A new self portrait - and a new haircut for the Caribbean, where I travel to tomorrow (via Paris). Snapping yourself can be odd because you can't frame the shot, so here I have a picture of the front and the back of my head (via the mirror) but more than that, there is a snap of one wall in the kitchen with a sun growing out of my head. Still, what else can we expect from a self portrait, except I look older in the picture than I do when I look in the same mirror - strange that, dont you think? I am now on my final tidy up - some marking, a report to write up and then final packing (boy style - sock, boxers, some bathing trunks and t-shirts and then books - carefully tucked between the packing called clothes). I plan to read this poem in better detail on the plane - have printed it out, but it was sent to me from Australia and I rather like it:Jack Gilbert, failing and flying
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work.
That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that.
Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
And here is my new favourite pop group, I Am Kloot: