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Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 7, 2012 - 01:27pm PT
Parable

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper,
with these words: "Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island.
I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!"

"There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway.
It could have been floating for years," the first fisherman said.

"And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean," the second fisherman said.

"It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere," the third fisherman said.

They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.


~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)
Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 7, 2012 - 02:42pm PT
Love that eKat! Economy that speaks giant volumes. TPFU!

Eric
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 7, 2012 - 04:13pm PT
Holidays Among the Rocks


Our last visitor fled two weeks ago.
Then the rocks began to fall....
Hear the larger masses journeying down.
Then that reeky storm-tissue disappears.
I'll eat Royal Arches, salted with Bachelor's Tears.
I'll choose Riverbank Meadow.
And some purple granite for me.
It was a tranquil day in Yosemite.
--Reverntly lifted off of JMuir, Winter in Yosemite, Yosemite in Winter

http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_writings/yosemite_in_winter.html

"That giant speaks volumes," retorted MFM.
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 7, 2012 - 04:45pm PT
Love that eKat!
Economy speaks
Giant Volumes.
T P F U.--Fletcher
Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 7, 2012 - 06:13pm PT
You guys are making my beautiful warm afternoon even better.

Warm days and cool nights here in the San Gabriels... the wheel is turning (did it ever stop?).

Bring on that Muir guy... I think we may have shared a tree back in another life.

Eric
Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 8, 2012 - 01:46am PT
Cross posted from Neebee's "THE ROBIN SHED..." thread...

The Messenger:

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird-equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

~ Mary Oliver ~
Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 8, 2012 - 04:06pm PT
eKat of the North

Mouse plumbing the depths of mind

Both please the Fletcher
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 8, 2012 - 06:42pm PT
Ah to be alive
On a mid-September morn...
Barefoot, pants rolled up.--Mtnmun
Mtnmun

Trad climber
Top of the Mountain Mun
Topic Author's Reply - Oct 8, 2012 - 08:01pm PT
Thanks for the Julia Parker Vidio MFM. I do not believe I wrote that poem above, but here is a painting I did of Julia Parker after she touched my heart a few years back.




mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 8, 2012 - 08:13pm PT
Begin video first...

The Meat Eater Diaries

I have never heard it said that we are getting to the vegetable course of a discussion
Nor never has someone ever said to me, "Ah, here's the Conversation Starter Soup."

We may scream for ice cream, but we all lean towards nice fatty, crisp bacon.
Even on our baked potatoes. Especially in our BLTs. What's a BLT without Bacos? Still a BLT.

I should start thinking about the meat of this discussion.
Should we begin with Lamb? Beef? Pork? Rattlesnake? Turkey?

Rodger's steer? Baloney Butt? I can't thank you enough.
I will thank Rodger and God, for it is mete, always and everywhere to give shanks for the glory that is marbled with fat.

I can't help it but I like big butts. Pork butts. Archery butts.
Fletcher, the target of many, the butt of the joke, but one of the funniest guys you'd ever want to meet.

Let there be potatoes as well. And the wine of your choosing.
Vintage photos. Really old. Like days of yessteryore. Jerked thoughts on paper.

And just to be shore,
A small salad of haiku
Served up on a wish.

A non-rhyming oddball
A vegetarian answer
For those who like fish.

It's not just the meat
In the ocean. It's the meat
That's the ocean's motion.

I move for more meat.
I move when my bowels say.
Drink Adam's ale today.

Haiku is much harder
Than you might think. It is not
Just count, then the ink.

But not all that hard.
At least it demands not rhyme.
At best a little time.

Getting to the heart of the matter I sense I have come to a fence.

I'd better jump over
And land in some clover.
I feel I have put in two cents.

How Wild Buffalo Got Wings

Father killed buffalo for the hides and meat to support himself and family. I have seen the hillsides, slopes, and flats black with herds of buffalo for days at a time. When the buffalo hunters would shoot at the herds you would hear a roaring noise like a big storm coming. The earth would almost quiver like an earthquake from their running. I saw Father shoot, before breakfast, as many as he could skin all day. We could see the smoke of his gun from the house every time he would shoot.

In the early days when we first moved there, the buffalo were quite numerous. We could see them every day--big bunches of them going by. they were our mainstay.

[Click to View YouTube Video]

We didn't eat only the choice part of the buffalo, what we called the hump. They call it loin steak now, I believe, if it's cut from a beef. It was quite a large steak which lay along the side of the high hump on the buffalo's back. . . . When we needed meat and Father was out killing buffalo, he'd bring in some of the hump.

Father used to take the buffalo tongues when he was killing them for the hides. Mother would pickle a fifty gollon barrel of buffalo tongues every fall; so we enjoyed buffalo tongues during the winter. They were black, blacker really than a Jersey cow's tongue, but they surely were good eating.

In pickling buffalo tongues, Mother always boiled them in water and then made a preparation of vinegar and salt and other things and poured it over them until they were all covered. When we wanted to use them, we'd take them out of the barrel and wash them thoroughly. then you could warm them or eat them cold...

In the summertime, when we couldn't keep steak very long, we'd eat jerky. They'd cut the steak in strips and hang it up in the attic of our log house, salt it well, and let it dry. That's what we ate for lunch lots of times, we kids especially.

[My grandfather preferred to jerk the neck meat of bears he shot; peppered heavily, it is like the biscotti of the meat world. Others prefer to jerk chicken necks, and various recipes are found. It seems to take women a lot of experimentation, but men seem to have a more instinctual grasp of how to properly jerk chicken neck. Buffalo Wild Wings, anyone?]

[Everyone wore home-made buvvalo Adidas.]

In still-hunting of buffalo, they had lots of running to do because they hunted on foot altogether. They'd see a group of buffalo coming and they had to be pretty speedy to get in the lead of them and lie down in a buffalo wallow or in a hole somewhere to be in shooting distance of them when they came along. With those black-powder guns they couldn't kill one more than about a hundred or a hundred fifty yards away.

Few people ever ran buffalo on horses and that was Bill Cody and a few others, but in horse-hunting they drifted them around so much, they'd run them off the hunting grounds and the hunters would have to move. If they hunted them on foot, they would't stampede so many of them, so they would leave the range.

[Everyone had light-weight camping equipment.]

In 1874, when Mother was making some bedclothes after she was able to get some other goods, she wanted some filling for a quilt because she could get no cotton or wool. Father used to take the long hair off the buffalo and bring it in. Mother padded the quilts with it. She would wash it thouroughly, get it all clean and nice and straighten it out with the cards as she used to card the wool, and get it into shape together just like a pad of cotton for a quilt. She'd put it in the quilt and then quilt it (sew it through back and forth) to hold the padding in place.

When I left the plains country to come to California, I had an old quilt in my camp bed that I'd carried for years and years. It had been re-covered and re-covered. It was padded with buffalo hair. I told my wife I wasn't going to leave that buffalo hair, so I took the covering off and put the hair in a sack. I had a burlap sack alomost full of it. It was just as nice and soft at that time as it was when it was taken off the animal. I brought it to California and kept it until our house burned down out west of Modesto about three miles away.

[Our first climbing rope was plaited buffalo hide strips.]

Being a plains rat, I knew nothing of the Rocky Mountains except they each had a summit. There were also rumored to be as many as the buffalo. I decided to see for myself. I knew only that I might need a rope and warm hat and the quilt padded with buffalo hair. I never thought about what I would do with the rope. There was nobody to hold it for me, nobody to tie it to, and mainly there were no mountains yet. I still had to get there. I wasn't going to leave that buffalo hair, so I took the thing along stuffed in a sack over my shoulder, put some fresh bananas in with it, and set off down the road. I got to the Rocky Mountains, but the bananas had gotten squashed the first afternoon when I sat on the sack I was lugging.

I was picked up by a gentle soul named Beckey, driving a dilapidated Studebaker wagon. I showed him my rope when he told me he was heading west toward the desert towers of the Carson Sink which he'd heard tell were numerous, virgin, and easy. Who could resist?

[More installments at a much later date.]

Edit://www.bsblog.com/09/10/2011/grief.html

Mtnmun--
Ah, young grasshopper,
you are the author Haiku.
Done by you. It's true.

See ya to da O.P., eh?






Fletcher

Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
Oct 9, 2012 - 01:23am PT
You guys got me going now... more baby steps came to me at one kid's football (that's soccer for you 'mericans) practice this evening:

Lying on the earth
Flat on back upwards to sky
Both grounded, far-flung

Eric
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 9, 2012 - 11:08am PT
For All We Sing of Snow
Jack Rosenblum

http://vimeo.com/10165779

For All I Know I Blow

For all I know I blow. Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
So I'll just jam with this dude, slow. Plinky plink, plinky plink

Where I'm at since you've been gone.
Typos all over the place.
Double space in your face.
Backspace backspace backspace
period period epic period GF's pregnant.

Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
Plinky plink, plinky plink

Verbs and nouns in my hand,
A big old smile on my face.
And when we come to read it
A lone spark breaks through.

Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
Plinky plink, plinky plink
--A Beefheart acolyte, apparently



Telephoto Mountain Messages

It's all about the hills,
Ecstasy in vertical.
Nothing finity.

Dancing on the peaks
Of the summits of the top
Of the world. Early. Often.

In ranks they fall away
Foreground, middle distance, far
Himalayan peaks

The years too drop away
Layers and layers of age
Ledges like ledgers

mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 9, 2012 - 11:24am PT
Telly marking snow--
Snow better thing I know--
Always makes my day
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 9, 2012 - 11:26am PT
panny cakes syrup
butter scrambled eggs coffee
and a ton of snow
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 9, 2012 - 11:29am PT
wishes were horses
ghosts roamed my pockets
you remained as my friend

Jack Rosenblum's pretty cathartic listening.
He's a weird Dylanesque 'snew-age don't wannabe...but he is, fortunately.

"I can't decide what to shoot at.
Or choke. Is this some kind of joke.
I feel like a house detective who has lost his shopping bag.
I look like one too."


Jokers and thieves hang
Together, talking tacos
E-veh-ry dang day.
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 9, 2012 - 12:12pm PT
Soccer makes dads cry.
In spite, the kids laugh harder.
Don't you just love it?
BLUEBLOCR

Social climber
joshua tree
Oct 9, 2012 - 12:19pm PT

Oct 8, 2012 - 03:51pm PT
My Reality.

My reality is willy-nilly.
Having resonance with my creator.
I am in tune with the waves of control.
Feeling the rock is solid as my tooth.
My body is contoured to be a sacrifice for gain.
My mind is a flutter with the prescribed pain.
My spirit rockets on the hopes of the proposal of fame.
But my ambitions could be quenched by the verdict of shame.
Whilst my heart is playing another game.
My soul warns me that we are all the same.
I give thanks to the Lord, on a job well done.
And ask for strength, to keep hang'in on.
As he wraps his arms, around me and sez
I Love U Son

Jus Ryhm'in
BB

Edit
neebee

Social climber
calif/texas
Oct 10, 2012 - 10:59pm PT
hey there say, flecher... say i saw the poem there, :)

love that robin! possibly, besides her and her mate, there just mayyy be another lone one that shows up later, not sure where her mate must be, though :O

well:
i enjoyed the poem, in both spots, as, it made me think of my mom...

she loves the greatoutdoors too, and worked in it... doing her
gardening things... is harder now, she is older--
like the old
clothes in this poem...
(and her sis, 79, that died fallling through the ice of her pond one year--well: her boots and clothes were old too--she worked hard in the greatoutdoors by walking through it, as she tended to it, and she loved these very things--she also had worked indoors, as oneof the main folks at the cleveland museum of natural history, since when it first started)...

thanks for sharing...
our true work IS to enjoy and to pass it onward...
money,though we DO need it, and must provide for our home of kids, after all, will NOT endure forever--but--love does, as we share it gleaning from our experiences and passing that love of life, onward...

gives a firm foundation of self esteem, for when the money times seems to
fail for a season...

:)


*oh--got the dreamcatcher email i just could not get the mail to work this eve, :( it DID work earlier, but i have to get off line now, so jjuust threw this in fast, :)
neebee

Social climber
calif/texas
Oct 10, 2012 - 11:01pm PT
hey there say, ekat! i can picture you there, :)
as to your quote:


Montana big sky

Streaming in my log cabin

Fall is glorious

:)
mouse from merced

Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
Oct 11, 2012 - 12:43am PT
Point of Punctuation

? :) = 2 (syllables)*?

Symbols, icons, ideas.

Scannning the literature there are two accepted symbols for the building blocks of poetry, the syllables. A poem is a sentence, therefore, I is a poem because I is a poem.

It's a different concept than I am a poem or I am poem.

My motive herein is to show the breakage of the word ":)" into two short syllables, ":" and ")".

This yields the possibility that neebee's statement is a devilishly-conceived poetical conceit that could only arise from the fertile ground of Texas. Or it may simply be my imagination.

I admit, the word ":))," which neebee frequently uses, seemingly at whim, (but one never knows) but always to great effect, [ (> ] might have convinced me it wasn't so.

I am just a hopeless romantic, I guess. Boy, howdy!

[Did I say that right?]

I, poet.


* There are no "breve" marks nor "macron" marks on this keyboard, hence "syllables" is a substitution, which is the best I could do...But there is no substitute for neebee, I must say.

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