There are a pair of crows that live in the Hollow and I often see them when I'm out on my morning walk or going up the hill for dinner at 6 (our only regularly scheduled event). I hear them calling back and forth, or see them hopping around in Harmon Park. They left a feather for me, so I took a picture of it on the beautiful blue and white quilt on my bed with the stone I found that has a fossil shaped like the rune tyr.
Somehow, walking along and thinking about the crows (and all the other birds--I've seen flickers, which I haven't seen since I lived in Michigan, jays, robins, cardinals, finches, a few others I'll have to look up) led me to Flash Girls' songs. So now I have "Twa Bonny Maids" in my head (at least it finally got the Dictators out of my brain, thanks Marko). But I was also thinking about being apart from Gene so long, which put Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" in my head. I always have an uphill battle teaching Donne to my students. The first stumbling block for that poem is that they don't know there's another kind of compass than the one that points directions (my desk here faces east, home of inspiration, by the way). But Donne uses that wonderful image to assure his wife that though he travels to the ends of the earth, like the two legs of the compass they can never be parted, and the perfect circle they draw assures they will always come together again. Beautiful.
Donne, Blake and Marlowe -- somehow that triumvirate have been much in my imagination for the last couple years. A weighty trio of singular individuals who all seemed to swim against the prevailing tides; I guess I have something to learn from them.
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