BIRTHDAY POETICS

Let's face it -- though I found out relatively recently that I was born on Sept. 10, my birthday will permanently be Sept. 11 as that's how the legal documents note it and how I've lived it most of my life -- all because some dufus-clerk long ago in some dusty boondock town failed to understand how a calendar works. I don't even try, Folks; without trying, I live fiction-ally.

Meanwhile, a pal & art advisor (the most honest art advisor I know so if you need one go to the link) sent me an e-birthday card viz St. Veronica having an incident at Carvel (somehow also a fitting metaphor for Moi Life):



Then I wrote a poem entitled, aptly "BIRTHDAY POETICS: A RE-VISION" referencing the sensibility of war's persistency. Here's an excerpt:

Dust clouds keep recurring
in the East, in the West—
“heaven, earth and all in between”—
as men battle each other
not “in jest” although Allah
in the Koran once raised
the possibility of creation as a joke—

What exactly is the redemption
found in the canary singing
atop a skull? Whose emptied
eye sockets became polished to ivory
by these terrified winds?

“Cruelty is a mystery,
and the waste of pain,”
says the pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Still, that infernal canary sings—

The poem was writ while reading through the first chapter of Annie Dillard's brilliantly lyrical Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Thank you, Annie Dillard.