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Cancel the Cab - I'll give you a lift. The Critical United States Citizen Soldier Returning Tomorrow poetry as events: truth or fiction? If I Could Sleep Until December 15th, I Would Friends Like No Kind of Restaurant in Town November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09
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A Maid Before Tapestry
Gregory Clemens
In her sunlit morning room, she reads
again each word on perfect lips too young
to know a sweetheart’s kiss, her only letter from the man.
His words that found her on an afternoon
a full moon ago, she knows
His words in double hearts that long for his return from the tapestry of Earth,
behind her on the wall
in borders, rivers, mountains, oceans moving,
re-forming like the clouds above her,
She sees the face of God and knows her man lives somewhere in this panel of the World;
He’ll find this room again like the letter did, like the
brass nails and leather of her chairs, the pearls upon her desk –Yes
He’ll come to her again as sure as the ornamental iron that holds the World in Place.
“A Maid Before Tapestry” was written in response to a print of Vermeer’s painting, Woman In Blue, (Reading a Letter). The original painting is exhibited in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
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Tonight, southbound on I-5, passing Lyons, I did not believe what I saw. I thought it was a gag, like the "bullet hole" you see on the back of a SuV.
It was a real boxer dog with a leash around its neck, attached to and chasing this elevated truck at 70 MPH in the #1 lane.
This morning I talked to my wife, checked my bank balance, looked to see if anyone had read or commented on my blog and then, looked at what my Bakersfield.com friends were doing, writing, thinking. Hmmmm.....'Don't have many Friends. So, I decided to Work on That. I probably need Some. I'm that kind of friend. (I Size everything I write about this big so I can read it myself.) Norman Mailer's passing was reported today. I met the writer in a restaurant around the corner of the Promenade Theatre Off Broadway in the west 70's of NYC when he came in and took a seat at our table. He talked with Geraldine Paige and Sam Shepard. Somebody told him that I played the character Jerry Rubin in The Chicago Conspiracy Trial in LA and Chicago. He didn't give a rat's ass. He knew Ginsburg and Kunstler and Kerouac; he'd covered the 1969 Chicago convention, walked the park in the teargas, seen the bloody attempts of Daley's troops to kill dissent. I am now the age he was then and my greatest memory of the man that night was: jeez, this old guy could kick my butt. Executioner's Song was a popular "read" at the time. He wouldn't talk about his next novel, the one that took him 11 years to write, the one the bookstores returned to his publisher with the covers torn off. Imagine his rage and sorrow seeing the faces of his children mutilated that way, if you can, Bakersfield. |