[lit-ideas] Re: Poem from behind the last, on Sunday

I don't know why you should care, but if you do, I'll confess I wish I knew why I like to stroke the thickly shellacked top of the side table I made for one of our rooms at home. An Edinburgh aunt, when in pain--which is almost always-- also rubs her hands on woods, absently, usually at corners of tables, four inches in this direction, four back. My mother--different side of the family, but also a Scot--did the same thing when in pain, which was almost always. So maybe it's a Scottish stoic thing? Or, second theory, some ancient aesthetic connection with the bogwood handles of dirks or the hardwood drones of pipes, all of them beautifully smooth. But why me and why now? My knees have both been done; I suffer no great hurt; the table's made of birch. So maybe it's a different gesture altogether, pride in craft? I don't know. And here goes my hand again, like a ferry, sliding across the surface of my wee shiny stump of tree.
I do know I buy clocks because they're cheap. In Target the dial of a beauty can be had, as my father's expression goes, "for two thirds of nothing," so when I wander over and am asked to hold the coats while the women look around, I gravitate towards the aisles of Michael Graves and sometimes come upon one, a clock, with a couple of red stickers on, much reduced and nearly irrisistable.
Maybe you've a big theory going now, something about death and ships on the Styx, life's pains and passages in the Oregon rain? Well explain this. Today at a sale I bought a sundial, not wood, not cheap, not particularly beautiful.
Could it be that all three of us are mad enough to want to see a genie emerge, a smart one, with a fine red kilt on, the full head of hair alluring, in a woody and dreamy and really quite light shade of brown? 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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