16 Tons

This has nothing to do with today's post, but it did make me happy during Friday's lunch.

It's oddly satisfying to find oneself having so much difficulty getting up in the morning following a day of (unforced) labor. Though a day at the computer can leave me feeling more than a bit sapped and with a drawing tiredness behind the eyes that makes me feel as if I've a face like an aging orange or a deflated pumpkin, it never makes the body struggle to rise from bed.

It may do that to the mind, and the mind can persuade the body that it just cannot get up, put on slippers, shuffle to the front room, and start the computer, but it's not the same ache.

All this ripping of wall board and flashing, and the passing of drivers (or drills), gets me to thinking about language. All this deconstruction of a room gets me to thinking about the parts of those walls and tools used to put them up or tear them down. And how little I know of it.



I was thrilled geekily on a recent visit to my brother's place (which is also Hope's place, of course) and he mentioned the desk he'd put together. He'd had to borrow a dremel and debur a bit of the metal.

I thought more about this after a friend recommended some Roethke poems. I hadn't pieced through poetry for a spell and was grateful to get back to it. Things like that get lost easily in the bustle of life (which is the clatter of a keyboard). I read "Lines Upon Leaving a Sanitarium" and it recalled to me Dylan Thomas' "Love in the Asylum" (though they are drastically different tales). I read "The Far Field", the opening stanza of which reminds me strongly of that Park Point or Point Park or whatever that spit of land in Duluth is called exactly. (I wrote about it almost a year ago.)

So I kept pulling books from the shelf--books by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, John Donne. A volume of poetry by the Romantics (by which I mean the period in poetry, not the '80s band you know mostly for "What I Like About You").

On it went. Words not so distant but poorly remembered and seldom used like wintry and quaking were returned to me.

And where the mind was perhaps weary a fire now burns.

Credits

Keith, Kym, Ben, Flannery and Mike: Grand to see you at brunch on Sunday. Thanks for the gathering (and Mike for the call). And Flannery: thanks for the hat. The Mayor of Lake Street shall rise again!

Jess, thanks for coming to lunch on Friday. But bugger all to your office arch enemies!

eR and jR: I hope you're enjoying Mexico.

Dingley: Thanks for the "Raptor Force" showing at the Dub. Good times. And Bob Anderson was great. Really nice to meet him and hear more about the making of that film.

eW: Thanks for the Roethke recs.
-cK