First, I just think I’ll mention that it’s the 25th anniversary today of the company my Dad founded in our basement and from which he is now (mostly) retired, and where I currently work (15 years this month). I’m really quite proud of this! Hard to believe we used to be small enough to fit into the basement, known then as the “Dungeon”. The first non-family employee used to have to come in and play with Muppy, our mini-dachshund, first thing before he could get to work, and the second non-family employee still works here, and is married to the now-president, who’s been hired for every job he’s had since high school by my father, and has actually known him longer than I have. (One month longer, in fact.) In high school, Dad would pay me $.02 a name for data entry, but since I couldn’t type particularly well and had no attention span, I never exactly earned much (grin). A quarter of a century. Wow.

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Now, from Laura’s Booking Through Thursday:

1. Do you lend your books to other people? Rarely outside the family, but on occasion
2. If so, do you get them back? Sadly, only about half the time (not counting family)–which is one of the reasons it’s a rare thing.
3. What do you do if they’re not returned? Send the police? Stop speaking to the borrower? Storm the house and take them back? Try asking nicely, politely, etcetera, but usually give up after a certain, undefined period of time. The friendship, though, is never quite the same–if it survives at all.

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And then, for the Blogger’s (Silent) Poetry Reading, I’m giving you not one, but two poems by Billy Collins, the recent-but-no-longer poet laureate of the United States. (I thought of giving you one of my own, but really, you wanted something with quality, right?)SONNET
by Billy Collins
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.THESAURUS
by Billy Collins

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

• Tags: General, Reading • Permalink:Warming Up (MeMeMeMe) //