Riddle #3 Rosamond

O, Rosamond so fair

Blessed by God with beauty rare

A mountain’s life doth flow to thee

O, Rosamond, my joy, my glee

Thy long hair flowing down

Until it touch the ground

And longer still it grows

Further still it goes

There so far away from me

Where Sailors wish to marry thee

But in thy hollow I would climb

And there with thee would spend my time.

A Winter's Walk with Sammy

Sammy is one happy dog. Funny how dogs can get into your heart. I suppose that since we’ve been living with them for more than 100,000 years we’ve bread a little of our own humanity into them. It’s not too hard to read them. They quickly pick up on what we want and seem to be able to communicate what they need—usually something like, “I gotta’ eat now.” Or, “Hey, can you get with the program and take me out, I gotta’ pee and poop!”

Sammy is a good dog. She isn’t overly needy and doesn’t tend to constantly beg for attention or fawn all over you. She’s a ton of fun to go on walks with because she gets so excited and she shows you how much she loves you and wants nothing more than to be with you. We’ve had some beautiful snow for walks. I can’t get the sparkle in the morning sunlight on video like what I see in real life, but that’s when a walk with Sammy is the most fun.

I’m giving you an image of Holland, Michigan in the winter. There are some shots of the ice on the pier. In a couple of weeks we will have icebergs out there. It sometimes builds up like hills. The light house at the end of the pier will sometimes have ice piled up to the green ring. The lake never completely freezes over but the ice can go out a ways and I think it is kind of exotic to see. Anyway, the video is a slice of my life for the time being.

Riddles

I published a couple of my riddles on facebook for all my friends there, but for those who don't have FB, I'm putting them here through photobucket. (facebook, youtube and my blog videos are all blocked where I work, but photobucket seems to work.)

I wrote the riddles back in the early 80's when I worked in the sign shop of an art department. I'd post the riddles with an illustration every week and see who got the answer. When I was done with them I sent them to my good friend David Wey who is now a priest in an Orthodox Chruch in Indianapolis.

Anyway, since I've been trying to pick up the guitar, I thought I'd try to put some of the old riddles to music here. I kind of keep this as my journal anyway.

The Lake in Winter

Elizabeth, Peter and I wanted to get down to the Beach on Lake Michigan while she was here. So we (E and I) both took the opportunity to take some photos and videos. She is a much better artist and photographer than I am, but I keep trying. Keveen gave me an adobe video editor a while back and I've been working with a few new effects and discovered several advantages to it; so I keep working and experimenting and one of these days I may come up with something that might be halfway good. I have to find out how to get better quality when I upload. I want the images to be sharper and a bit more like they look to me when I view them. I uploaded to photobucket as an experiment and I hope it fits in my blog space. I also wish I had a better video recorder and a better camera--no time soon for this kid.

It was a beautiful day and something of the color of the afternoon does come through. Again, my music is not the greatest but I don't have to worry about copyright violations!

Drawings at a coffee shop

My daughter is home for the holidays and as we are wont to do, we spend a bit of time in a coffee shop, sometimes chatting, sometimes on the net, and sometimes sitting and doing creative projects. This is a great blessing. When I was in the Emirates we would chat for hours by Gmail or Skype but it wasn't quite the same as this. At any rate, these are a couple of the doodles that I did while we sat drinking coffee at Barnes&Nobles.

The last one of these three is a kind of representation of my daughter.

ESL Holiday Party 2010

Winter's Garden

There are roses made of Ice

...growing in my garden

......my cold, white garden;

and crystalline trees shedding

...snowflakes like cherry blossoms

......on my marble angels

.........half buried in the snow.



There is hoary sage and frosted thyme

...growing in my garden

......my bitter, frozen garden;

where the arctic fox

...is catching the albino hare

......on the tundra

.........that is buried beneath the snow.



There are pallid goddesses

...singing in my chalky, misted garden

......my chilly, winter garden;

where sons and daughters walk in coats

...trying to remember

......trying hard to remember—

.........what is buried in the snow.

Sassafras Dreams

There is a boy with long blond hair
And blue-sky eyes
Lean with skin that doesn’t tan
T-shirt tied around his waist and wading
In a creek that he pronounces “krick”
The water and the clay say “stay with me
The minnows and the tadpoles say “stay with me

He swings on a grape vine
And taunts the ravine and the boulders fifty feet below
As he hangs by one hand
The wind cools his skin and dries his sweat
Crows caw in the branches above
The crows and the wind say, “stay with me
The bark, the leaves and the vines say “stay with me

He troubles an old opossum and catches crawdads
He throws his pocket knife at a stump for hour after hour
On a day where the sun never seems to set
He is Wild in the Wild and nothing will tame him
And that is what the Wild wants
As the opossum, the crawdads, and the stump say, “stay with me
As the Wild itself says “stay with me