Loitering in Mind

A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive):

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From whiskey river:

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online])

Not from whiskey river:

Patience
For Max Rojas

Once a month
when the moon loses everything,
Don Max takes a chair
to the edge of the sea.
Black sand beach & green-backed heron.
The moon
casts off her milkglass earrings.
I am nothing, she says, but black & white.
I keep losing my face.
Don Max feels for his pipe in his pocket.
Takes it, knocks it against his palm.
I am old! She cries. I get gooseflesh
in the dark. Don Max is looking for his tobacco.
Don Max has found a match.
You don’t know how hard it is
to come back from nothing.
Don Max smiles & lights up.
I keep making the same mistakes, she says.
I think you should leave me, she says.
Through smoke, she watches Don Max
fold a strip of seaweed into a grasshopper.
Leave me for your own good! She demands.
Don Max has set the grasshopper in the sand.
Besides, I am too beautiful.
She speaks it as though it makes her sad.
I’ll find other lovers. I will
forget you.

(Katherine Larson [source])

…and:

Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I’m tired.

(Mae West )

…and finally, Stephen Colbert (with Feist’s help) urges us to just hold on for a few seconds more — because even the technology of Heaven may have its glitches  (lyrics below). It’s a bit early in the season, sure, but some reminders just can’t wait.

Lyrics:

Please Be Patient
(lyrics by Stephen Colbert;
music from “Angels We Have Heard on High“)

Angels soaring through the air
as they did in Bethlehem
Angels answer every prayer
once they get around to them
Please be patient, an angel
will be with thee shortly

Due to increased prayer amounts
Seraphim will have delays
Servicing thy prayer accounts
For the next five million days
Please be patient, an angel
will be with thee shortly

Please continue thee to hold
All thy ills shall be relieved
Every human grief consoled
In the order ’twas received
Please be patient, an authorized prayer technician
will be with thee shortly
Or to save thee time, wait for the chime