Sometimes, it's something that just isn't seen by others......it's some odd internal structure within the brain......within the emotional self....that can only be perceived by others who recognize it.......we're all made of cosmic dust from the beginning of this Time.
This photo, taken in the late 50's at Daytona Beach, shows my identical twin Aunts.....shy and reserved DeDe on the left and more emphatic Jo on the right.......Mirror images, yet so different in posture and disposition. I was an identical twin also, and have always wondered what my brother would have been like had he survived infancy.....I had fantasies of living with one who is genetically identical...at birth anyway......but that was not to be........My friend Steven [who has a surviving fraternal twin, Sandra] and I used to pretend that we were twins sometimes....it was fun, although we were not very much alike.
Cheryl's untimely death by Cancer still saddens me, for we met in 1963 and were close friends for many of the years....I think of her every day.......every day....
Marjorie Oberne, Hunter Patterson, Reis Birdwhistell and I (not pictured) began playing bridge every Wednesday night in the '70's. Marjorie died and was replaced by Hunter's childhood friend, Tommy Lewis, who moved to Tampa and was replaced by Beth Boston; Hunter died and was replaced by Betty Samson who moved to yuppieland north of I-285 and was replaced by Jo Anne Stone. Reis, Beth, Jo Ann and I still play every Wednesday night @ 7. Although we play for small change which is put into a box when one "loses" and is spent on dinner when we have enough, it takes months to get together enough for a fancy meal, as our stakes have not increased with inflation and are the same as they were 30 years ago.........
I've been watching the entire QAF series again........still groundbreaking and sensitively wrought......hey, it's about good, sensitive, emotionally-wrought gay persons.......of course I think it's wonderful.....
When @ 18, a freshman in college, I read a poem by one of my professors, John Crowe Ransom:
BELLS FOR JOHN WHITESIDE'S DAUGHTER
There was such speed in her little body, And such lightness in her footfall, It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all
Her wars were bruited in our high window. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow, Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud Dripping their snow on the green grass, Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little Lady with rod that made them rise From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.
This poem was unlike the more classical work that I was to later emulate in my own writing. More in the Dickenson style.... elusively simple and ironically melancholy. It transcended the maudlin sentimentality of the read-on-the-toilet Reader's Digest poetry that was stacked beneath the toilet paper dispenser in my mother's bathroom, and opened my mindset about poetry. Natural and stylistically transparent and so much more accessible than the work of Pound or Eliot, that I admired so much, it flows from a wisely understanding heart. My own work is more guarded and stilted, evolving from the poesy of the 17th and 18th centuries, tempered by my love of Eastern philosophy and aesthetic and my preoccupations with the thought processes that divulge the words and schematics that manifest from within emotional thinking, embarrassingly Rorschachianly spilled to the virtual parchment.
pragmatic sensualist, motivated by really deep instincts, actualized by willful imaginings and perpetuated by other's desires. Abstract, yet clear in purpose, honest, but abstruse, my moods change like winds and water with my confidences, and when ungrounded, i am both guarded and vulnerable, leaning, in darkness, to the Light, nurtured by instinctual feelings arising from a deep gene pool.
