Crossword clue

One of today's crossword clues is pleasing to the eye and mind. I love a well crafted clue:

3 across Burn without a flame - burn for a flame (8)

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you would never walk though markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

This is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter
and you searched your arms
for the missing perfume
and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

- Michael Ondaatje

Quiddling with Words

I like words
like Perforate
that snap neatly
into brittle pieces
like a cracker,

like Ricochet
that spring madly
like a grasshopper
in a glass pickle jar,

like Quiddle
which I just discovered
in the dictionary
sandwiched between
Perforate and Ricochet.

By Kristine O’Connell George

Thursday movie reviews

I've added a few new reviews to the blog I contribute to, Just Finished Watching.

Fond memories? Well, the bran muffins were quite nice

Two years I spent in Michael the Therapist’s office.

The first three months of that was spent with him patiently trying to get me back on topic.

I deflect awkwardness and emotional intensity with humour and general, useless trivia, who knew?

The next six months was spent coaching me in the right to my own feelings.

Michael: Are you feeling angry?

Me: Nah, I don’t really get angry. Or annoyed. Or have any negative feelings whatsoever about anyone other than myself, and I deserve it.

Michael: You’re allowed to be angry.

Me: Oh no, that doesn’t sound right, angry is bad and destructive.

Michael: How about if I keep attacking you and making you angry?

Me: Did you know that the scientific word for a llama is llama llama?

Michael: *Slams head into desk repeatedly.*

Finally, a breakthrough. Except you’re supposed to act on anger and negative emotion with confrontation? Don’t think so!

Me: So, ok, I’m angry. Cautiously angry. Not at myself, but someone else. But no doubt that’s my fault.

Michael: Why would you say that?

Me: Oh…don’t do that.

Michael: Do what?

Me: Make me come up with my own answer.

Michael: You’re angry with someone else. Why is that your fault?

Me: Because…because…

Michael: You could explain why you’re angry.

Me: And actually express emotion to the person who has caused that emotion? That’s just crazy talk!

Michael: What are you so afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen?

Me: They could tell me it’s all my fault and I’m a terrible person.

Michael: Are you?

Me: That’s all the time we have today.

But cognitive behavioural therapy gives you tips on how to confront! No matter how badly you want to run away. And it did work, to a point. All those hours spent practising how to respond and why and when, they all helped.

But now I wish we spent more time on shutting up irrational voices. Confrontation actually hasn’t come up so much in last 12 years, but The Irrational Voice, and her irritating companions, What Did You Expect, Paranoia, and You’re Not Good Enough has come up plenty.

And really, what is there to do? Nothing. I don’t believe the irrational side of me (except at 3am). I realise that actually, all people have the irrational side. I don’t let it prey on me as much as I might have done at one point. It’s just that having it there at all fills me with fear. Because sometimes, I do believe her, and I react stupidly, or brood, or am needlessly anxious. And every minute I give in to the voice, is a minute of reality wasted. It’s time I need to talk myself out of whatever harebrained reactionary thing I want to do or say or scribble or post.

It’s reassuring that the voice isn’t there as much as it once was. It means that I believe that my life is ok. That I’m happy and contented and making my way through that life well. But I want it gone, full stop. And that’s probably never going to happen.

Letting Go

I love the abandon
of abandoned things

the harmonium surrendering
in a churchyard in Aherlow,
the hearse resigned to nettles
behind a pub in Carna,
the tin dancehall possessed
by convolvulus in Kerry,
the living room that hosts
a tree in south Kilkenny.

I sense a rapture
in deserted things

washed-out circus posters
derelict on gables,
lush forgotten sidings
of country railway stations,
bat droppings profligate
on pew and font and lectern,
the wedding dress a dog
has nosed from a dustbin.

I love the openness
of things no longer viable,
I sense their shameless
slow unbuttoning:
the implicit nakedness
there for the taking,
the surrender to the dance
of breaking and creating.

By Michael Coady

Shocker

Today was a quiet day. The most exciting thing that happened was that while stroking Pippin as she sat on the green blanket made of some unidentifiably plush material, we both got shocked by static electricity.

The betrayal of Samwise the Fluff

This morning saw me call the vet to arrange to have Sam neutered. I made the call as he lounged on my lap, stretched out like a little fluffy sultan, purring up a storm. He's going to hate me in the morning.

Love Poem for Wednesday

You’re the day after Tuesday, before eternity.
You’re the day we ran out of tomatoes
and used tiny packets of ketchup instead.

You are salt, no salt, too much salt, a hangover.
You hold the breath of an abandoned cave.
Sometimes you surprise me with your

aurora borealis and I’ll pull over to watch you;
I’ll wait in the dark shivering fields of you.
But mostly, not. My students don’t care for you

or your lessons from the life of a minor god.
Can you hit the high C in our anthem?
Can you bench press a national disaster?

I fear for you, Wednesday. Your papers
are never in order. Your boots track in mud.
You’re the day I realized I didn’t even like him,

and the day I still said yes, yes, yes.
Sometimes I think you and I should elope,
and leave this house of cards to shuffle itself.

You are love, no love, too much love, a cuckold.
You are the loneliest of the three bears, hoping
to come home and find someone in your bed.

by Sandra Beasley

Teaser Tuesday - 15 January

"The girl looked at him as if to say don't fight it, mac. 'Only Fanta,' she flatly pronounced.

Bloody typical, Morgan thought as he took a reluctant sip at the cloying warm liquid, bloody typical. His headache was getting worse."

~ A Good Man in Africa, by William Boyd, pg 98

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

From Neil Gaiman's blog

The Power of Dog

Variation on the word sleep

My friend Tash posted this on Facebook. I have had a love hate relationship with Margaret Atwood since university (in fact, that is probably what I said the last time I posted one of her poems). But I have admiration for the way she boils concepts down to essentials, and somehow always finds good by exploring what others might call ill.

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary. - Margaret Atwood, Variation on the word sleep