G'morning Pink Buddha - G'bye Pink Bedroom / Poem: Going Down

Buddha and I spent a couple minutes meditating together on the front lawn. Buddha seems perfectly happy in his new home. Wonder how the birds and squirrels will feel about him.

Rich Claire, a self-employed painter for 39 yrs, will paint the pink room an ivory color. I'm turning it back into a bedroom. Will buy a sofa-bed and put it in there and go upstairs and read on my lunch hour. Current reading material: Diabetes Forecast mag, Street Lawyer by John Grisham about homeless people, and Jacob's Room by Va. Woolf.

Richard is a talker! Like me, he takes photos. I told him about the Times' Lens Blog and when he returns on Friday to paint the room will tell him about Bill's photo-journalism blog up in AK where he recently wrote it was 30 below.

On my CD player was Karl Richter playing Bach Organ Toccatas. Rich said he likes harp music and Spanish geetar. I told him to look em up on YouTube. My latest find on there is Old Dog Blue, a blues classic, sung by Jim Jackson, tho I prefer a woman from Appalachia whose name I can't remember. Alan Lomax traveled the country - and indeed the world - preserving these songs on recordings.

Sarah's old bedroom became a huge walk-in closet.

My poems were in neat piles on the pink carpet according to categories such as Birds (The Bluejay's Day), Animals, Intake Clients (Backseat Motel), Neighbors, Famous People (Ode to Gandhi), Love Poems (The Third Time He Died).

I brewed myself some decaf, sat down on the floor and put them all in a big pile.

Sarah made the above border on the door of her bedroom when she lived here. At 17, she went to college, and never came home again.

Here's a poem I found in the pile called "Places or Institutions." It's from the days when I worked as a therapist at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services. The agency was housed in a former elementary school. Today it's nothing but a big housing development! No trace of any of us except droplets in the air that are still resounding with all the conversations we held.

GOING DOWN

I knew by the way my boss moved across my office
toward the empty chair,
a man who never sat,
a man who never rested,
full of loose grace and a misplaced
assurance that he was - to what avail? -
descended from a line of Scottish royalty,
knew without a word that I had lost my job.

Knew, too, by the way he sank in the chair,
the whoosh of it,
the sigh of it,
that it was something greater than myself,
greater than my endless worries of pleasing my clients
or whether my charts were done up
in the proper shade of blank ink.

Finally, he said, it's come to this:
our flawed, failing, panic-stricken
agency was shutting down for good.
Bankrupt on promises.
He sat in one of my for-company-only chairs
an impossibly gorgeous blue upholstered
chair with dust so old I couldn't
budget it from the corners
even with moistened fingers.

Now he was seated,
the man who never sits,
one tree-trunk leg crossed over the other,
shiny black policeman's shoes
reflecting the light of day,
the future King of England
had things gone his way.

I loved our newfound virgin closeness, the
pretense that he would share with me the rumble of
his discontent; his massive ambition knocked silly,
the man who sat atop tables at meetings and consulted his
watch with flourish. Henry the Eighth I called him,
and waited for them to take him down, his
incompetence legion.

Instead, we'd end our lives together,
and an I, an odd, out of sync pair,
sinking together.