Found this poem in a box. Wrote it for Denise Dankert one long time ago.

[fflo]

 
I have been finding notes from you

Tonight a postcard in a book of poems,
Norman Rockwell painted Huckleberry Finn,
January '84:  "Our phone is being installed
on the 11th"       "Hello to the Boys"

The other day in the Shakespeare
a coffee-stained legal sheet---
Bob Melvin finally hit a home run
as all day of a Sunday with Chet
you were waiting for me

And in a box for special things
a Social Security card I was after
and the red card poem, 8-13-88, Carroll County


Surprise:  not the us they recall
that is other, but the places,
pictures of the gone    or not yet    world

You'd think I'd planned it,
like scraps hidden in Laura's room,
perfect plants for moments like these
poignant comings-across in a future
with or without you still around
---or, as it turns out, both


Yeah, this entry is about finding an old piece of paper with a poem on it that's about finding old pieces of paper (one of which has a poem on it). And that ain't the only way it's regressive.


P.S.  I just saw a clip from the upcoming Gwynneth Paltrow movie in which her character quibbles with the notion of "healthy" hair (at which I've bristled for many moons) and then chides the woman she's talking to (as I might well feel the urge to do in the same circumstances) for contrasting "organic" with "chemical". The only other thing I know about the film is that it's called Proof, but that's enough to suggest it could be a little close for comfort. And thus potentially utterly compelling.

I always think that Hal Hartley film Trust was called Proof, even though I've memorized that it wasn't.

"Proof" is quite a word. And it's in the pudding, too.

Pudding. Mmmmm. How long since you've had pudding?

[Poll #566470]

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Old pieces of paper: Buried in binders in the heavy cedar chest under the wicker chest and the plastic bookshelves is the time capsule of correspondence with Riin from before we lived together. Maybe someday it will fascinating artifact of the last generation of handwritten weekly correspondence before email turned it into volitile bits and bites that turn unreadable with each change of storage medium. There are stories and pitures I want to retrieve from those letters some day, but I don't dare look for now.

Once I found some music on an old scrap of paper in my dulcimer bag.

Healthy hair: I've often ranted "But it's dead! It's dead! Something dead can't be healthy!" I've said the same thing about healthy foods, too.

Pudding: I remember the kind of pudding mix my mom heated on the stove, and poured into a small bowl and added a marachino cherry and put it in the fridge and the skin formed on it which was kind of exciting, along with the occasional bubble that broke the surface and looked like a crater on the moon, which they were gonna land on in a few years with Project Apollo, which, in retrospect, suffered for the lack of a theramin soundtrack.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I finally got into my dead parents' old love letters after this last break-up of mine. There was such fresh pain that any pain of lingering unfinished parental feelings would be relatively muted, you know? I didn't count on how their talk of devotion would sting in the other arena.

I was so hyped about the Apollo program as a kid. Such innocence and unsullied enthusiasm.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I was so hyped about the Apollo program as a kid. Such innocence and unsullied enthusiasm.

I never got over it. It has been central to my life ever since. I teach astronomy because of Apollo. I write books about rocket because of Apollo. I design rocket kits because of Apollo. I make music in the filk community because of Apollo. I spend my summer vacations on NARAM trips because of Apollo.

Tang, and all that.

[altamont.livejournal.com]

Me-three on that. I remember watching the Eagle touch down in the company of my grandmother and marvelling that she had been a teenager at the time of Kitty Hawk (she was born in 1888) and here we were on the moon. Mind-blowing. I remember playing self-hypnotic 'zero-gravity' games at bedtime. Wild.

It all came back at me hard the first time I saw the IMAX shuttle footage at Nat'l Air & Space in DC, which left me overwhelmed to the point of tears and the shakes. One of my best friends hails from Rockettown -- Huntsville, AL -- and is the daughter of two NASA engineers, and I still tell her that she's been cheated because she's too young to have been round for Apollo 11. Her formative experience was Challenger, and I think that sucks.

I remember having Apollo 13 nightmares -- smothering and such -- while that was happening. (Similarly, I'm not the only erstwhile kid from my area who had Thresher-related night scares. My dad worked for EB in Groton, CT building submarines, and that disaster was discussed only in low tones. The spookier urban legends about what happened after they went down got passed around at school.