Monday, March 21, 2022

Twenty-Nine



We laughed yesterday at the stories from L and my dinner the night before at the brother-in-law and wife's house, they didn't believe L when she told them C just as if not more whack than me re: what they think *I'm* whack about, laugh





THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.


2 comments:

  1. someone likely to be a planetary inhabitant for perhaps several more decades - not just a one or two, which is the situation facing spouse and self - might be encouraged at the chance for an inflection point in anthropogenic global warming described in bill mckibben's latest essay in the new yorker



    In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

    The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels.




    https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's passing like wipers in the rain. Best wishes for your Planet until the odometer turns and presents a new opportunity this time next.

    ReplyDelete