Month: September 2007

Who Says You Can Never Go Home Again?

I’m home after a long, eventful week in Colorado. I got to see Sydney go from starting to walk to virtually sprinting across the room, I got to see two of Logan’s soccer “games,” and, best of all, I got to go on two memorable hikes with people I love.

Boy, am I glad to be home. For someone who claims to have no “routine,” I’m glad to get back to mine. This morning I finally finished deleting nearly 500 spam emails. (Apparently someone used my email address to spam the world, and I got all the rejection notices.) I’m looking forward to doing something a little more productive later in the day.

Skye and I just finished our morning walk, splashing along in the rain that awaited me when I landed last night. Normally I might complain, but it seemed like an appropriate welcome after trying hard not to become dehydrated in Colorado, and not always succeeding.

I have an 11 o’clock appointment with my doctor to see if if ended up with bronchitis from the cold I got in Colorado. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but when I really exert myself, like the last quarter mile on Saturday’s hike at the top of the Rockies, I’m wracked with coughing.

Sometime today I’ll restart my two-a-day, breathing exercises and tonight I’ll start back on learning the Tai Chi form we’ve been working on since January.

It somehow seemed appropriate that there was a new poetry book that was back ordered a long time ago waiting at the door when I got home last night.

Denver Zoo

Jen and the kids took me to the Denver Zoo again, today. I suspect from the screams of delight that this baby giraffe might have been the hit of the zoo, and it was certainly cute:

BabyGiraffe

For me, though, the highlight of the zoo continues to be their remarkable collection of birds. Though I suspect it’s been around for awhile, this is the first time I’ve noticed this Secretary Bird, one I might not have even noticed if it hadn’t appeared on the cover of one of Shelley Power’s books:

Secretary Bird

Though I think my favorite bird continues to be this East African Crowned Crane:

East African Crowned Crane

Alan Dugan’s Poems Seven

I still remember vividly the fist time I read a book of poems by Alan Dugan. It was the first quarter my senior year, and the class had to review a book that hadn’t been covered in class. I chose Alan Dugan’s Poems 2, probably because it had won either the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry that year.

When I got my paper back one comment stood out, “Do you think this is poetry?” Well, duh. Ya think? After all it had been chosen as the best book of poetry that year by people who knew a hell of a lot more about poetry than I did as a senior in college. Besides, I really liked a number of the poems. In fact, I immediately remembered them rereading them all these years later.

It was the only “C” paper I got my senior year, and what I’d failed to realize until later was that Dugan had beat out my instructor for that award that year. Never underestimate the ego of a poet! Strangely enough, grades meant so little to me then that the instructor has remained one of my favorite poets ever since I had him for a class my freshman year in college.

One of my favorite poems from Dugan’s first book of poetry is this one:

Poem

The person who can do
accounts receivable as fast
as steel machines and out-
talk telephones, has wiped
her business lipstick off,
undone her girdle and belts,
and stepped down sighing from
the black quoins of her heels
to be the quiet smiler with
changed eyes. After long-
haired women have unwired
their pencil-pierced buns, it’s an
event with pennants when
the Great Falls of emotion say
that beauty is in residence,
grand in her hotel of flesh,
and Venus of the marriage manual,
haloed by a diaphragm,
steps from the shell Mercenairia
to her constitutional majesty
in the red world of love.

I’m not sure whether I liked this so much as a twenty-one year old college senior because I was horny or simply because I admired the understated title. The fact that I still like it suggests, though, that I think there’s an important truth behind it, one that it’s easy to overlook on in our daily encounters judging people by the demands of their jobs.

Of course, it’s Love that helps us to transcend our daily selves. Without it, we’re all in danger of becoming mere appendages of our jobs, as cold and efficient as our jobs too often demand.

Rocky Mountain National Park

If I stay healthy long enough, I should manage to see most of Rocky Mountain National Park. I’ve been there several times now, and each time is a new adventure. This time the elk herds had descended down into the accessible areas, and we encountered several Elk Jams, most due to tourists stopping in the middle of the road or on both sides to catch sight of the elk herds.

I’m not sure what would possess someone like this photographer to get between a dominant bull and these two interlopers, but whatever it is it hasn’t possessed me yet:

Photographer with Elk

I was more than content to keep my distance and use my 400mm lens and some cropping to get this picture of the dominant male:

Bull Elk

Actually, I was thrilled when this Blue Jay suddenly flew down while we were walking up the trail to Emerald Lake.

Blue Jay With Pinenut

Heck, I would have been more than happy just to look at the ancient, gnarled trees that have managed to survive at this level

Gnarled Tree

or just to look at rocky mountains being eroded by rushing water.

Looking Up Valley