Drinking beer with Calliope . . .
It's Odin's day. Here in TulseyTown, We are enjoying the last of a couple of mild days ahead of a revisit by the heat hammer starting tomorrow and extending for at least the next ten days. Totally dry, except for the dew. The mailbox held a reminder of the birthday of one of my fave poets, so today's blog is dedicated to Calliope.
Charles Bukowski was born on this day in Andernach, Germany (1920). Check him out.
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.
My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.
We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.
Dogs and angels are not very far apart. – randomly seleted lines from Charles Bukowski. For more, go here:
Bukowski on writing poetry:
. . . unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it. . .
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
Jim Harrison and Bukowski never met one another, as far as I know, but I suspect they, like Mary Oliver often spent time with the same muse:
I see today that everyone on earth
wants the answer to the same question
but none has the language to ask it. . .
Dogs know the answer
by never asking the question
but can't advise us. – Jim Harrison, “A Puzzle,” Essential Poems, Copper Canyon. 2019.
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/jim-harrison-the-essential-poems-by-jim-harrison-joseph-bednarik-ed/
From “First Snow”
. . . though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain – not a single answer
has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees
and through the fields
feels like one. – Mary Oliver, “First Snow,” American Primative, Little Brown. 1983