poem.a.day
As well as daily news and breaking news emails from all over, and online magazine subscription emails throughout each week, and covered up with email ads from Fresh Market, L L Bean, BB&B, my inbox yields This Day in History (1935 Amelia Earhart flies from Hawaii to California), a.word.a.day (yesterday it was "gowk" which I don't see how I can work it into a sermon, and I don't see a word for today yet) and poem.a.day. If the poem looks especially inane or outstandingly selected and printed to show that the site is politically correct, as many, I skip reading.
Today's poem though, is different, strange, see what you think:
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I don't think so, but whatever. Phillips was taking off on somebody else's poem*.
Oh, there's also daily email from Buechner's websites. One or the other of our professors at seminary introduced us to him with required reading. You don't have to be required to enjoy Buechner, he's enjoyable and erudite and the source of much sermon enrichment over my forty years in the wilderness. Here's his piece this morning:
Agnostic
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AN AGNOSTIC IS SOMEBODY who doesn't know for sure whether there really is a God. That is some people all of the time and all people some of the time.
There are some agnostics who don't know simply because they've never taken pains to try to find out—like the bear who didn't know what was on the other side of the mountain.
There are other agnostics who have taken many pains. They have climbed over the mountain, and what do you think they saw? Only the other side of the mountain. At least that was all they could be sure of. That faint glimmer on the far horizon could have been just Disneyland. |
The professor told us "We will be able to tell whether you've read this assignment." It turned out that the way they could tell was by whether we pronounced it correctly, "Beek-ner". Seems to be a German name that before crossing the Atlantic had an umlaut: Büchner. Pronounce the "u" like an "e" but with your lips quickly pursed and unpursed, and the "ch" as in an Americanized "ich". As "ich heiße Büchner, wie heißen Sie?"
Pics a bit fuzzy: yesterday morning, tug standing by for one of the Progreso ships just entering port
* “‘Having a Fight with You’ is my riff on Frank O’Hara’s famous poem ‘Having a Coke with You,’ and shares with it the subject of love’s intoxicating, sometimes all-consuming power over us. O’Hara wrote one of the great odes to smitten-ness, and I hope mine is at least a variation on that theme—though I dwell instead on the gut-punch when two lovers quarrel. I was trying to be honest about those moments when love, precisely because of its intensity, feels a lot like devastation.”
—Patrick Phillips
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it