bill:

along
with photographing walls
thinkin’ of margaret bourke white & irving penn
images
just back from
wandering into and out of
new york city rush hour traffic
wondering if i could get from the shower
to the front door without
needing another shower
for 9 days

going to new jersey
summer camp reunion
sticking my finger down the throat of time
emitting
from
1955 1960 1966
55 50 44 year old

thoughts feelings memories—

here are a number of thoughts i’ve been working on over the past year
some of which i’ve already sent out…

from the internet search engine looking for the poem

with the words:

I have only what I remember

and wanting to use as a metaphor the lines:

and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it:

i discovered: http://hobbesdutt.com/blog/reviews/nomad-flute-the-poetry-of-w-s-merwin/

One afternoon, when grief still hurt but not like bright sunlight,

when parenting was just a synonym for exhaustion,

a voice came out of the radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103317326

An older voice,

a voice that felt like it had known grief and beauty, love and loss.

The voice said:

Almost to your birthday and as I
am getting dressed alone in the house
a button comes off and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it
and at last have sewed the button on
I open an old picture of you
who always did such things by magic
one photograph found after you died
of you at twenty
beautiful in a way
I would never see
for that was nine years
before I was born
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember

–w,s. merwin

from

The Shadow of Sirius 2009

thoughts inspired by W.S. Merwin

“I have only what I remember”

just suppose

we juxtapose

past and present

words and images

wound and balm

sight sound and scent

past summer places

with visions of idyllic childhoods

hope and reality

so

how big would the

eye

have to be

to thread that needle

to mend the present

all

i

have is what

i

remember

with an

eye

to see it

–bill august 2010

Margaret Bourke White–Louisville KY flood victims seeking relief under a bill board

Milk Man Iriving Penn

wall art
&
reality
&
the radio

don’t know
where or when
but
always tellin’
us
something…..

portions taken from a 2001 vermont public radio commentary…..with Aging Well as the theme….

….I traveled to Germany with an elderly Jewish woman. She was born in Germany in 1933, but her family fled
the country four years later. She had never returned. She never wanted to. The memories were too painful. But she finally decided this year that she needed to reconnect with this part of her life.

Such a journey can be a wrenching experience. And for my friend, parts were. But I think it was vitally important for her to take this trip. Doing so was a piece, I believe, of what some have come to call “aging well.”….

“When we are old,” Vaillant says, “our lives become the sum of all whom we have loved.
It is important not to waste anyone. One task of living out the last half of life is excavating and recovering all of those whom we loved in the first half. Thus, the recovery of lost loves becomes an important way in which
past affects the present.”

the radio reviewer makes this jump:
“I wonder if what Vaillant describes as a love for people can be extended to a love or connection with place–
that strong relationship that we sometimes have, for example, with the place where we’re born and grow up.
The Germans have a special word for this–
“HEIMAT”
in a ways not clearly understood,
but felt deeply.

Indeed, I think it was this thread that pulled my elderly friend back to Germany this year. She had to
recover a piece of her growing up that had become lost–despite some very painful memories.

*****
“HEIMAT” is a part of your heart till the end of your time on earth…..

the commentary ends:

If this is so, one can never hope to age successfully without reconnecting with this important part of
one’s life–no matter how distant and how difficult the memories may be……

from the sunday book review new york times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Bailey-t.html

Mad to Talk
By BLAKE BAILEY
Published: August 6, 2010
“Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are,” Jack Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950. “God’s angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunch cart, and God — their faces! I wondered what God was up to.” God’s purpose would remain opaque to Kerouac — try as he might to impart some glimpse of it in his work — and a dec ade later he was pretty much a burnt-out case. Poring over his old correspondence with Ginsberg and others in 1961, he sadly wondered at “the enthusiasms of younger men.” “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry,” he wrote

I did a somersault
As I seen him get his gun

As he started to load
The sun was comin’ up
And I was runnin’ down the road

****

Me, I romp and stomp
Thankful as I romp
Without freedom of speech
I might be in the swamp

–Motorpsycho Nightmare
bob dylan
on
Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964)

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, original dustjacket

KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. New York: The Viking
Press, 1957. Octavo. Original black cloth with
original dust-jacket. $8000.

First edition.

A fine copy in a superb unrestored dustjacket with only minute wear to corners and folds.

Seldom seen in this condition.

So it went in those sad final years. The last exchange of letters in the present volume is from 1963; five years later Kerouac would appear on “Firing Line,” William F. Buckley Jr.’s television program, bloated and drunk, knocking hippies and explaining the war in Asia as a Vietnamese “plot to get Jeeps into their country.” One year later, at the age of 47, he was dead of cirrhosis. Ginsberg, meanwhile, became a beloved and quite benign public figure, paying tribute to his friend’s memory by helping to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo. A place for those who “burn, burn, burn” with literary vocation just might have pleased Kerouac, whose favorite review of “On the Road” concluded with the words
“O I wish I was young again.”
That, more than anything, may have been what it was all about.

hard to know
what anything
means
these
days

back in vermont

bill (art work and attached photographs missing)