I am from Maine, but I'm on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley. They had money.

Right now, the campus is all but deserted. Winter classes haven't started yet. It's been raining almost constantly for a week, but yesterday it let up, and the sun came out. Today, I walked across the campus courtyard by the Sather Gate. It was empty, except for a few tourists and one guy, off by himself with a guitar, playing and singing.

     *      *      *

The problem with the blues

Is not that they descend on me,
an October fog at sunset, rolling
over the seaweeds that drape the rocky shore
of the Gulf of Maine,
but that, gray as I am,
I have not yet learned the art
of keeping my yap shut about them.

Oh, the blues are OK on occasion -
paroled from the prison of songs, performed
by a black guy on tour with an entourage;
or perhaps one on a small corner,
coaxing a last chord
from a patched and weary six-string;
you wish him well,
flip a coin at the case,
and he fades into the brume

Silent, for he knows you are busy
with your own lighthouse, and
who then is to blame if the lamp fails?

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.