The Man Who Would Be King
It's Freya's day . . . more poetry blowing into the mailbox watched by a strange looking rabbit with very long ears . .
Spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,
shoulders and all the rest. It could float, of course,
but would rather plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs the metaphor of the body.
– Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986
While dodging raindrops this stormy morning I found several dates I missed yesterday. . . .
Ted Kooser turned 85 yesterday. The poet laureate was born in 1939 Ames, Iowa.
The author of over 10,000 “Uncle Wiggily” stories, Howard R. Garis, was also born 151 years ago yesterday on this date in 1873 Binghamton, New York. Uncle Wiggily was a regular visitor to the nighttime bed-before-sleep, read by my father to my brother and I in our shared bedroom.
The "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald, was born in 1917 Newport News, Virginia, 107 years ago yesterday.
Yesterday in 1959, one of the largest civil engineering feats ever undertaken, the St. Lawrence Seaway officially opened. It links the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.
417 years ago today, the first permanent English settlers in North America landed at Cape Henry, Chesapeake Bay in 1607.
“The framers [of our Constitution] did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during the immunity arguments yesterday.
Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
. . . Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
. . . strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
– Ted Kooser, "Abandoned Farmhouse" from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Zoland Books, 1980.