Poetry Wednesday, Vol. 97

I don't even know who I am anymore.  I'm typing this on my new-as-of-a-couple-months-ago mac.  When I finish this post, I'll go to bed and read a big, heavy book in bed.  Only it won't be so very big or very heavy, because I will be reading it on a Kindle.  On our Wisconsin Dells trip there was a company dinner and they raffle off odd prizes, and the odd prize we won was a Kindle.  A Kindle!  This family that devours books, folding back the covers, writing in the margins, dog ear-ing the pages, now owns a Kindle.

And I love it.

We do quite a few home school lessons with the Kindle, I check out library books, and well that's it so far, but boy do we like it.  I also have a fancy phone, the kind that gets email and internet.  No, not an iPhone (just tried to spell that with a capital I, shows exactly how tech savvy I am), but fancy enough.

There was a time not too long ago when we had none of these gadgets.  In fact we took great pride, some might even say we reveled in our gadget-less existence.  Luddites?  Yes, us.  Now we are different people. Some days it is difficult to pry my nose out of my many gadgets.  Some days it is difficult to look up and see the lovely golden color cast over our back yard by the neighbor's tree.  I look out front and wonder when the mums began to flower, and didn't we just have tomatoes planted there?

Last night I was attempting to find some pictures of a baby Josie for Mom and had to wonder, wasn't she that little just yesterday?  When did her cheeks lose their chub?

Then I remember that it is actually 2011.  Not two years ago, three, even four.  It is now.  Put down the gadget.  Look at them now.  Those cheeks are still chubbly.  I just have to look.

FALL SONG

Mary Oliver

Another year gone, leaving everywhere

its rich spiced residues:  vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply

in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island

of this summer, this Now, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering 

in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds

and the wanderings of water.  This

I try to remember when time's measure 

painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing

to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever

in these momentary pastures.