Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Dry As a Bone




When the sun rises like a red rubber ball (thanks to the Beatles for that sparkling simile,) you can be pretty sure the day is going to be hot and dry.

We've had too many of those recently; the river is reduced to almost its lowest recorded level and brown is replacing green in the fields and pastures and woods.
I begin to think of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland -- a monster of a poem that I've always loved.

". . . If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water.
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water . . ."

{This is just one stanza from the whole 432 lines (plus several pages of footnotes) of the poem.}


Dry as a bone.
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6 comments:

Tammy said...

Hope you get some rain soon. I always have a feeling of despair when it gets hot and wilty dry. We are getting a little bit of misty rain now, and hopefully more later. Even after all the rain we've gotten, it still dries out fast it seems.
Tammy

Unknown said...

The photo of the French Broad just breaks my heart - I can only imagine how Big Pine Creek looks! The rafting companies must be hit hard by this.

Vicki Lane said...

I don't know if the rafts are still running. Maybe some of the little rubber kayaks. Even so, I bet they're getting stuck a lot.

Anonymous said...

I LOVE T.S. Eliot! Also dear lord that bone looks huge, is that real??

Vicki Lane said...

Hey, Wishing -- Yeah, that old Thomas S. knew a thing or two about poetry - and everything else, evidently. I enjoy his footnotes (what a geek I am) almost as much as the poetry.

The bone is seven and a half inches long. I found it on a beach in the Florida Panhandle -- a state park where there are lots of wild things. It looks like maybe a thigh bone to me but I'm really only good with chicken bones. Maybe from a deer?

Send for the ME!

Pat in east TN said...

WE just returned from the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area today and goodness sakes, coming across I-81 was like being in a dust bowl! Strong winds and fine dirt blowing around, and all the way across low water, brown yards and pitiful gardens and crops. When o when are we all going to get some decent rains!?!?