Swim Long Laps

The first morning glory opened today, and sweet autumn clematis already spices the air. Blue sky after a downpour at 3:00 a.m. Lap swimming in the blue pool at 6:30!

And here's a nutty thing. Yesterday at church, one of our "elders" approached me with a quizzical look in his twinkling eyes. (At times, he resembles Santa Claus and/or is mistaken for Santa Claus by the children.) "On Thursday night," he said, "around ten o'clock, I was listening to the radio, and your voice came on, talking about a man who had no testicles." You never know what might come up at our church.

"Yes," I confessed, and told him about Paul Celan and the coincidence that he and Virginia Woolf were both poets who committed suicide by walking into rivers.

Hence, my odd, surreal, dreamlike poem...

Here it is at Menacing Hedge, where you might have seen it already and where you can hear it, thanks to a taping by Bruce Bergethon at WGLT.

And here it is at WGLT's Poetry Radio, where Bruce added the ideal music, "Nutty," by Thelonius Monk by way of String Trio of New York, on Ascendant.

I've pronounced his name the way it was taught to me, the French way, I think, but in Romanian and maybe German it would be Chelan.

And here's THIS, too.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the public domain picture of Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford. Paul Celan's portrait is still copyrighted, but here is his grave, thanks to Martin Ottmann. You can see Celan's sad eyes here. Don't they look a lot like Virginia Woolf's sad eyes?

I have sad eyes, too, but I am mostly nutty.

And I don't put (very many) rocks in my pockets. So I plan to swim long and prosper.