November 19, 2012

The sky is closer this morning, the blue hazed in by a dusting of clouds; small planes buzz overhead like throaty bees, their bright red and yellow, sparkling in the sunlight.  The loud thrumming of a truck engine adds to the noise, a big tow truck come to take the neighbor's very small car away, like a broken toy.  Having found my ipod again, the cheerful music of Paul Simon's Graceland has supplanted the news, as this is a late start.   The African rhythms just seem to lift my spirits whenever I hear them.  I find it amazing that they can make so much music with just human voices.

This week will be Thanksgiving, and I will be thankful for a lot, especially that both the boys will be home and we will be all together for a few days.  They probably won't be able to come at Christmas, but at this stage in all our lives, you take what you can get <grin>!  There were plenty of years I was not home for Christmas, too far, too broke, too hard to travel with little ones, lots of reasons, all good, and all still meaning I was not home, so, I understand, but that doesn't mean I like it <chuckle>!

I found a funny poem to start the week.  We all get stuck looking at familiar things the same way all the time.  Here is a poet who imagines what a Martian might observe about some ordinary things.  Actually, there is a whole class of "riddle" poems; May Swenson wrote one of my favorites "Southbound on the Freeway" but there are lots of others I've read over the years.  This one has some very original . . . views.

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Craig Raine
Certainly there are some "alien" takes on ordinary things.  I love the one about fog, "dim and bookish", and about time tied to your wrist.  The caxtons got me but when I stopped thinking about the word the item came clear, it was the perched on the hands but not flying, and the bookish description a few lines late made me think I was right.  Still, a good exercise in thinking from a different perspective, even the most ordinary things take on an air of mystery.  For Monday, sometimes we need to get out of the box and do a little exploring, things can seem so ordinary, all the little routines instead of comforting can just seem boring.  However, there is always something out there to make things interesting, even if it's just tilting your brain a little to see things another way.  I'm sure that striped cat would like to see the little sparrow a different way, closer and slower!