A Luminous Halo

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." --Virginia Woolf

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Location: Springfield, Massachusetts, United States

Smith ’69, Purdue ’75. Anarchist; agnostic. Writer. Steward of the Pascal Emory house, an 1871 Second-Empire Victorian; of Sylvie, a 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SL; and of Taz, a purebred Cockador who sets the standard for her breed. Happy enough for the present in Massachusetts, but always looking East.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Heat

It's been around 100 degrees for the past couple of days, and humid, too. Thundershowers were supposed to come and break the heat, but never did. This is the kind of weather that kills people.

Amir is not coming out of his air-conditioned room, the ferret is snuggled up to a bag of ice cubes--and I'm in the loft, which is if anything hotter than outside, because the computer is here. Taz won't leave my side, even though downstairs is much cooler, and she's supposed to be Amir's dog in the first place. She'd rather lie on her side under the skylights, panting heavily, than relax in her master's cool and cushy pad. Go figure.

Here's a poem by H.D., appropriate for this season:

HEAT

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Duh? Who is H.D.?

10:12 PM  
Blogger Cicily Corbett said...

H. D. is Hilda Doolittle, one of the finest of the Imagist poets. Lover of Ezra Pound, friend of Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence...one of the expatriate crowd of 1920's Paris. She had beauty, talent, and the phenomenal luck to have been born when and where she was. But apparently she hated her name.

11:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I know you said something about mondegreens some time back, but I'm too lazy to go look for it, given the heat and all....

So I'll just drop a URL here, that lists some hysterical mis-heard Neil Diamond lines.

(I used to think that song invoked a pastor named Reverend Bluejeans, too. A far stranger last name than Doolittle.) Here's the site.

http://members.aol.com/litmanrs/revbluejeans.htm

11:04 AM  

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