Browns

EARLY MORNING IN YOUR ROOM
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasplike
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water -
It seems you've traveled years to get here.

Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.

Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter
to his Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling

With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That's what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.

- Robert Bly
Eating the Honey of Words

Via Whiskey River

Rain falling steadily, turning the dead leaves into soil for spring. I'm reading The Fifth Elephant, the much read words form groves for my mind to drop into and play the story again. And still, I laugh at a turn of phrase.

'Sometimes,' Vetinari said testily, 'it really does seem to me that the culture of cynicism in the Watch is... is...'

'Insufficient?' said Vimes.

T. Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant.

Counting up the people at work lost in the past year or so, retired, fired, resigned, dead. Susan, Greg, HP, Michelle, Nikky, Dani, Nicky, Phyllis, with Priscilla out half the year and back in reduced capacity. All people I trusted and relied upon, and gone. Moby gone, my wrist broken, my mother dead. A decoupage of griefs. Sticky stuff, hard to get it all off, it takes time.

I don't have the Blues, I have the Browns.