Perfectly Wabi Sabi

The Satyr has filled this morning's mailbox with notices of writers' births:

Rachel Carson was born in 1907 Springdale, Pennsylvania. She gave us The Sea Around Us, and Silent Spring .

It's Linda Pastan's birthday. The poet was in the Bronx, of 1932 New York City. She died this past January after 91 years and managing to publish some of the best American poetry of the late 20th Century.

Novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was born on this day in 1912 Quincy, Massachusetts.

And, its the 129th anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's birth. The author of The Maltese Falcon was born on the eastern shore of Maryland on this day in 1894.

The Myth of Perfectability

. . . I sit here at the typewriter,
putting in a comma to slow down
a long sentence, then taking it out,
then putting it back again
until I feel like a happy Sisyphus,
or like a good farmer who knows
that the body's work is never done,
for the motions of plowing and planting continue
season after season, even in his sleep.
– Linda Pastan, in Poetry (December 1989)