A Tidings of Magpies

with many thanks to Debra Heller Bures from whence I reallocated these bits of wisdom!! and I'll add one more of my own... Love. All ways.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

Dewey's pizza and a movie with hubby and the girls. 'Cause nothing says Christmas like watching a hot mess ruin a perfectly lovely family occasion, or as we say in my family, "Merry Damn Christmas!!" (apologies to those of you who did not grow up with alcoholics)

A woman in the Playhouse audience last night asked the sound check man if the lead, Carter Calvert, had an understudy and he said no, ma'am I don't believe she does. I'd been thinking I didn't know how she could given the actress's voice and her seamless fit into the role, but as I Googled for a video or a photo I found different productions and actresses. Amazing that there are so many talented people in the world and bless them all. If I could just sing on-key for the length of a song I'd be happy. If this show ever comes to your town or close by it's worth the dressing up and stepping out. Beware though, Patsy makes today's radio pop music sound a bit tarnished and thin. A Wife Explains Why She Likes Country by Barbara Ras Because those cows in the bottomland are black and white, colors anyone can understand, even against the green of the grass, where they glide like yes and no, nothing in between, because in country, heartache h...

then and now...

Lilac Sunday by Diana Der-Hovanessian Let us agree to meet here some winter when the park gates are locked, and the arches thinned of their vaulting green to climb the wall, thaw the icicles and watch the rain like flowering cherry and lilacs that kissed your hair; some winter when the fog is heavy,— to return to this light. Neither I nor CinCity have fallen off the edge of the world, though I can't say with certainty what I've been doing. I'm sure that driving aimlessly around the town was involved.                                                                           ...

Those visits home, the way the young by Marianne Boruch   Those visits home, the way the young come back and still follow you around or find you on the bed reading or writing, to lie down at an angle or sit cross-legged. No secret between you, not even trouble quite though it isn't ordinary, the way the world unravels through them: what he said, what she never, who traveled where, that things— how exactly—splinter and break and cut. It trails off then. Both of you, which one to speak but thinking better of it. And the book is just a prop, what you were writing perfectly weightless in this silence. Child, oh fully no longer, out there tangling, untangling.

by Julie Kane What luck—an open bookstore up ahead as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street, and then to find the books were secondhand, with one whole wall assigned to poetry; and then, as if that wasn't luck enough, to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees, the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of my chapbook, out of print since '83— its cover very slightly coffee-stained, but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh though all those cycles of the seasons since its publication by a London press. Then, out of luck, I read the name inside: The man I thought would love me till I died.