Dream

A curious dream. It is so trivial that I could easily let it pass without writing anything, but there were two aspects to it that serve like hooks biting into my brain. First, Sugar and Pablo Bastard are in it. We don’t seem to be buddy-buddies. Sugar and I don’t even say anything to each other. I come into the kitchen and we just stare at each other for a bit. She is cooking, and I leave her to it. As for Pablo Bastard, it looks like he was trying to get me into serious trouble, the go-to-jail kind of trouble. He was in the military reserves, and he almost talked me into taking his place one weekend. I agreed at first, but then I catch up to him - after passing Sugar in the kitchen - and tell him that is felony fraud. He just sort of chuckles, like “yup, I know!” The second aspect is just a matter of emphasis: the community aspect to the dream. We may not be the warmest pals, but it is like I am a part of adult circle of chums. You know, it’s like I am not living with my dad, but I am out in the world like an independent adult. We could even be a TV show. I’m not even sure how to think about the dream. I’m glad to have it, but I cannot read anything clear from it.

Pop and Kay

Kay has come over. Seeing how it is only Monday, I am praying that it is not to stay until Sunday. After all, he just left her yesterday. It is hard to think that their affections are only continuing to accelerate, but maybe that is the case. Pop takes out his cowboy hat to go out on the rounds with her, and she is girlishly cooing over him, like a fourteen-year-old cheerleader cooing over the school quarterback.

Understanding Robert Frost (Part 2)

Mr. Kirsch addresses Frost's traditional poetry, how it stands in contrast to the more literal and less-rhyming poetry of the contemporary period, as represented, for example, by Robert Lowell. Kirsch quotes Lowell's line, capturing the modus operandi of much of today's poetry: “Yet why not say what happened?” For Frost it is through the mythic-seeming of metaphor and song that poetry finds its highest art form.

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“We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.” And he goes even further, suggesting that “metaphor [is] the whole of thinking.” What philosophy and poetry have in common, Frost writes, is “the attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity.”

-- Adam Kirsch at Harvard Magazine

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We also have Frost's poem that is on point, titled "The Aim Was Song":

Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn’t found the place to blow;
It blew too hard—the aim was song.
And listen—how it ought to go!

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be—
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song—the wind could see.

Coco

I thought Pop and Kay were at the kitchen table well engaged in their dinner, so that it was a good time for me to take care of that business of transferring the cats from the big room to the office. I started with Coco, and my timing could not have been worse. Kay had not been at the table, but was only just now walking down the hall to the kitchen. Coco started crying up a storm and struggling fiercely in my hands. I let her drop before she could bloody me up. It disappoints me, after these years of care and love, Coco does not trust my handling and will behave almost as badly as a feral cat. At least I wasn’t injured, no standing at the sink running water over a wound.