11 January 2008

Once again, the past keeps knock knock knocking at my door...

Let me tell you a story about my technical past. In college, I used the Macintosh computer labs, because the College of Education worked with Macs. In 1991, I received my first computer. It was a Mac Classic. Sometime around 1995 I bought a Mac PowerPC, and that was my computer until sometime around 2003, when I purchased a PC for the first time in my life.

What that means for me and you is that pretty much all of my graduate work was done on the Macintosh and remains on floppy disk. In fact, everything I did on computer was on Macintosh floppy disks, and has been nearly completely inaccessible for the past five or so years. I'm digging through those disks right now with the help of a program call MacOpener, trying to see if there's anything in my scholarly records salvageable and publishable with a little dusting off...

In the meantime I'm also finding that I've got quite a bit of poetry that I haven't seen in long time. So here's a little gem from the archive, circa 1995, from a period in which I must have been trying to write sonnets.

Love and its attendants

Though you make tears flow in torrents
and fill my nights in dread dreams,
I pull myself to your side: quiet moments
with palms pressed or the unspoken need
of lips upon lips as the memory recedes
like a tide at its ebb. In wave's wake
the gulls walk stilted and pick tender meat
from stranded shells, the lonesome fate
of those who would leave the hidden deep
for a sunlit world, like those who expose
their soft bellies in the name of a dream.
I've seen vulture-cleaned bones in the glow
of moonlight, when the clouds split above,
and despite the terror, I will speak of love.

4 comments:

Reya Mellicker said...

Wow. That's incredible, Cuff. Really.

Powerful. Thank you!

And thanks too for reminding me of "floppy" disks. What a funny idea.

m.a. said...

Cool poem. You should go back to writing them.

mysterygirl! said...

I love your poem.

cs said...

Thanks everyone for the comments on the poem. I stopped writing poetry and fiction sometime around the time our son was born...which for many writers is a great event for material. However, for me it meant no time left to sit by myself for hours thinking and the added pressure of trying to complete my degree. It's fun rediscovering the old ones though. I'm sure I'll post more from the archive.