Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
So Tulasi, Vidya, and myself went to the Kidney Walk yesterday. IT was a nice family oriented event, with lots of kid activities and free food. Plus we got t-shirts!
I sold a bunch of Sarris candy bars and met a guy who is waiting on the kidney transplant list who I recruited for Team Pittsburgh. We agreed to meet at the next Games that happen after his transplant.
I am also fundraising another way — online. Anyone can click on the link below and go to a page where you can make a donation. I would appreciate any support I can get.
Team Pittsburgh personal Fund raising page.
The National Kidney Foundation sets up an account with Convio who host and give templates so it is really easy for individuals like myself to set up our own page. Any nonprofit organization can do it and if you are involved with fundraising for one you should give this a look over.
The forecast is for rain all day, 100% chance, except for around noon when it drops to 85%. They are right so far.
The garden needs it, so I hope it gets to be an inch (2.5 cm) by the time it ends tomorrow morning. If it hadn’t rained, watering the veggies and newly planted perennials, shrubs, berries and fruit and nut trees would have been a priority this coming week. Even the trees and berries planted last year need supplemental watering this year, as this year’s planting will still need watering in their second year if a week goes by without sufficient rainfall.
So the rain is good and welcome, lifegiving. The down side is that today I was going to go to the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) Walk in Wheeling and sell chocolate bars. And walk, of course. The chocolate bars are Sarris brand, locally owned and produced. They are a staple of fundraisers in the Upper Ohio Valley area. We sold them many times for soccer teams or whatever, and most parents around here have done the same.
This time it is fund raising for Team Pittsburgh. That is the team I am a member of that is going to compete in the NKF 2010 Transplant Games in Madison, Wisconsin July 30, 2010 - August 4, 2010.
The rain is going to cut the crowd at the Kidney Walk today. The staunch will come but not as many lookie-lous will venture out so sales will be down from full potential.
Which means I will have leftovers so anyone wants to stop by to buy some premium chocolate and support Team Pittsburgh, feel invited. Plain paper bags provided for those not wanting to be seen with chocolate.
We are also selling asparagus, rhubarb, and radishes, FYI, all organic, on a first come first served limited basis. Vidya has been selling asparagus at the temple Sunday feast but we are skipping that today to go to the Kidney Walk so we will have some available at home.
Other than the Walk, I will try catch up on some desk work and indoor repair jobs. Never a lack of things to do even on rainy days. Caught up in one sector means behind in another and I am behind on rainy day jobs as it stands.
If you are going to buy from Amazon, do me a favor.
Go to my blog itself and scroll down the right sidebar until you see a picture of the Bhagavad Gita. Click on that and it will take you to Amazon.com.
Then search for/go to the thing(s) you were going to buy and proceed as any normal purchase. Once you enter via the portal on my blog, anything you purchase after that for the next 24 hours I get a small percent of. It doesn’t affect your price, it comes out of their advertising budget.
Thanks in advance.
