A Tidings of Magpies

  Excerpts from "How to be Perfect" by Ron Padgett Get some sleep. Eat an orange every morning. Be friendly. It will help make you happy. Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly. Don't stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don't forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm's length and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball collection. Wear comfortable shoes. Do not spend too much time with large groups of people. Plan your day so you never have to rush. Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you have paid them, even if they do favors you don't want. After dinner, wash the dishes. Calm down. Don't expect your children to love you, so they c...

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim by Walt Whitman A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim, As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless, As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent, Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying, Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all. Curious I halt and silent stand, Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket; Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you my dear comrade? Then to the second I step--and who are you my child and darling? Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming? Then to the third--a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you--I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dea...

All Dharmas Are Marked with Emptiness by Frank X. Gaspar I'm talking now about the destitute and the wild-eyed, I'm talking about the lady who made the head of the Virgin Mary out of cut up pieces of magazines and broken glass and a can of carpenter's glue—and then there's the girl I know who works in the supermarket, who printed an entire anthology of poems on a single eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of Xerox paper and folded a hundred copies down to wallet size and passed them out to anyone who dared look her in the eye. You know what I mean: there are all those lonely, desperate, weird minds—yours among them for all I know—and the Dharma is everywhere, books and words and people thinking, beat-up notebooks from the dollar store, scribbling the world into them—a man has a mystery, a woman has an adventure, the kids are banging rhymes together like tin cans full of old nails. Where's it all going, this clatter, this wonder...

Our desire to live as a one car family has come to an end and so early Saturday morning Hubby and I set out to eastern Virginia to pick up the 2003 Toyota he bought online with the lure of a 6hr road trip (one way). I finally looked at a map Thursday night after work...that ain't no 6 hour drive. Ten hours per Google and more like 12 hours (one way) with a dog and a sick-of-being-in-this-car wife. He now has heard my promise and declaration to never, never drive through West Virginia again, which he has interpreted as "unsedated." Still and all, an adventure was had. After picking up our newest addition to the family fleet we became addled when looking for the no-tell motel and ended up driving back and forth past Quantico Marine Base maybe four or seventeen times. I'm hoping for expecting a knock on the door from NCIS' Jethro and Ducky for questioning any day now. Lessons learned: Waffle Houses are fantabulous country-wide,...

Work it, girls.

Hubby and I saw the documentary, Marley, a few days ago and I was really surprised. Didn't know much about the man at all and, I admit, thought the whole movement was about smoking dope. I know, a little judgey. However, a good movie, great music, and I suspect inside Bob Marley was a little Jewish grandmother telling us all how to be better people...so Happy Mothers' Day weekend and get out there and  spread the love.

by William Stafford We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In the rain yesterday, puddles on the walk to the barn sounded their quick little drinks. The edge of the haymow, all soaked in moonlight, dreams out there like silver music. Are there farms like this where no one likes to live? And the sky going everywhere? While the earth breaks the soft horizon eastward, we study how to deserve what has already been given us. please note: photo by Henk de Boer

and made mischief of one kind... and another his mother called him "WILD THING!" and Max said "I'll EAT YOU UP!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything. That very night in Max's room a forest grew.. and grew- and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost a year to where the wild things are. And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws til Max said "BE STILL!" and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things "And now", cried Max, "let the wild rum...

by Thomas Lux I have thought much upon who might be my ilk, and that I am ilk myself if I have ilk. Is one of my ilk, or me, the barber who cuts the hair of the blind? And the man crushed by cruelties for which we can't imagine sorrow, who would be his ilk? And whose ilk was it standing around, hands in pockets, May 1933, when 2,242 tons of books were burned? Not mine. So: what makes my ilkness my ilkness? No answers, none forthcoming. To be one of the ilks, that's all I hoped for; to say hello to the mailman, nod to my neighbors, to watch my children climb the stairs of a big yellow bus which takes them to a place where they learn to read and write and eat their lunches from puzzle trays—all around them, amid the clatter and din, amid bananas, bread, and milk. all around them: them and their ilk. (thanks, rudee)

and could you please move your big head from in front of the monitor screen, Mr. Likes-To-Get-In-My-Way-While-I-Am-Trying-To-Work...?? The Cure by Ginger Andrews Lying around all day with some strange new deep blue weekend funk, I'm not really asleep when my sister calls to say she's just hung up from talking with Aunt Bertha who is 89 and ill but managing to take care of Uncle Frank who is completely bed ridden. Aunt Bert says it's snowing there in Arkansas, on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been able to walk out to their mailbox. She's been suffering from a bad case of the mulleygrubs. The cure for the mulleygrubs, she tells my sister, is to get up and bake a cake. If that doesn't do it, put on a red dress.