Month: April 2022

Caveat: Tree #1177

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree and its peers lining the steep hillsides failed to resist my efforts at anthropomorphization.
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picture[daily log: walking, 6.5km; dogwalking, 3km; c120072059085s]

Caveat: Tree #1176

A Daily Tree / My Photos / Treehouse

This tree (which sticks up through the floor of my treehouse) was there when I installed a new worktable in my treehouse, which I made with some scrap lumber and a used pallet which I acquired from my place of employment.
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picture[daily log: walking, 7.5km; dogwalking, 3.5km]

Caveat: Poem #2083 “Manifesto”

A Daily Poem / Book 3 / Couplets and Quatrains / My Poetry & Fiction 
ㅁ
Spring is unbearable, just like the fall:
seasons do best when they're in one and all.
Likewise the sun shouldn't vary each day:
better to have it a lot, or away.

– a quatrain dactylic tetrameter. Bear in mind the “narrator’s voice” here really isn’t my opinion. It’s a kind of exaggerated, somewhat facetious narrator speaking.
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Caveat: Tree #1175

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree was there as I pulled the tarp off the GDC (RV) and got it started and moved it 20 feet. It all worked, somewhat to my surprise – I hadn’t started it since January, and I was worried I’d let it sit too long. I also managed to “cure” its fuse problem – though I confess I don’t know quite how I did that. So electrical systems seem okay now (unlike in January).
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I was talking to Arthur, as we drove home from the store today. Sometimes I blather on: “I really like this pothole. It’s my favorite. It has plenty of width and depth, so you can drive down into it and not just bounce across it, and it’s as wide as the whole road. It’s the kind of pothole you can talk to your friends about with pride.”

This was Arthur’s reply: “If you say so.”

picture[daily log: walking, 8km; dogwalking, 3km]

Caveat: Poem #2082 “While the Men Converse”

A Daily Poem / Book 3 / My Drawings & Paintings / My Poetry & Fiction / Relics From My Own Ancient History 
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While the Men Converse
         Went so. / for Wntr.
         / can y. undstd --
       In spc. mny types
      awt. the end.
        |
        |
      °°° ~ now the
    blue/bk. over / turned
    the eggs of Tps.
    To reveal to me the
       Vrts.
    That man dwells amidst * - c
  ? Id.s. ,,, / (,,,) -- ...
    / / / -- \ °°°
  Tps Vrts -- flowing like
lamposts on dusty grey
bookshelves --
While the Men.
Converse°°° °°

– A free-form poem, a guest-poem from my past. I wrote this poem in the summer of 1983, a point in time when I was keeping a fairly regular journal (a kind of analogue predecessor to this here blog thingy, right?). It was hard to transcribe – I was experimenting with what is called “concrete poetry” I guess. My handwritten letters and the spaces that I filled with bits of punctuation and pseudo-writing were as important as the actual text. I was being deliberately gnomic with my weird abbreviations and omissions of letters – most of them I can figure out, but in fact I’m clueless about the meaning of “Tps” in the above poem. I’m guessing that “Vrts” is “virtues”… maybe? So perhaps “Tps” means “typos” – that would please my notion of meta-referentiality, anyway. Let it be so.

So transcription is quite difficult. Here is the image of the original poem. And the facing page with its accompanying illustration.

MenconverseA_260

MenconverseB_260

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Caveat: not in haste to end

Not My Poetry / Quotable 
The Best Thing in the World

What's the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
--Something out of it, I think.

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English poet, 1806-1861)
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Caveat: Tree #1171

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree saw yesterday’s salmonberry bloom relieved of its burden of snow.
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picture[daily log: walking, 3.5km; dogwalking, 3km]

Caveat: a piece / of ripened memory

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Not My Poetry / Quotable 
Part of Speech

...and when "the future" is uttered, swarms of mice
rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece
of ripened memory which is twice
as hole-ridden as real cheese.
After all these years it hardly matters who
or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,
and your mind resounds not with a seraphic "doh",
only their rustle. Life, that no one dares
to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth,
bares its teeth in a grin at each
encounter. What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.

– Joseph Brodsky (Russian-American poet, 1940-1996)
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Caveat: Poem #2074 “Cage of lions and I”

A Daily Poem / Book 3 / My Poetry & Fiction 
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Cage of lions and I we are two things

Secure within immutability
safe inside my sphere
I pound my head against
its walls
begging to be free.
Then a man with silver key
cracks my prison
sets me free.
I grab some glue,
I gasp for breath
I beg the man to take his
key, and go away.
Patching sphere
repairing cracks
I turn around and
pound my head against
its other walls.

I know the answer
I have asked the questions
but no one tells me how

Dog and bug are in a room.
A green plant.

– a free-form poem. This poem is a “guest post” from my own past: I wrote this poem while in high school, in 1982. I transcribed to my “retroblog” in 2010.
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Caveat: Tree #1165

A Daily Tree / Internet & Blogging / My Photos

This tree was reaching for a dog.
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Meanwhile, lately I’m not feeling comfortable with the accuracy of my weather widget, on the right hand column of this here blog.
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picture[daily log: walking, 3.5km; dogwalking, 4km]

Caveat: 공든 탑이 무너지랴

한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean) / 한국어 속담 (Aphorisms & Proverbs)

I found this aphorism in my book of Korean aphorisms.

공든               탑이        무너지랴
gong.deun         tap.i      mu.neo.ji.rya
be-effortful-PART tower-SUBJ crumble-RHET-INTERROG
[Can] a well-built tower crumble?

This means that if you put your sincerest effort into a project, it will have enduring value. A person’s hard work is never wasted. It’s pretty anodyne, I guess. This features another occurrence of the “rhetorical interrogative” I reported on a few weeks back. It’s a cool syntactic construction.

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