Meditações - You can never have enough clocks in your house.

Rintrah Roars

for John Grant

 

My father-in-law writes from Umbria (where peasants eat songbirds

for lunch and pray beneath frescoes by Giotto): Saturday, 30 Jan. (last

day of the season wherein big men can kill little birds).

 

Lyndon Johnson, while being escorted by a young Marine who said,

“That one over there is your helicopter, Sir,” replied, placing his arm

around the boy, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”  

 

Sam said, “I might be white bread, but there is one pissed-off nigger in  

my heart.”

 

McPherson says he doesn’t see anything in the world worth coming

back for. He wants to get off the wheel, says, “I don’t want to come

back as anything — not even a bumblebee.”  

 

So I say, “Oh, Jim, you’d make a good bumblebee,” but I was thinking:

That should be enough for anybody’s God.

 

It would be trite to describe the clocksmith’s house — the way it

sounded like bees in there. “You can never have enough clocks in your

house.” This from a man who had thousands in his. I asked, “You

probably don’t even hear them anymore.” He said, “I hear them when

they stop.”

 

Lyle said, “It’s all right to be a fool; it’s just not all right to be a old

fool.”

 

Steve, the banjo wasn’t all they smashed. It was every window. It was

every thing I had. You don’t want to feel the wind blow through your

house that way.

 

Another friend said, “I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom

of my eyes.”

Notes:

The last line of “Rintrah Roars” is from Porchia.

 

James Galvin, Rintrah Roars” from Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997