I used to glance askance at audio books, always assuming
that listening to a book was ridiculous in comparison to reading the book
myself. Only in the past year have I realized how foolishly blithe this was.
Audio books are awesome. Not as a replacement for reading, but as an
opportunity for reading while driving, running, working, or for listening to
other interpretations of passages that I’ve only read within the echoing
chambers of my skull.
At first, I started “audio reading” books that I was
struggling to find time for, but had always wanted to read, but then I realized
an alternative use for this particular format. My speakers aren’t particularly
good in my car, and the bass and treble often get truncated, and because I
often acquire my audio books for free from librivox, every chapter is a
different reader and some of the authors are impossible to hear. The
difficulty, then, is knowing that I might miss important information, and that
makes reading more involved books almost impossible. The alternative I found is
listening to poetry and mythology. I’d always wanted to read the whole of the
Ramayana, the Poetic Edda and the Central American mythos. Listening to the
philosophical conversations between Arjuna and Krishna is easier than
struggling to follow difficult Russian names in War and Peace (which I’ll just
have to read in my free time), and listening to the rhythm of poetry has
revived my interest in certain poets that I previously struggled reading
because of how I read their poems.
I started listening to Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe (I’ve
liked his short stories, but his poetry I never read much of), Keats (I always
liked Keats), Whitman (thought he was a bit wordy), TS Eliot, William Blake (I
really enjoy listening to Songs of Experience). I even have new playlists lined
up for some other poets I’m excited to listen to as well. One of the neat
aspects of public domain readings is that I can find single poems all over the
place, and combine them into playlists for long trips.
Turns out, audio books are awesome.
Today, as I sat on the deck listening to The Raven and then
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I realized just how beautiful it is in the
hills. I always realize this, over and over. I can’t even count the number of
types of trees I can see just from my deck, even though the big-leaf maple does
its best to hide all the rest. It’s really quite beautiful.
Is this your dream,
your fulfillment of being?
a heart leaves on wings,
forgetting – does the brother bird
remember his siblings
when they are old, gone
from their fledgling feathers left
to molt on the forest floor?
melancholy hills cover the sunset
so it strobes over and over –
a million sunsets over the ridge lip
bleeding until the silhouettes run
together in the dark,
and father earth and mother sea
flush the light into the western reach
of endless night.
I’m fae today, stepping gingerly between the shadows of the
moon left by lofty branch boughs – silver traces like icy-argentine rivers,
like eyelashes of light on the cold, bumpy ground. The moon is too slow for the
agile earth, and revolves the wrong way though it tries, like swimming against
the current, to travel east, though each night its journey is westward bound,
following the sun inevitably. The stars wink, knowingly, for it’s all a ruse.
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