Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Holy Waters

I guess I was in a mood. This poem was written on my wife’s birthday, though she died in 2001. I don’t think I was consciously thinking of her, and I have no idea if I had thought that day her birthday. Now it seems sort of obvious.

Huh. My internet connection is really sluggish tonight. I have not yet been totally driven off, even though this often happens at home. At work, I have a real 56k connection. I could live with that. I am frankly really turned off by the pricing of high speed. I simply don’t do enough computer internet things to justify the price. I also go for cheap cel phones. I have texting blocked on my phone because I was getting spam and it cost me money. I make my living using the computer but I really don’t want that much to do with it as a lifestyle. As a man who has written a book length document (283 pages) on an electric typewriter and many other school documents on a manual typewriter, I will say that word processing is without question progress. Now I can write very close to the speed of thought. The editing is beyond priceless. I do not have a problem, not even a little one composing a poem at the keyboard on the fly.

In my work life as a designer, I have both won and lost in the switch to computers. I was a damn good hand drafter, able to organize and scrub my errors as I went, so that very little red ever showed up on my check prints. I had peripheral vision for errors that bordered on psychic. The computer wipes all that out because the screen is tunnel vision. I can’t use my eyes the same way. Editing power probably makes up for the loss and then some. I got laid off today after a month back. There is a problem with the money flow.

Holy Waters

My insides take shapes
just like the symmetry found
in crystal faces
joined to each other
in the soft light of your eyes,
washed in morning dew,
in the hope of day,
in the holy waters love
gives to ease the way.

April 17, 2009 12:14 PM

10 comments:

  1. This reminds me of something I read recently about a protein called laminin, something needed to hold cells together. It's in the shape of a cross in every instance investigated. Hmmm...

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  2. mmmm, a place I'd like to live in. reminds me of some of the imagery in a Sharon Olds' poem that my love read to me the first time I heard his voice...honey comb meshwork...in The Shore. Beautiful, Christopher.

    xo
    erin
    (You were laid off then, right, and not now?)

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  3. sorry you're layed-off. hope the money flow gets fixed.

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  4. I had to type a W2 correction on a manual typewriter last week. Holy crap Batman! Couldn't figure the thing out, how to line up the type, how to make the thingy go back to the left, how to erase my mistakes. Archaic!

    So hard to know what's real and what's make believe in blogdom, but I hope you weren't laid off. It's epidemic. My husband has been out of work since early December. Hang in there Chris!

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  5. Karen, the cross is a universal shape that precedes human use. The mathematicians would point out that it is a quadrate form of radial symmetry, and as such is easily accessible as a design tool by any tropism or force. In other words it should show up under right conditions anywhere in nature. As we are direct descendants and inheritors of this background it is easy to understand why the cross, also a special form of bilateral symmetry when oriented right as well as radial symmetry, might arise as a spirit symbol.

    Symmetry figures very large in what we view as beautiful.

    Broken symmetry carefully handled is our dynamic. That too is in the heart of things. It is said that broken symmetry is the very start of our universe.

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  6. Erin, anytime you want to lift me up to the likes of Sharon Olds, I will take the elevator. Thanks.

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  7. Yes Ghost, me too. I have just come from four months off for medical reasons and worked a month to make up for it before being layed off again. This time I am eligible for unemployment and I think I am not hurt too much by the four month loss. But better would be a quick return. This lay off stuff has been a part of my work life since 1993, so I am used to it.

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  8. W&W, We got so good on the manual typewriter in the old days that none of that stuff was so bad to do. We loved correction tape when it came along. I actually started using typewriters before correction tape. Then we would have to roll the typing a couple notches to get an ink eraser in there. Sometimes it would be easier to retype the whole page. Carbon copies were a bitch. Typists who were letter perfect were the standard because editing was so difficult. First drafts were always hand copies.

    Now I rarely write anything by hand.

    As for layoff. It is definitely right now. Thanks for your concern.

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  9. I found this poem to be a little erotic actually. Perhaps i am weird :)

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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