little update and a poem

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Whew!  On Saturday after several delightful hours of preparing with Jordan VanHemert the sax guy for Friday’s gig, I decided I felt fatigued and lay down on the couch with the idea I would get up in an hour or two and bake pies for my Dad’s 80th birthday.

I was down for most of the next 48 hours. I suffered from body aches and diarrhea (aint blogging great? just what you need to know about  my day….. ). I managed to drag myself to church duties on Sunday, But Eileen and brother Mark had to take over the Dad festivities. Eileen picked up a couple pies at Meijers on Sunday morning and everything went fine, I guess.

Fortunately, this morning my aches and tummy problems seem to have gone away. I am sort of weak in a usual post-virus/flu thingo state. But I think if I pace myself I will do well over the next five days. That would get me through the upcoming gig on Friday. Plus several other rehearsals… I actually have daily rehearsals scheduled between now and the gig. It’s for three different projects/responsibilities: the high school music pit orchestra I assist, a reh for Friday and thursday’s regular choir rehearsal.

When I outlined all this for my brother Mark he sarcastically commented that it must be great to be part-time. Besides my own overfunctiong he  was thinking of his own upcoming schedule that he will have to balance between part-time adjunct professor and part-time priest (His priest gig starts Apr 1).

So even though I have been sick, I have been reading and thinking as usual. Here’s a poem that caught my attention:

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF WORDS           

This is how they die,
the old words:
like snowflakes which,
after hesitating in the air,
fall to the ground
without so much as a sigh,
Or should I say: with a word.
Where are they now
the one hundred ways of saying butterfly?
On the Biarritz  coast
Nabako collected one:
miresicoletea.
Look, it lies under the sand,  

like a splinter of shell.
And the lips that moved
and said precisely that–
miresicoletea—
the lips of those children
who were the parents
of our parents,
those lips now sleep.
You say: One rainy day
when I was walking 
along a road in Greece,
I noticed that the guides to a temple
were wearing yellow raincoats
with a big Mickey Mouse on them.
The old gods also sleep.
New words, you say,
are made of such commonplace materials.
And you mention plastic, polyurethane,
synthetic rubber, and declare
that soon they’ll all end up
in the rubbish bin.
You seem a little sad. 
But look at the children
shouting and playing
by the front door,
listen carefully to what they’re saying:
The horse rode off to Garatare.
What’s Garatare, I ask them.
It’s a new word, they say.
You see, words don’t always emerge
out of remote industrial estates;
they’re not necessarily the products
of advertising agencies.
Sometimes they are born out of laughter
and float like dandelion clocks in the air.
Look how they rise into the sky,
look how it’s snowing up there.
(N.B. This poem is at the front of Bernardo Atxaga’s novel, “The Accordionist’s Son.”)

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