armageddon is scheduled for thursday
step back from the edge, jobe
Goodbye.
A fog rises from the earth.
A cool, misty blanket.
As gray as a soul.
Archangels wade in the river shallows, like herons.
They seem to be looking for something,
But I don't ask them about it.
I am a small wooden boat, and time is my anchor.
I have pennies in a bucket, lots of them.
From the shore, the sound of the music of Bach
Being played on a cello.
Pablo Casals, in his eighties, was asked why he still practiced.
"I think I am making progress," he said.
I raise the anchor and shove off into the fog.
I think I am making progress, too.
-jobe
-previously in Medusa’s Kitchen
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
Amiri Baraka
Like millions of people, I became a hermit during the COVID shutdown. Well, a hermit with a wife. And I found that I rather like it. It's lovely, you know? I can wander around here, there's a park across the street. I stock up at the library just like at the grocery store. Writing, reading, streaming old movies, napping with my dog, cooking for my wife, and continue our daily habit playing a game together. Uno, Rummy, Scrabble, Monopoly. Man, I’m happy with that.
Sometimes I'll go do some small thing out there in the ‘world of people.’ Go to church, if the 49ers have the later game, I mean, I have priorities. Go to a restaurant. Cruise a couple of thrift stores looking for books real cheap. And if I speak with anyone, I tell them, “Hey, I’m a hermit.” It's cooler to be a hermit if people know that you're hermit.
-jobe
-read-
Reach inside yourself for strength.
It’s there.
Your strength is in your own heart,
Where it always has been.
Hold on to your faith in life,
In your own humanity.
Believe in yourself. Keep hope.
Life will go on.
Until it doesn’t.
And love will go on even then.
-jobe
Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
Salvador Dali
Yesterday, while sipping good coffee, a friend told me that he felt like a failure in life, that he should have more at this age, a house, money. All the while he spoke, finches played on the patio, I could see that the crape myrtles were thriving, our planet turned, orbiting the sun with the other planets, and this entire solar system moved across the universe.
Just forgive yourself.
Yesterday? You can’t touch it.
Touch the earth instead.
-jobe
A poem by Yi Lei, 1951-2018, China
The Nude
My eye laps at you in lamplight
Like a white hot tongue. Longing
Draws back, then rises, tidal.
The curtain of my hair
Announces my breasts. Your lips:
A languid breeze. Like a miracle
We feast and feast and nothing is spent.
Let flesh attend to flesh, sex to sex.
O, dexterous gold watch of the universe
On which one minute can straddle
A hundred years.
Yi Lei
May we, as a people, find the strength to hold on to our compassion, faith, hope, and love. And may I, as one person, find that strength as well.
-jobe
completely legal links
UC San Diego Professor Wins 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
That’s my Jobian wife up there in the picture with me. She is more kind than I am, but she is not as tall.
Thanks for reading this, and may this day be the day that you hoped yesterday would be, back on the day before.
-jobe
