Heaven's Undertaking

Day 223 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project and Lindsay has been reading Apparition and Late Fictions, by Thomas Lynch, because she loves short stories.  I send you to her blog, I Heart Short Stories, for her wonderful review, and to learn more about Lynch, also a wonderful poet and an undertaker.  If you heart short stories, too, stay there!

In Lindsay's review, and in the Land of CoincidOZ, Thomas Lynch, like Frasier (mentioned yesterday), says "I'm listening."

Last night my husband and I watched Oliver Stone's film The Doors. I love the scene where we see Jim Morrison and Pam reading!  All those books laid out on the floor, Jim lounging, Pam reading by candlelight.  I recall Jack Kerouac, of course, and Artonin Artaud, a Surrealist, famous for the "theatre of cruelty."

Wait!  Jim and Pam?!  Like Jim and Pam on The Office?  Is this some popular culture in-joke that passed me by?  Or am I still wandering around in the Land of CoincidOZ?

Speaking of being over the rainbow, this beautiful bird painting is Heaven-sent, by Pamela Callahan.  She and her husband run Otter Creek Arts in Wisconsin.  I have seen Callahan's birds at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and she granted permission to use them in my blog, so there are more to come!

Maybe Heaven undertook to wake me at 3:38 a.m. this morning. Maybe Heaven sent me into my daughter's room to check her blood sugar.  It was low, 42; 140, fasting, is normal.  But I think it is mother's intuition.  I am the one who fed her a brown sugar poptart and milk.  Not the healthiest of snacks, but it does raise the blood sugar quickly.

Waiting to test her again, I returned to A Civic Pageant, by Frank Montesonti, a book of poems I read too quickly in amazement, knowing I needed to come back to the two long poems in the middle.

So last night I re-read "Heaven's Undershirt" and was rewarded with a smack in the heart:

Dear  Reader.  One night when I was still becoming a man, the moon threw down its white wet underclothes on the tree branches in my front yard

And since then I've been shocked.

Dear Frank.  Of course you are a poet.  I understand completely!

Inside man is how he disappears, flashes on this wide, wronged earth and lets his life go up and out. 

Inside woman, too.