Monday Poetry Reading

We had a good crowd, but mostly "new" people. The absent regulars--Ramey, Joe, Sherry--should be aware that we talk about them when they're not there. But good talk.

I almost didn't go to the meeting myself. I got a lot done yesterday, but I hurt all day. All over. Well, not all over; my head didn't hurt. Neither did my feet. Just all that stuff in between. On days like that, I hardly ever remember that in the cabinet I've got at least three mild OTC pain relievers. "One sure, if another fails" (Browning, "Soliloquy Of the Spanish Cloister").

Mo is still at the vet clinic. The doctor said she would call me Saturday afternoon, but she didn't. I phoned yesterday morning, but the assistant said she would call me later in the day, but she didn't. Luckily, she never seems to charge me room and board when she keeps Mo longer than planned, just a basic charge plus whatever tests or medicines that she quotes beforehand or in the process. When she examined him Saturday morning, she said he still has a little bit of vision. Poor Mo.

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Poetry is important, probably as important as any other art. Painting/visual arts and crafts show form, color, texture, beauty. Prose is stories in one form or another. Poetry is ideas and emotion in distilled form, even if it has no form. Even if you can't see or hear, once you get a poem, you keep the best part of it, sometimes all of it. Of course, that's true of the other arts, like music. Art gets inside you, if you let it.

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I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers "Death."

from "Maud," by Lord Tennyson

"Maud" is a long, creepy and beautiful poem, and worth reading. "...They have not buried me deep enough."

I quit "work" yesterday before remembering to put the trash cart on the curb, and now I hear the garbage truck.