Hail, lady Moon, ruling over browned weeds,
flocking geese, strutting quail, and coyote’s call.
Squirrel tends his work, but groundhog stands tall;
he has more to ponder than nuts and seeds.
He fears fox’s footprints among the reeds.
Every downed leaf has a hole, or a gall —
summer subtlety fled beyond recall.
Strength focuses now on survival’s needs.
Wren flees the tree-bole, and chipmunk moves in,
weary of his stone-walled summer retreat.
Acorns constellate underneath red oak;
some will survive even squirrel’s new kin.
Yet deep in grey roots, maple sap turns sweet:
spring lays plans at first press of winter’s yoke.
I’m typing this on a friend’s backup computer, since my own kicked the bucket (naturally, on the first day of Mercury retrograde, as my friends tell me). It turned out that I had a day left on my warranty, so I took it in on Friday for repair and/or replacement. It’s tremendously inconvenient, of course — it’s exams and comments time, and I have quizzes to give in all of my classes in preparation for exams, and I was participating in National Novel Writing Month again, and AGAIN I’m sorta shut out early in the process — but all in all it was that sort of week.
I had my third exposure to being a carpenter yesterday, when I helped my friend F work on his house. His GC assigned me to build a wall, which I did. It’s quite easy, actually. Everything is in 4s, 8s and 16s, and once he explained the measuring process it was pretty simple to do. Maybe I’ll work as a carpenter’s apprentice next summer, or something. Nah… I’m already getting booked up for next summer, and mostly I want to kayak. In any case, my wall-building was for naught. It turned out the GC was confused about which wall I was to build, and I’d created a wall where there was supposed to be a door. Oops.
Sonnet for the Nones of November will be out later today. There are something like nine poems left in this series, although I’ll freely admit that I’m behind on the odes/hymns to Greco-Roman gods.
In other news, with the death of my computer, I have no idea how many addresses I’ve lost. I’ve screnned comments to this entry; please give me your e-mail, phone and other contact info if you feel I deserve it; I will transcribe and delete your data as I remove the comments from this entry.
