big tree in australia

 

"Norman" by Mary Larson

This is a better picture of Norman. We have certainly enjoyed him.

Poetry Saturday--Czeslaw Milosz

AND YET THE BOOKS

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters.  So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imaging the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Berkeley, 1986

Nostalgia

I have been corresponding with old old friends, high school classmates.  One friend is on a quest with the "angle of death" down in South Texas.  He's been reading Don Miguel Ruis and Ekhart Tolle.  I don't have permission to post his adventures here but they reminded me of the Porcine Canticles by the poet David Lee from the early 80s so I sent him a couple of poetry books.  Another old classmate found me on Facebook and wrote me about his globe trotting adventures and the sad tale and his regrets of a failed marriage.

I've also heard the sad news of the illness and death of my junior high and high school algebra teacher, Bob Boatright.  I sent him flowers before he died and I'd just completed my PhD so I told him about it in the card.  Like my success is his success.  Who knows how much the teachers remember about old students?  I sure remember him.  He was scary strict and I never did my homework for that class (3 years worth) but managed to pass the quizzes. I think he took pity on my miserable life.  My life was hard in those days.  He'd say "Trigg, if you'd just do your homework...."   Somehow when I got to college I just "knew" algebra and did well in my math and science classes, so I must have learned something.  Here is a youtube of Bob in a fiddle medley.  If you watch long enough you can see him and his chubby cheeks as he fiddles.  I think I would have liked this guy if I'd known him in real life.  As it was, I just felt bad about not doing my homework for those years.

I've also heard from a college friend.  I don't know what has gotten into me but I've been looking my old self up and trying to remember who I was.  Most strange, I'm not that different now, if anything more myself.  And our class song, Freebird still applies.

Hurray for the Class of '76.   We were all that and more!

Nostalgia--HS class song--Freebird

Nurse Jackie

Let Me Help!

 This is Julie, the oldest of my rescued parrots. She is about 30 years old and was raised from an egg by my partner's brother when they were adolescents. Julie has lived with Demos, the parents, and has now come to live with us. She fell in love with me the moment we met. No one seems to know the source of the deep and immediate affection/attachment the African Greys sometimes exhibit. As you can see, Julie has climbed up on my computer to help me with blogging.

Norman is here!

Here is an initial photograph of Norman.  The photograph doesn't do him justice.   I'll get a better picture of him up later this week.  Watch a video about Mary Larson the artist here.  She's painted what I see when I work with my patients.

Rainer Maria Rilke -- Do not write love poems;

Paris, February 17, 1903 from Letters to a Young Poet

...avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace...describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some kind of beauty--describe all these with loving, quite, humble sincerity, and use to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses--would you not still then have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure house of memories? Try to raise the submerged sensations of that simple; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.

Coming Soon: A Mary Larson Painting!

I've been trying to get a Mary Larson painting for several years. She's always sold out! Today I was showing another artist friend/coworker her paintings and noticed that she had several up for sale, so I called immediately and asked to buy one of them. I got a call back within 1-2 hours from Mary Larson herself saying that the painting "Norman" was available. The price: 250 $5.00 Starbuck's cards. And worth every drop of all that coffee.

Mary Larson is a nurse employed at Seattle's Pioneer Health Clinic which treats many homeless people. Ms. Larson started painting portraits and selling them for donations of items needed for the homeless patients who come to the clinic.

I'm especially moved by these paintings because Larson is a nurse working at a clinic serving the homeless and many of my patients at the hospital are also patients at her clinic. I also love the eye for beauty she brings to each painting. Finally, she sells them for donations for concerns serving homeless patients. I was so excited that I was told I could get a painting that I wanted to leave work immediately and go get my starbuck's cards and figure out where I was going to hang the painting!

Inaugural Challenge

I've been thinking about the challenge to Elizabeth Alexander to write an inaugural poem for Obama. I am sure that she needs no help, but I think Obama deserves more than one poem.

I say, let's all write him one! Let's all give our poems the same title:

Inaugural, 2009

or something like that, and see what we come up with. According the NYTimes, Ms. Alexander has turned to W.H. Auden and Gwendolyn Brooks in order to write her "occasional" poem.

So how about it? How often do we get a chance to write inaugural poems like this!

My Heart!

 =

White Christmas!

I made it to work today but no thanks to my little bug which couldn't make it through the slurpy slush. Eugene next door helped me get the stuck little car to the side of the road. Then his friend Marvin gave me a ride to work. Marvin is a teacher's aide working with special needs kids in public schools. I couldn't get home after my work was done. None of the cabs were answering the phone, for real. I called my friend Mason to see if he could help me. He dropped everything and gave me a ride.

I've been very lucky.

Eyes are very itchy. I made a patient cry when she saw the bruises. I told her it was ok, I just had surgery. She cried and said it still made her sad.

Still Snowed In

I'm still snowed in here. I also had minor eye surgery yesterday to correct my overly droopy eyes. I was told not to strain my face. I've never heard of face straining but it doesn't sound good. Or does it? Does a smile or frown strain the face?

I've spent most of the day resting, setting up the new blog and icing my face which Eleni tells me looks like I was beaten. I was not! We couldn't get a cab to the surgery center due to the snow, so I called my new friend Mason to give us a ride.

I've been looking for poems again. I was looking for a youtube of Gwendolyn Brooks and found a 12 year old poet named Autumn Ashante' who knocked my socks off. I couldn't find a video that was of good enough quality so I'm sharing a reading by Elizabeth Alexander instead. Her claim to fame is that she has been selected to read a poem for the inauguration.

Xmas Eve Poetry-- Elizabeth Alexander

template tweaks

I've used a minibox 3 column template from James William at 2600.

I've created a header image using wordle and the draft/chapbook of poems I submitted to Centrum. My blogging seems to be weighted toward poetry. I'm not sure if the header is attractive or annoying! But it's a good symbol for how I remember my poem thoughts coming to me--words followed by rhythms, glued together with the emotion of whatever story was pressing at the time.

I've added a label cloud from phydeaux3. Changed center align to justify for now.

I've added a creative commons license, feeds for articles on Sherman Alexie and Walter Mosley, and a widget to let me share stuff from my google reader. I left behind my "fish tank" on the original triggXR but am looking for another pet.

hello world the new triggXR

This is a test post for a new blogger template I've been testing. I have been considering closing the cover on triggXR as I would a journal. When I used the paper journals they lasted about 3 months. I don't see any reason to start new blogs every 3 months but perhaps when I start new life episodes, such as in light of my recent graduation from doctoral studies.

I was devout about my journaling for many years until the dramatic and traumatic death of 3 close friends. I couldn't write without unbearable sadness so I put the journals away. In the meantime I went to graduate school where the internet and computer use exploded into my life. When I began to want to write in my journal again I was out of the habit of carrying the journal everywhere and had moved into my computer. I haven't been able to quite duplicate the free form journaling on my computer yet. The hardest thing to replace is the doodling that I did between ideas or while cogitating.

Anyway, I think I can work within this template with a few tweaks. It feels like a nice fresh pallette or new journal full of clean empty pages.

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