Adult Grief - Louise Gluck

Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child's love.

Now, of course, it's too late --
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they'd endured.

If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time's past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I've seen you press your face against the granite markers --
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow,
you will not let yourself
obliterate anything.

What Are You Reading Wednesday

What Are You Reading (Actually On A!) Wednesday:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading? Hasn't changed much in a fortnight!

Poetry: The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse and Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Anthology, along with the weekly assigned poetry for the course I'm teaching.

James Joyce, Ulysses: Still plodding along and making it to about half of the reading group meetings.

Primary Sources: I'm still working through Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose and the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn. I've added Of Arthoure and Merlin, from the Auchinlek Manuscript. We're reading the conception of Merlin in reading group - it's actually quite hilarious. The demon can't just impregnate a suitable woman, no, he has to torment and murder all her family first.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: is starting to really grip me now. I'm finding it very easy to disappear into this for whole evenings.

What did you recently finish reading? Er, nothing. No books, anyway. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT AUDIOFICTION instead.

Tonight I just listened to The Thing on the Fourble Board, an stand-alone episode of Quiet Please, a 1940s American radio series. I don't normally do horror, but this was just the right kind of spooky for me. Plus it had one feature I love in all literature - a strong sense of *place*, the place in this instance being an isolated (inland) oil rig.

I'm almost up-to-date with Welcome to Nightvale at the moment, and also listening to selected other podcasts. LightSpeed Magazine has provided some gems:

Death and the Hobbyist, by Australian sci-fi author Sean Williams. In which transport geeks save the day! (Caveat lector if dementia is a hot-button issue for you.)

The Litigation Master and the Monkey King: in which an elderly lawyer in rural China (Qing Dynasty) defends cases for disadvantaged locals, aided and abetted by the spirit of the Monkey King.

What do you think you'll read next? I need to start some more secondary reading (a thing I have been meaning to do for a fortnight, I notice...). There's another Ken Liu story in my Lightspeed queue, and I have one episode of Nightvale waiting for me. I'm not sure I'll get time for either of those before Christmas - December is a busy month.