Trying to go to sleep but keep hearing in my head The Beatles

Though I know I'll never lose affection
for people and things that went before
You know I'll often stop and think about them
but in my life, I love you more

Maybe that's how it goes...then I started thinking about women
100 years ago who found it hard to go to sleep at night
and what songs might have been playing in their minds
and then I think women 100 years ago were probably
so damn tired there was no song...there was no radio
but there was music
and then I think 100 years or 1,ooo...makes no difference

loss is loss and there was music and there were words
and there were sleepless nights no matter how tired

and I just want to sleep. I want the words to stop for this night.
Tabula rasa...

The Beatles - In my Life

There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain

All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

I was listening "Birds" by Neil Young (posted below) on the drive back to work today and thought about my dad. Didn't cry. Just created a short film in my mind as it was playing. The film's about a woman who has no destination--she's just driving to be driving (I know, crazy considering the cost of gas!). But, she keeps driving--past the children playing in the schoolyard, past the cows grazing, past some horses running toward a barn, past the signs "Road Work Ahead" "Congested Area" "Speed Limit 45" " Straw For Sale" "Fresh Vegetables" "Prepare for Sudden Stop", past the factories, over the bridges, through each season, across the mountains, next to the coast, on the freeways, through covered bridges--always driving. At one point, her car startles a field of blackbirds and they take flight simultaneously, waving up and down in the air--lifting themselves all at once until she passes and then landing themselves all at once when they know she is nothing to fear. The little vignette played on and on and I just kept hitting repeat so I could keep listening to the song and dreaming along.

Gotta go to the grocery and then home to cook. Need a glass of merlot. Need some sleep.

"Birds"

Lover,there will be another one
Who'll hover over you beneath the sun
Tomorrow see the things that never come
Today

When you see me
Fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It's over, it's over.

Nestled in your wings my little one
This special morning brings another sun
Tomorrow see the things that never come
Today

When you see me
Fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It's over, it's over.

Neil Young

Death Beds


The ancients were talkative on theirs,
so many agencies needed to be addressed:
the gods of departure who controlled
the seven portals of the world,
the ferrymen leaning on their smooth oars,
the eternal pilots, immortal conductors,
and that was just the transportation.

Japanese monks would motion for a tablet,
sometimes, an inkwell and a brush
so they could leave behind the dark,
wet strokes of a short poem--
a drop of rain on a yellow leaf.
One described the night clouds
and the moon making its million-mile journey.

Medieval Christians who could read
could read a treatise on the subject:
De Arte Moriendi, On the Art of Dying,
pages of instruction on what to do in bed,
how to set the heart right
how to point the soul upward
and listen to the prayer of one's own breathing.

Some pale Victorians in their tubercular
throes would ask for a looking glass
so they could behold the seraphic glow
the dry fever brought to their faces.
A few even had a photographer summoned
to open his tripod in the sickroom
and disappear under the heavy black cloth
as the subject, more or less, was doing the same.

Then there were the wits,
using their last breath to exhale a line,
a devastating capper, as if the world
were simply a large gallery buzzing with people,
and now it was time to throw on a long scarf
and make an exit, leaving
it to someone else to close the door.

Some lie on their backs for months,
students of the ceiling,
others roll over once and are gone.
Some bellow for a priest
and make the one confesssion no one doubts.
And you, and I, too, may lie on ours,
the vigilant family in a semicircle,
or the night nurse holding our hand
in the dark, or alone.
There will be no ink, mirror, or Latin book,
though the wallpaper may be tasteless
and you may feel yourself entering a myth.

I would hope for a window,
the usual frame of reference,
a clear sky, or thin high clouds,
an abundance of sun, a cool pillow.
And I would expect just at the end
a moment of pure awareness
when I could feel the solitary pea under the mattress
and pick out the dot of a hawk lost in the blue.

Billy Collins

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden



Overall, I am not that impressed with this Auden poem, but those first few
lines remind me so much of the way I felt the first time I found someone
dead. I was 18 and had completed an on-the-job training position with
the hospital for the position of Certified Medication Technician. I gave all
the routine meds and all the PRN (as needed meds). All IM's, subcutaneous, by
mouths (po's), and suppositories. I was also involved in all codes on my floor.

Mr. Johnson was my first code. I was going in to give him a PRN shot for pain
and could tell from the door that he was dead. He was upright in bed and had vomitted.
I wasn't far from the nurse's station so I yelled Code 5 and within seconds (literally), the room was filling with people. The charge nurse, the nursing supervisor, doctors from all fields,
respiratory therapy, and I. I was popping vials of lidocaine and whatever else
the doctors were telling me they needed. They actually revived Mr. J and took him to surgery,
but they lost him 45 minutes later on the table when his lung ruptured. I just
remember thinking how I felt after I came out of his room and he had been taken
downstairs to surgery. I kept thinking how odd it was that nothing stopped for death--nothing.

A woman who was there visiting someone fainted and we had to get out the ammonium
carbonate (I think!), the phone was ringing off the hook, people were being wheeled up from surgery, PRNs were hanging on my door, televisions and radios were on, people were laughing.
It all seemed so odd. I was barely 18, still had braces on my teeth and hair down to my waist,
and had only ever seen a dead person in a casket. I just felt that Mr. J deserved things to stop
and take notice of his leaving this life.

I wonder how my dad felt that last night of his life. We had all gone home because he was
supposed to be coming home the next day, but an hour and a half after we left, they coded
him. They told us he was talking when they got to him, but I didn't think to ask what
he said to them. I couldn't think. I couldn't believe my father was gone. That just couldn't
be my dad with his intubation tube still down his throat, eyes wide open but not full
of life and color. I just kept saying to him over and over

Breathe, Daddy, breathe! Please, Daddy, breathe! You can't be gone, you can't be gone,
you can't be gone! Oh no, Daddy, no! And all around us, in every room, in every hallway, in all the world, life just kept going on.

Just got back from New Harmony, IN


but don't want to write of the trip just now though it was peaceful and healing. Bought myself a bouquet of flowers on the way there yesterday. Had a picnic on the Wabash. Took them with me and then threw them in before I left in honor of my father and others I have lost. Hardly any current so they ever so slowly made their way north.

Now this:

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?


Robert Frost

Cheers


Already tonight I have lifted my glass to Jackie
Wilson and to Gracie Lantz, the voice
of Woody Woodpecker and creator of the taunting laugh
according to her obituary in this morning's paper.

And now the wind is whistling at the doors and windows,
straining to lift the roof off this house,
and I am alone and casting about for someone else
to toast, someone remarkable whose leaving

shrivels the skin of the world. It could be
a virgin martyr or exiled Ovid, or even Jackie
Wilson again, the man no act would follow,
not James Brown, not the Temptations, one of whom

explained it was because he left a hole in the stage.
The only toast that should follow a toast to the dead
is a toast to the long dead, so up goes my glass
to the first man ever to notice the outline

of a bear in the stars one quiet night long before
the wheel and shortly after fire. It is said
that laziness was the mother of astronomy,
and surely he must have spent hours on his back,

hands pillowing his head, while his eyes
connected the points of light with imaginary lines
until a ferocious shape stood before him in the sky.
I drink to the long wonderment of his gazing,

the Nile of amazement flowing into the night,
his hand moving up to cover his open mouth.
And still the wind is driving hard through the trees,
knocking down the weak branches which I will

gather in the morning and break over my knee
for kindling; but the scene inside is composed,
a tableau of bottle, vase, open book,
a painting of a little ship framed on the wall,

far from home in a churning sea and burdened
with perilous cargo. I wander in the details
of its sail lines and streamers flying from the masts.
I see a man in the rigging, the red dot of his shirt.

No wonder visitors always remark on this picture
while I am out in the kitchen making their drinks
and getting ready to propose the first toast,
to hoist my glass to that dark, bearded man

lying dumbstruck and reeking of woodsmoke
a little distance from the mouth of his cave.
Here's to the bear he saw roaring in the heavens,
to the ram, the tilted scales, the intricate crab,

and the dippers pouring out a universe of ink.
Here's to Cassiopeia in her chair and chained Andromeda.
Here's to the wind blowing against this lighted house
and to the vast, windless spaces between the stars.

Billy Collins

From: The Art of Drowning

Billy Collins night

Had an impromptu dinner with neighbors last Friday night. My oldest son and his wife were in for a few days, my husband was racing (trying to set another national record when he could have been home having so much fun sitting by the fish pond), and my youngest son went to the county fair with friends, soooooo, I had cooked enough for a log rollin' and was outside talking to my neighbors when Lynn said something about going inside to cook something to eat. I had all that food cooking and so I just said, "I'm bringing food over and we'll eat on the patio."

Amazing food. Great neighbors. Wonderfully nice evening. Few mosquitoes. I brought the food and a bottle of wine (a nice Penfolds cab). On the menu: marinated pork chops, roasted asparagus, roasted new potatoes with herbs, mixed green salad with herbs, celery, red pepper, chives, chopped green onions, and feta cheese, and garlic bread. We ate & talked & laughed & cried. Jerry just lost his dad a year ago--I lost mine in April. And then I told them about going to the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and that Billy was going to be there, so of course, I had to read some Billy.

Read Billy. By candlelight. Left the book open and now there's red wax spllied across these words:

whom
hole in the
toast to
and still
knocking
gather

The rest of the wax is in the margins.

The poem is Cheers.

I'm going to type it in here after I get something to eat. Been a busy day today and it's almost 2 and I haven't been to lunch!