More Engman

A nice break in the weather today. Wish I'd been outside a bit more.
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We're shipping Randy's quilt tomorrow to the PA quilt show. It runs Sept 6-9 in Harrisburg.
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I should be in bed but LOTR: The Return of the King is on, and it's hard to walk away from it once heads get rolling.
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From John Engman's Temporary Help, two more poems of dark days that foreshadow our own:

Richard Nixon

Are you the President of pink flamingos and sad plastic flowers?
I remember you as a young man waving through a blizzard of television snow.
I remember you as an old man weeping real tears that fooled nobody.
I will do my best to remember you as a wise, china owl in a city garden.
Would you rather I remember you as a wise, china owl in a city garden
or as someone’s father selling pencils in the rain under a streetlamp?
Do you believe America will fall to pink flamingos and sad plastic flowers?
I believe I could have been elected President but nobody voted for me!
The young woman sitting beside me on the bus could have been an angel
of Michelangelo but half her face had been destroyed by a grenade.


Red Wine

Something in his voice tonight
is like joy as he describes

red noise and ribbons of white fire,
the beauty of the bombing of Iraq.

We are watching a late broadcast,
a new war on CBS, and my friend,

a woman with whom I have not slept,
admires the way the anchorman uses

his voice to confuse sex and death.
Showbiz, I tell her, is great stuff.

But she says no, the human touch.
He warms our insides like red wine,

as if he rushed to the studio to say
folks are dying, the sky is falling,

just for us. We believe he is kind.
We believe he has never been kissed.

Drinking the koolade

Drove up to Lycoming this afternoon to run some last-minute errands (parking sticker, voicemaul setup, class rosters) before donning regalia to take part in my first-ever convocation. I don't know why I never did this at Bucknell. I didn't go to my own graduation at Houston (but the Vermont ceremony was great). Anyway, a nice 45 minutes outside on a slightly breezy but otherwise muggy August afternoon. The faculty, staff and administration walked double-file over to the quad, then stepped to the side to line a pathway, through which the first-year students passed while we applauded. It seemed all so delightfully pagan. In the tent after the ceremony, I bypassed the trays of appetizing morsels and dove straight for the iced barrel of bottled water.

On the way home, I saw the Goodyear blimp make a steep nosedive across the freeway and disappear behind some trees. I think it's here for the Little League World Series, though I heard on the radio that there were no games scheduled for today.

Classes start on Monday. I'm about as ready as I'll ever be.
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Here's a poem from John Engman's Temporary Help:

The Window in the Cow

You are a child with much to learn,
my professor said, when I compared
windows in cows to Nazi experiments.
The worst-case scenario for cows is veal,
he said, brief lives in small, dark stalls.
And didn’t I eat steak? Someday I would be
dead, he said, of what might be diseases
cured by such cows. So I changed my thesis

and learned a first lesson in rhetoric:
try to think before you feel what you see.
From my dormitory room, I could see the cow
grazing pampered grasses, strolling her acre
of the University behind a chainlink fence,
scolding those who came to see her bowels,
and the four stomachs, with a woeful moo.
Like an Old Faithful or Mount Rushmore,

backdrops for photographs of children,
she was exotica for the family album.
And if she came close, mothers and fathers
could study her puzzling intestines through
glass held by rivets to her torso, encourage
the children, with oohs and ahhs, to step up
and rub her soft ears, the children amazed
that such a cow was willing to be touched.