May’s poem

Samuel now often falls asleep to this track (pun intended):

So, it is fitting to recall a poem about a train.

(Also, we live near some tracks.)

(Also, while sleeping today, Samuel smiled and laughed, as if enjoying a hilarious dream.)

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NIGHT MAIL
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film)

I

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, / Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, / The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: / The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, / Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily, she passes / Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches, / Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; / They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes, / But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

II

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done. / Down towards Glasgow she descends, / Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes, / Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. / All Scotland waits for her: / In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs, / Men long for news.

III

Letters of thanks, letters from banks, / Letters of joy from girl and boy, / Receipted bills and invitations / To inspect new stock or to visit relations, / And applications for situations, / And timid lovers’ declarations, / And gossip, gossip from all the nations, / News circumstantial, news financial, / Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, / Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, / Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, / Letters to Scotland from the South of France, / Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, / Notes from overseas to Hebrides, / Written on paper of every hue, / The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, / The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV

Thousands are still asleep, / Dreaming of terrifying monsters / Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s: / Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, / Asleep in granite Aberdeen, / They continue their dreams, / But shall wake soon and hope for letters, / And none will hear the postman’s knock / Without a quickening of the heart. / For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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(W.H. Auden)

Beethoven at bedtime

Our flimsiest bookcase is in the bedroom. Should Mishawaka’s earth shake at night, I’ll be pummelled by the novels of Dorothy Sayers. Some of them – The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night – are rather large.

(Josephine Tey’s books also are on the highest shelf.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Less bulky but also forceful is Beethoven at Bedtime, which Karin & I play to lull Samuel to sleep. On a good night, he’ll lose consciousness by the third track, “Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat Major” (which I know from Picnic at Hanging Rock).

This evening, however, he protests through most of the album. Karin turns on the “mood” light. I know that trick, too, protests Samuel, and he bleats all the louder.

And then something appears hilarious to him. He laughs and laughs.

Finally, he sleeps to Joe Baker’s Sound of Summer Rain.

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I continue to apply for work (usually after Samuel has gone to sleep). My current effort is directed toward a college in Nevada. The campus has three regular faculty and twenty adjunct lecturers. Onsite teaching is done after hours in a high school building. I would be delighted to get this job.