joy to the world

Jeremiah was a bullfrog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine
Singin'...

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

If I were the king of the world
Tell you what I'd do
I'd throw away the cars and the bars in the world
Make sweet love to you
Sing it now...

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

You know I love the ladies
Love to have my fun
I'm a hot night flier and a rainbow rider
A straight shootin' son-of-a-gun
I said a straight shootin' son-of-a-gun

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the world
Joy to you and me

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

I wanna tell you
Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

(fading)
Joy to the world
All the boys and girls....

© 2008 Hoyt Axton, Three Dog Night

the wave, part IV

AT POPHAM BEACH

Haze of wave spume
towards Small Point,
Seguin Island Light like
a whale's spout--
maybe life washes itself here,
cools off.
It never comes clean.
See all the sails up
and full in the windy parade of skin
and sand and brine.
Soon the rocks will pluck
each wave's feathers.
Soon the beach
like the moon, waning,
will be 1/8th its size.
somewhere else --
maybe Ireland -- the tide
will bottom out then.

For now the sun
blesses the bodies at home in theirs,
and those less so,
to ruin and ruin's aftermath --
whatever that is --
and the waves rolling in,
little snowplows,
nimbus in miniature; how
the beach fishhooks east,
one child -- is that mine,
or some spirit I was one more
usher of? -- face up, arms and legs
scraping a temporary angel in the sand.

© 2008 Thorpe Moeckel

PRELUDE

I know only the bare
rocks of today.
In these lies my brown sea-weed,—
green quartz veins bent through the wet shale;
in these lie my pools left by the tide—
quiet, forgetting waves;
on these stiffen white star fish
on these I slip barefooted!

Whispers of the fishy air touch my body;
Sisters, I say to them.

© 2008 William Carlos Williams

PROJECTOR

Light takes new attribute

and yet his old
glory
enchants;

he shows his splendour
in a little room;
he says to us,
be glad

and laugh, be gay;

waves sparkle and delight
the weary eyes
that never saw the sun fall in the sea
nor the bright

Pleiads rise.

© 2008 H.D.

BLANDULA, TENULLA, VAGULA

What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?
Will we not rather, when our freedom's won,

Get us to some clear place wherein the sun
Lets drift in on us through the olive leaves
A liquid glory? If at Sirmio,
My soul, I meet thee,
when this life's outrun,
Will we not find some
headland consecrated
By aery apostles of
terrene delight,

Will not our cult be founded
on the waves,

Clear sapphire, cobalt, cyanine,

On triune azures,
the impalpable
Mirrors unstill of the eternal change?

Soul, if She meet us there,
will any rumour
Of havens more high
and courts desirable
Lure us beyond
the cloudy peak of Riva?

© 2008 Ezra Pound

(not the first time the wave has shown up here -- check it out -- this time inspired by quiche's fascination with it.)

please see bio below regarding format change

(well, you might have noticed it's back where it was. long story.)

my secret name

TIGER LILY: ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg wa

PETER PAN: ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg wa

BOTH: gugg-a-bluck
gugg-a-bluck
gugg-a-bluck
gugg-a-bluck wa-hoo
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ubble wubble
when we get in trouble
ugg-a-woo
there's just one thing to do

PETER PAN: I'll just send for Tiger Lily

TIGER LILY: I'll send for Peter Pan

BOTH: we'll be coming willy, nilly, Lily

TIGER LILY: Beat on a drum
and I will come

PETER PAN: and I will come and
save the brave noble red skin

ALL: boom boom
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg wa
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg wa
puff-a-wuff
puff-a-wuff
puff-a-wuff
puff-a-wuff
pow wow
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ugg-a-wugg
ubble wubble when you get in trouble
and you're took away by Captin Hook

PETER PAN: I'll just send for Tiger Lily

TIGER LILY: I'll send for Peter Pan

ALL: We'll be coming willy, nilly, Lily



PETER PAN: Send up a flare

TIGER LILY: and I'll be there

ALL: and you know you got a friend (a friend) we'll be true blood brothers till the end, the end, we're brothers till the end! **

G O L D

Pale gold of the walls, gold

of the centers of daisies, yellow roses

pressing from a clear bowl. All day

we lay on the bed, my hand

stroking the deep

gold of your thighs and your back.

We slept and woke

entering the golden room together,

lay down in it breathing

quickly, then

slowly again,

caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily

touching my hair now.




We made in those days

tiny identical rooms inside our bodies

which the men who uncover our graves


will find in a thousand years,

shining and whole.

Donald Hall

From Old and New Poems by Donald Hall, published by Ticknor & Fields. Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall.

(if you see an AW on the picture, i first discovered it here, and an rfl is from here. both are terrific blogs worth checking out.)

let evening come

'Twas such a little -- little boat
That toddled down the bay!
'Twas such a gallant -- gallant sea
That beckoned it away!

'Twas such a greedy, greedy wave
That licked it from the Coast --
Nor ever guessed the stately sails
My little craft was lost!

© 2008 Emily Dickinson

Adrift! A little boat adrift!
And night is coming down!
Will no one guide a little boat
Unto the nearest town?

So Sailors say -- on yester- day --
Just as the dusk was brown
One little boat gave up its strife
And gurgled down and down.

So angels say -- on yesterday --
Just as the dawn was red
One little boat -- o'erspent with gales --
Retrimmed its masts -- redecked its sails --
And shot -- exultant on!

© 2008 Emily Dickinson




Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

© 2008 Jane Kenyon

The Book of Tea : 茶の本

THE CUP OF HUMANITY

Tea began as a medi- cine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism — Teaism.

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentiallya worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.


The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. 1

thus begins 'the book of tea,' written by Kakuzo Okakura in 1906. known to many as a scholar, particularly when it came to japanese art, it is perhaps not surprising that he wound up in boston.

as okakura was also a scholar of english, his life took some very interesting turns in the early years of the explorartion of japan by americans (usually from boston!): "Kakuzo Okakura, the connoisseur, curator and cultural historian mentored by Ernest Fenollosa, the Tokyo philosophy professor instrumental in shaping Japanese fine arts policy, mentors in turn John La Farge, the painter most responsible for bringing Japanese aesthetic ideas and methods to American art.

La Farge makes a pivotal trip to Japan in the company of Henry Adams, whose lifelong friend John Hay was later responsible for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Fenollosa's own obsession with Japan had been inspired by Edward Sylvester Morse, a principal Western figure at Tokyo Imperial University, who in 1881 delivered a seminal set of lectures in Boston on Japanese folkways.

Also fired by Morse's lectures were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who founded a museum of her own, and the astronomer Percival Lowell. Gardner became Okakura's intimate friend and probable lover during his years as curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Lowell's writings on Japan became a major source for his sister Amy's Japanese-inflected poetry. Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who disputed control of the Imagist movement in poetry, met in Paris in 1913, the same year that Mary Fenollosa, Ernest's wife, altered the course of Pound's career -- and of 20th-century poetry -- by giving him the notes her late husband had made while studying Chinese poetry with Kakuzo Okakura."

The story of Okakura, who emerges as something like the book's hero, embodies still other ideas. Having had a thorough education in both the new Western learning and the traditions of old Japan, he became his country's leading cultural ambassador -- but not before La Farge had taught him how to ''be Japanese'' for American audiences, how to suggest, through a certain sad charm, the wisdom of the East.

And after learning to perform an identity he already possessed, he went on to write a series of books -- most famously, ''The Book of Tea,'' whose explication of the principles of the tea ceremony had a pro- found impact on, among many others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger -- in which he explained Japanese culture to the West, and in so doing explained it to himself, discarding received ideas about the imitativeness and femininity of Japanese traditions in favor of notions of creativity and vigor. 2

(from a review of the wonderful book,
THE GREAT WAVE: Gilded Age Misfits,
Japanese Eccentrics,
and the Opening of Old Japan,
by Christopher Benfey.

(with thanks for inspiration
to the floating bridge)