Rock, Poem, Photo III

To Be Or Not To Be

I'll understand if you skip the windy explanation.

I had three rules for this blog this whole year. I told myself I could reveal them on January 1.

The first was to post every day if possible—not planning in advance.
The second was to be as honest as possible. Not to contrive, even if what I was thinking made no sense.
The third, in part to achieve the second, was to never to address you, readers.

I liked the way that worked. But having told you that, I will say hi once. Today.

Hi.

I speculate sometimes on how many of you are out there. A handful of you make yourselves known. I mention this blog to very few people, so the statistics page confuses me a bit, standing almost perfectly steady at 30 hits every weekday (although there is a very real probability that one reader in particular refreshes the site fifteen times a day just to keep me guessing).

The days Ty's blog drives to this one, traffic more than doubles, and that spike always makes me chuckle.

So do your comments. Encouragement, participation, a remark from a friend who keeps reading here, the very occasional comments from someone who stumbled across the blog.

I like that I reach you. And that sometimes you wave back.

I've been thinking about whether or not to try to continue this blog. My goal was to post here for a year, and I've done that. I have exhausted my favorite poetry and skimmed a good bit of new stuff. I've hit a plateau with my photography (aside from the +/- button) and I want to get a bit more technical, less poetic, with rocks. Do you really want to sit through that? Does anyone out there really read the long poems?

I thought of the title for this post and then looked up the passage. Shakespeare was always too dense for my patience, but this is a nice chunk:

To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action

—from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

For now, I've decided to continue with the outrageous fortune. In chapter IV. 

My pick axe the only bodkin around.

To Be Or Not To Be

I'll understand if you skip the windy explanation.

I had three rules for this blog this whole year. I told myself I could reveal them on January 1.

The first was to post every day if possible—not planning in advance.
The second was to be as honest as possible. Not to contrive, even if what I was thinking made no sense.
The third, in part to achieve the second, was to never to address you, readers.

I liked the way that worked. But having told you that, I will say hi once. Today.

Hi.

I speculate sometimes on how many of you are out there. A handful of you make yourselves known. I mention this blog to very few people, so the statistics page confuses me a bit, standing almost perfectly steady at 30 hits every weekday (although there is a very real probability that one reader in particular refreshes the site fifteen times a day just to keep me guessing).

The days Ty's blog drives to this one, traffic more than doubles, and that spike always makes me chuckle.

So do your comments. Encouragement, participation, a remark from a friend who keeps reading here, the very occasional comments from someone who stumbled across the blog.

I like that I reach you. And that sometimes you wave back.

I've been thinking about whether or not to try to continue this blog. My goal was to post here for a year, and I've done that. I have exhausted my favorite poetry and skimmed a good bit of new stuff. I've hit a plateau with my photography (aside from the +/- button) and I want to get a bit more technical, less poetic, with rocks. Do you really want to sit through that? Does anyone out there really read the long poems?

I thought of the title for this post and then looked up the passage. Shakespeare was always too dense for my patience, but this is a nice chunk:

To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action

—from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

For now, I've decided to continue with the outrageous fortune. In chapter IV. 

My pick axe the only bodkin around.

Only the Finding

It's a strange thing to love poetry. Or rocks. Or making a photograph. Strange to feel the pull of anything. Love, words, stones, moments frozen in color, on paper. They are useless. There is nothing to be done with them, no reason.

Only the finding.

Geodes

They are useless, there is nothing
To be done with them, no reason, only

The finding: letting myself down holding
To ironwood and the dry bristle of roots

Into the creekbed, into clear water shelved
Below the outcroppings, where crawdads spurt

Through silt; clawing them out of clay, scrubbing
Away the sand, setting them in a shaft of light

To dry. Sweat clings in the cliff's downdraft.
I take up each one like a safecracker listening

For the lapse within, the moment crystal turns
On crystal. It is all waiting there in the darkness.

I want to know only that things gather themselves
With great patience, that they do this forever.

—from Work, For the Night is Coming, by Jared Carter

Happy new year.

Only the Finding

It's a strange thing to love poetry. Or rocks. Or making a photograph. Strange to feel the pull of anything. Love, words, stones, moments frozen in color, on paper. They are useless. There is nothing to be done with them, no reason.

Only the finding.

Geodes

They are useless, there is nothing
To be done with them, no reason, only

The finding: letting myself down holding
To ironwood and the dry bristle of roots

Into the creekbed, into clear water shelved
Below the outcroppings, where crawdads spurt

Through silt; clawing them out of clay, scrubbing
Away the sand, setting them in a shaft of light

To dry. Sweat clings in the cliff's downdraft.
I take up each one like a safecracker listening

For the lapse within, the moment crystal turns
On crystal. It is all waiting there in the darkness.

I want to know only that things gather themselves
With great patience, that they do this forever.

—from Work, For the Night is Coming, by Jared Carter

Happy new year.

Understood

I'm having a hard time believing that I never posted this poem. I've searched the archives and haven't found it. I could swear I remember writing it out.

At any rate, the year shouldn't end without this one. And in rewriting it, I sat and skimmed back over Human Wishes and Sun Under Wood. I wrote a poem once about the feeling of having two books of poetry that you love at hand (and coffee, of course). A funny, favorite, hopeful feeling: there's more.

The Seventh Night

It was the seventh night and he walked out to look at the stars.
Chill in the air, sharp, not of summer, and he wondered
if the geese on the lake felt it and grew restless
and if that was why, in the late afternoon, they had gathered
at the bay's mouth and flown abruptly back and forth,
back and forth on the easy, swift veering of their wings.
It was high summer and he was thinking of autumn,
under a shadowy tall pine, and of geese overhead on cold mornings
and high clouds drifting. He regarded the stars in the cold dark.
they were a long way off, and he decided, watching them blink,
that compared to the distance between him and them,
the outside-looking-in feeling was dancing cheek-to-cheek.
And noticed then that she was there, a shadow between parked cars,
looking out across the valley where the half-moon poured thin light
down the pine ridge. She started when he approached her,
and then recognized him, and smiled, and said, "Hi, night light."
And he said "Hi, dreamer." And she said, "Hi moonshine,"
and he said "Hi, mortal splendor." And she said, "That's good."
She thought for a while. Scent of sage or yerba buena
and the singing in the house. She took a new tack and said,
"My father is a sad chair and I am the blind thumb's yearning."
He said, "Who threw the jade swan in the boiling oatmeal?"
Some of the others were coming out of the house, saying goodbye,
hugging each other. She said, "The lion of grief paws
what meat she is given." Cars starting up, one of the stagehands
struggling to uproot the pine. He said, "Rifling the purse
of possible regrets." She said, "Staggering tarts, a narcoleptic moon."
Most of the others were gone. A few gathered to listen.
The stagehands were lugging off the understory plants.
Two others were rolling up the mountain. It was clear that,
though polite, they were impatient. He said, "Goodbye, last thing."
She said, "So long, apocalypse." Someone else said, "Time,"
but she said, "The last boat left Xania in late afternoon."
He said, "Goodbye, Moscow, nights like sable,
mornings like the word persimmon." She said,
"Day's mailman drinks from a black well of reheated coffee
in a cafe called Mom's on the outskirts of Durango." He said,
"That's good." And one of the stagehands stubbed
his cigarette and said, "OK, would the last of you folks to leave,
if you can remember it, just put out the stars?" which they did,
and the white light everywhere in that silence was white paper.

—from Sun Under Wood by Robert Hass