Getting There

Warning -- Corniness alert!

Chamber of echoes,
Moonshine melody,
Multitude of poets,
Mariners at sea.
Close my eyes and wonder,
At a child growing near,
The future holds I know not what,
But that child I'll hold dear.
Imagine tiny hand
Reaching up to mine
A high voice calling "Daddy,"
Angels ne'er so divine.
I cannot call her yet,
I do not know her name,
But already I love her so,
I hope she'll feel the same.
--
Back on the road tomorrow, be back in a week or so.
--
Winner of Name My Beer is posted on the right column. When the actual brewer of the beer (rather than just the apprentice) picks a favorite, we've got ourselves a winner.

potd

If it rained every day,

Languorous weather all the time,
Our love would be as sunshine,
Voluminous strands of light
Encircling us in the gloom.

You work wonders on me,
Offering a fresh spring
Undiluted by the rainwater.

Waiting

Bags packed and computer docked,
Dogs have been fed and walked,
The windows and doors have all been locked,
I sit ready.

Both of us have showered,
Breakfast has been devoured,
Dishes have been scoured,
I sit ready.

She has more she needs to achieve,
She'll be done in a minute she believes,
Still an hour before we have to leave,
I sit ready.

Miscellaneous, Melancholy Musings and Mutterings

But first, a haiku:

Awesome, glorious,
Heartless, random, cruel, vicious,
Beautiful Nature.

Says a man who used artificial insemination to bring about pregnancy in the first place.

Some people reach out to us and say kind and comforting things, others are at such a loss for words that their' tongues might as well be cut off. We've both been so appreciative of the first group, more than we thought possible.

The hardest part for Kathy has been having a lifeless embryo inside her -- the mind knows it's dead, but the body still gives her all the symptoms of pregnancy.

An August trip to Copenhagen and London could still lie in my future, and Kathy's as well.

As part of the post-transfer treatment, Kathy had been taking supplemental progesterone. With the bad news, she stopped taking it, and now she really misses it -- she finds that it kept her calm and composed. For her at least, prozac has nothing on progesterone (not that she's tried the former).

A number of friends have been more angry at our loss than we have, under some sort of "it isn't fair" mentality. I don't believe life is fair -- what did I do to win the birth lottery versus a child born into a life of malnourishment and disease who dies before age 10?

I want this to work out, I want resolution, I want Kathy to be happy.

A small silver lining --Kathy will be able to enjoy beer and sushi in Portland this weekend.

Tomorrow afternoon Kathy will have the surgery to remove the embryo.

Tennis Ball

1/6/94

At birth you are rushed
To a sterile and dry place,
Leaving thousands of siblings
Packaged with but two.
The nascent smell is overpowering,
In such close and closed quarters,
Your fuzzy sides gently touching
On one side a brother,
In every way your identical
And on the other your cage
Trapped behind plastic walls.

You lose your sense of identity,
Surrounded by others
In other plastic prisons,
In an enormous warehouse,
A place of misery,
The contradiction of thousands
Living isolated together.

Eventually someone picks your cage,
And throws you in a trunk
Where you sit for days,
Until you are grabbed firmly,
You hear a giant popping sound
And you are freed from your cell.
Free to bounce around,
Or so you think.
For your freedom is but an illusion
And your fate is not for you to control.

Your bounces are timed
Between painfully slamming rackets
Bent on destroying you.
The only reprieve comes when you
Hit the gentle net and drop weakly to the ground.
And in the end, when your nerves are deadened,
And you are too exhausted to move,
They collect you and your brethren,
And put you back in your confining quarters.

The ritual repeats itself, and again,
But at the end of one day,
You know it is the end.
You can hardly move, and you know that rest
Won't do the trick.
You are freed from your merciless agonies,
But not altogether freed.

A hunkering menacing slobbering creature
Approaches and takes you in its mouth,
Drenching you in its nasty fluids.
It runs and stops and drops you,
You are picked up and hurtled through the yard,
Bounce twice and then roll,
And when you have hardly stopped moving,
The creature returns so you can relive
The horror repeatedly.

Why, you ask, is this the way the ball bounces?

National Poetry Month

I don't feel like I have much to say at the moment, but the six of you reading my blog deserve to see the page updated as much as possible. So in that vein, along with the premise that old stuff can become new again, and in honor of National Poetry Month, here are a couple of old poems of mine:

The Child Within

Enigmatic child leads me by the hand,
To take me to his Never Never Land.
Patiently the youth explains what it is he's made,
While in his own world he had played.

The stories he tells defy belief,
And I say that with much relief.
His imagination knows no limit --
I pray adulthood doesn't dim it.

Let the strictures of adolescence never come
To deprive him of his childhood fun.
The freedom to choose between what can't and can
Is a gift that too few understand.

Written in college, revised 5/25/94

-----

the mourning after -- 11/11/95

incessant pounding of a neighbor's hammering takes me unaware,
involuntarily starting my day on the
underside of the life curve
through its rhythmic throbbing inflaming the
bitterness remaining from the previous evening's
endeavors to find someone to share my
affections all the while shunning the reality
that the dysfunctional ambience of
smoke and mirrors makes me ever desperate
to gain more than these furtive jaunts into the
city's loneliness crying out for contentment
can hope to provide, recognizing in myself
the futile goal of finding a
companionship that wouldn't leave me feeling
empty as the morning's dog bowl, the a.m. a
tangled embarrassment of arms and legs
belonging to neither of their owners
but to a moment that ended shortly before dawn.