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Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Gerard Van der Leun
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When she says she needs to take the day off for a “mental health day,” it’s not a joke. That’s real. I had a long conversation a couple of months ago with a very senior manager of a national insurance company who told me that all new hires have to start employment answering the phone as a customer-service rep. She said the Board even had required the new CEO hire to do that. For if they can’t cut it there, they don’t move on.
“Millennials,” she told me, “are almost immediately stressed out talking with customers. Normal customers, just calling for a clarification about something. When an irate customer calls, their heads explode. It’s not at all unusual for a new-hire Millennial to take a sick day to see a counselor after only three days on the job. The counselor then gives them a week or two of recuperation for mental wholeness. In the old days, they would have just quit or we would have fired them, but now we have to run short-staffed because they are on medical leave and the job must be held for them. Believe me, they know it, too, and are experts at gaming the system. I can’t wait to retire.”
Big Don,
Fortunate they are not equipped with similar training and experience then dropped into a combat zone.
Whew! That is an eye-opener.
I am on your premises, and you are an employer, therefore I have a job and you bear responsibility for my every well being. I guess that’s what she was thinking. If you can call that *thinking*.
About 15 years ago, the neurotic hypochondriac daughter in law had just been dumped by a call center run by an insurance company. She had too many absences. She was complaining on social media about how (the company) needed to understand that some staff have issues that need to be accomodated, and blah, blah, blah, etc. Everyone else I knew, to whom I showed the whine, thought she was nuts and in need of a reality check: companies don’t have to do that.
Now I see she was just ahead of her time.
And Casey, that’s a parody, but just barely. I was having lunch with some early 20-somethings. We talked about their college efforts. I said, “When I was your age, one could go to a state school, and work part time during the school year, and full time in the summer, and graduate owing nothing at all. But you have a Vice-president for Diversity and a climbing wall. I hope you used the wall.” I also took the blame, saying people my age allowed college costs to explode and didn’t stop it.
Later, one of those in the audience told me privately that she was greatly offended by my bringing politics into the discussion. I looked at her like she was nuts, because I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. She was clearly trouble, and I kept my distance and arranged for her not to be on my teams in the future.
Welding, man. I need to get me some welding skills. That should carry me till death, and I don’t have to put up with millennials.