MONDAY 17th & TUESDAY 18th
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Rod on Maui, August 2003.
Photo by John Scoggins.
©2003 by Stanyan Entertainment.
A Thought for Today
Optimism is the forehead of beauty.
WHITEBAIT
The birds went
looking
all the afternoon
for what whitebait
the fishermen had left
behind.
I glanced up too
half expecting some brown body
to come slowly down the sand.
What better way to waste my time
than in dreams of glory?
Many did
and many do
come down the beach.
Running, strutting,
sauntering,
diving in the water
sliding in the sand.
Surely one will stop
and look.
Take your time
brown-bodied strangers
I've more hours
than there are stones
along the coastline.
Impatience has been
till now
an overriding trouble
in my life
but I'll not be
impatient any more.
The sun calmed me,
charmed me into waiting.
I pace myself
the way the sea birds do.
Patrick's coming
in the morning
bringing brine
and whitebait
so that we can
go out fishing too.
I do not expect
the boys of boredom
to come barging, bolting
down the sand.
I would rather they moved
slowly
so that I can search them out.
I'd not wish to see
the girls of summer
parading past me
in a pageant.
Let them file by single file
giving this one man
the chance to twice them over
not look one time, then away.
Surely
as this summer starts
there is mermaid, merman
somewhere
who will walk or wander by
causing me to have a cause,
a purpose for the year
upcoming.
If not I have
the mother ocean still
but making love to relatives
is not as full
and all fulfilling
as being filled by strangers
or filling up
a proper strangers arms.
- from "The Sea Around Me," 1977
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MONDAY
17th NOVEMBER
Mischa Auer o
Troy Beckwith o
Bret Blewitt o
Brandon Call o
Kate Ceberano o
Peter Cook o
Danny DeVito o
Daisy Fuentes o
Isaac Hanson o
Rock Hudson o
Lauren Hutton o
Hershey Kaye o
Jack Lescoulie o
Gordon Lightfoot o
Sir Charles MacKerras o
Dean Paul Martin o
Bob Mathias o
Lorne Michaels o
Myra Montezuma o
Isamu Noguchi o
Bebe Rebozo o
RuPaul o
Martin Scorsese o
Tom Seaver o
Lee Strasberg o
Laura Wilkinson
TUESDAY
18th NOVEMBER
Hank Ballard o
Imogene Coca o
Dorothy Collins o
Louis Dagger o
Dorothy Dix o
Linda Evans o
George Gallup o
Sir William Gilbert o
Kirk Lee Hammet o
David Hemming o
Jim Menace o
Johnny Mercer o
Mickey Mouse (debuts) o
Eugene Ormandy o
Graham Parker o
Jameson Parker o
Elizabeth Perkins o
Alan Shepard, Jr. o
Roy Sievers o
Sinead o
Susan Sullivan o
Brenda Vaccaro o
Jacky Ward o
Kim Wilde |
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Never fear life or death, only mere existence.
Be grateful for your dreams. The grave holds only sleep.
To write it out is to
let it go.
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AN EVENT OF SOME IMPORTANCE |
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I started up the hill
and there they were.
One of them was hardly twenty,
the other maybe more.
They were still.
Dead I knew.
I slowed but didn’t stop.
A cop was waving traffic past.
No ambulance had yet arrived
but two police cars kept a guard
on the coroner’s new dibs.
One bike was halfway up a wall
the front wheel still spinning.
The other, folded over like a half-left sandwich,
grew like sculpture in the middle of the road
and blossomed with the red of one of them.
I didn’t know which one.
Looking back
from further up the hill
I saw one cop strike up some flares.
Still no sirens in the distance.
Traffic now crawled up behind me
slowly till we hit Mulholland
and the other side.
Down below was Christmas
as it always is.
Searchlights.
Perhaps a used-car lot
was opening
or another shop
with shiny motorcycles.
The evening paper
in the driveway once again.
I picked it up
before I parked the car.
Inside
I sat down with a cup of coffee
and wrote a poem on what it’s like
to miss a falling star.
Perhaps I should have made a wish
on one of many searchlights,
biting at the clouds.
More dependable than stars
in California.
- From "In Someone’s Shadow", 1969 |
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