, should seriously think again. That's far more melodies than the number of centimeters between the Earth and the Sun, and back again. Then there are those that say “everything’s already been written”. To that comment I only have to suggest that the OED includes 616,500 (10^+5.7899) different word forms, and that Don Quixote is 1072 pages long. Given a rough average of 400 words per page . . . my calculator refuses to even tell me how many different possible combinations there are.