hipbone's poetry and more

Hi:

I'm Charles Cameron, recently moved to this area.

I've been writing poetry for decades now, making some minimal efforts at getting published, and just a month or two ago ran into an old friend who will be trying to get a publisher friend in Banares, India, to publish a book of my poetry. Banares - I like the idea of being published on the banks of the Ganges, I must admit.

So...

I'll be dropping the occasional poem in here, and perhaps some prose on occasion. Starting now...

Question


This sense that the trees might be blank trees,
the grasses blank grasses
with their backs turned to us,
that the sky's back might be turned,
that all of creation might be uninterested,
not listening, not speaking with us
in that quiet confidential tone of glory,
the assurance, blade by blade, of resurrection,


that would be the depressing sense
to come away with, the dark
that put all light to shame -- and yet
have not the trees the right
to turn their backs on us, the rivers
to flow slyly away from wherever we thirst?

Comments welcome, silence too...

.

Dylan: Shake shake mama


Think of a column of sheer sky,
you'll have an idea
of where a voice starts,
the throat opens
and a column of sheer sky
pours upwards,
sheer blue,
sans clouds, pure poetry.

And then the whiskey,
the smoke hits,
the voice is riddled, with doubt,
resignation,
more smog than clouds,
and the deep blues at last begin...

.

Overview


Nail a man to a rock face a thousand feet up,
have a broad river run below,
place a small town beside the river,
an abbey further along,
with plainchant for a soundtrack
and the whirr of helicopters,
it is always possible that nuclear materials
are somehow involved. How

can a simple map capture
the weathering that's on the farmer's face,
the farm itself, the road so many
children take to town,
the politics, the pieties, the passions?
We live in a world both secret and surveilled.

.

Cogito, Zero Sum


God, who does not hear prayers on Sunday,
that being His day off,
used to feel unconflicted
while all military requests favored
His chosen People, but
since His Son opened the flood gates to All
and Sundry, conflicts have been
on the rise, as when two Parties request

victory in a Zero Sum encounter.
Following Napoleon's advice, He now lets
whoever has the most battalions win,
which secretly sickens Him.
And then there are understandable,
sympathizeable prayers for an end to death.



Resurrection, any body?

.
I came here fairly early in my time in Sonoma County and posted a couple of poems -- my standard method of connecting -- but somehow drifted, and came back today when a friend sent me some possible places to move -- I'm leaving my current abode towards the end of March -- so I cam back and see I really didn't post many poems here.

So here are some recent offerings.

Lost lives


Two blocks of wood clapped together
make but the one sound, one
sound cuts sleep so that sleep and waking
fall apart, waking vaguely recalling
being asleep but not easily
able to verbalize it -- and we are
unskilled at describing our womb time too,
let alone knowing whether we

lived a few times before that, perhaps
even in Tibet, perhaps,
as my clairvoyant friend tells me I did,
as a yak herder. Yak butter
in my tea, yak hair in my butter,
I don't recall -- perhaps I prefer to forget.

I was getting all excited about the idea of having had a past life in Tibet, you understand -- yak herding wasn't what I'd been thinking of.

So i got (metaphorically) dumped in yak butter!

.
Il pleut des voix de femmes


To sit in your late model car
outside the cardiac wing while it rains
with your windshield wipers
going full blast, this too
is a form of crying, a form of grief,
and we for whom crying is
at times an avenue blocked by our
damnable self control may

gain some freedom in knowing this:
the forms of analogy
are forms of kinship deeper
than the kinship of cause
with effect -- and there
are times rain does the crying for us.

.

.

What strange ones we are


The burrs you wear on your days are proof
enough of education, you have moved
through the fields of life collecting pollen
of friendship, distaste, first love, love
lost, stained glass, onions, moments on stage
and behind scenes, and the bees of cosmos
feed richly and bring your essences to
others, similarly constituted, who come to

life in the contact: slip from the banal clarity
of sunlight into the moon's revelations:
you find yourself aglow with tinctures of
all dreams that ever reached you, your veins
coursing with exotic minerals, your night
insights felt as tremblings within the breath.

.

.

On film -- Pelham 123


One of the snakes of God,
one of the silver subway snakes
sliding against a smog dark
sky, evening, tenement blocks,
blocks of harsh colors,
harsh lives if you could see
inside the blocks, sunset if you
could call it that, the snake

gliding by, perfect in telephoto,
the humans invisible, not present, .
no part of the picture, silver
sheen of one of the snakes
slithering the rails to infinity,
to dusk, night, the end of the line.

There -- saying hello again, hope you like some of the poems.

Charles (aka hipbone)

>>>]There -- saying hello again, hope you like some of the poems.

Yes, I like these poems enormously.

-Conrad

.
Well, that's a quick response, Conrad.

And wonderful, as is your website which I just visited. Shakespeare, by God! The Tempest at that! And much more besides...


Hm. Here we go...

Stage Magic

for Conrad

The purveyor of magic knows sawdust
is among the ingredients, that the lights
must angle up and be angled down
for the face to be fully seen, the face
seen for the voice to be fully heard, the
heart in the voice for mind to shape
meaning that penetrates the heart, and
that the curtain must fall to protect

the sacredness of the sacred. Plotinus
called this world a stage which we
have dotted with stages of our own
devising: the theater is fractal, then --
from God's lips to your ear, from your
gifted gesture to our joyous applause.

.

.
here's another for your pleasure...

World War II


Trees huddle together like sheep,
it's cold, England,
one tree keeps the next
protected from the wind,
the field is empty.
One string of the double bass
played long, getting
louder, or it might be a squadron

of fighters coming in
across the fields. War adds
to loneliness, just as
to camaraderie -- we too
huddle close against the wind,
against the brutal cold coming on.

.

.

Quest


The bee does not explore every verse
written on every leaf, nor sepal, nor
petal of each every flower, finding
treasure enough, then moving on;
the flower itself may be unconscious;
even the sun toward which it angles
and stretches may not know its song, its
whole and perfect utterance, its psalm --

yet holiness sings within every atom:
in the clustering of molecules that color
light just so -- in the mathematic
spirals of twigs, branches, petals and
florets -- in longing, and quest,
scent, and fulfillment -- in the Beloved.

.

.

Simone Weil
for Kristie


Like an enclosed nun behind a grille
she gazed in at the sacrament on the altar,
adored the Godlight blazing there
as it flooded the sanctuary, fell and rose
with sin and resurrection as the tides
called her, swept up in the great waves
of Mary Mercy's cloak billowing
across time, the purple veiling of Lent,

daffodil trumpets of Easter, the sweet
birth of all Innocence like a crocus
in the bitter snow cold of each turning,
trembling year -- oh, she felt breath
of the Spirit fill her own sails, own
great small fold of the Sky Lady's gown.

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one of a series of poems in which i attempt to see what Christianity would be if it was a system of poetry, not dogma and moralism.

.

A didactic poem, I'm afraid


Trust in oneself comes wrapped in relaxation:
only the breath can untangle both muscle
and mind, everything else this green world over
has some uses and some zones of no use
whatsoever -- but breath, breath can walk you
up your shoulders and down your spine
like an invalid slowly growing accustomed to
sunlight until windows in heart, mind and

solar plexus are flung open at once, and the
entire sanitarium knows it's the day for picnic
and croquet in the nicely trimmed garden
where time meets eternity not as a newcomer,
but as a familiar, lifelong presence. So go --
wrap your mind round breath and take the ride!

for a certain friend of mine who shall in all probability remain nameless

.

Wrap up note to the Incoming Dead


Pissing and puking's over, no further need
of cash, you are now in a joy and sorrow economy
with instant thought transmission and no
capacity to receive what you haven't grown
into, so catch this -- angels were never
butterfly-human hybrids, just motes of reality dust
scattered under the eyelids of persons still
back there at the time (and entangled with desire

which as you now know warps intelligence
and disassembles hope). Truth being altogether too
beautiful and unbearably real for human
nerves to handle, a quick glimpse was all the
system permitted: but there were ways
to grow receptive to the way-beyond-all-suns light.

.

.

The Dorian door


Bach, we say, as though it said enough:
but the first time I heard the Dorian toccata
a door in one of the many many suites
of rooms in Bach opened onto a garden
wilder than any I had encountered, mossy
between flagstones, ivied at the walls,
its fish-pond two thirds covered in lilypads
and overflown by brilliant dragonflies --

show me the score I could show you --
but no, hearing's the thing, and to hear this
garden come alive is transportation
not from one irritable spot to another but
beyond irritation to a garden within us
so easily overlooked -- and thus unvisited.

.

Well, I wrote this one last September (the others here are all pretty recent) and just ran across it and really liked it. So...

.

Comparative Religion (UK)


You might think a nice cuppa tea with the vicar
was compatible with the King James
Version, the Book of Common Prayer,
Thirty-Nine Articles, Apostles, Nicene and
Athanasian Creeds, Anglican Hymnal
and Oxford Book of Carols, but:
hold your three spoonfuls of sugar right there,
and skip the milk or lemon -- the zen

monk Bodhidharma cut off his eyelids
to stay awake in meditation, and that is where
tea leaves sprang from. Drink
sheer awareness -- add sugar, milk, lemon
to taste -- if you must, but please
know you are committing the utmost Buddhism.

.

.

Laying mind into poem


I wondered, then, how each of you lays mind
into the poem you read -- whether you drop it in,
easy as water across rock and moss down
some steep hill -- or pick up, study and place
this word and that, as in my own Yorkshire
and perhaps Frost's New England, those
with the knowing of it build dry stone
wall -- or in some yet other style. The poem

as angel, reader as wrestler? You, Steve, who
love Rilke as you do, might feel that way,
or find the poem in yourself a standing presence,
tirelessly shaped by years under the drip
of time. Myself, I seek the mechanism of its
weir-gates first -- and only then unleash its flow.

.
.
after reading Frost's Directive with some friends

.

In a painter's garden, quote
for Felicity Hodder


So m'lady was tripping around
in a painter's garden,
even flouncing, perhaps,
on occasion,
and the lightness of the light
and airy openness of air
conferred on plants and person
alike that halo

which hovers over whoever
dances, unconscious of self,
in the open,
in spring or summer --
for the halo for fall and winter is
of a quite different hue.

.

.

Such silence as includes the creek
for Chris Worden


The goal-directed poplars: up up up.
The spreading oaks, pushing out
this way and that, and up, trying for new
branches on all limbs, new leaves
on all their branches, the goal --
if you'd call it that -- everywhere
at once, including putting down roots.

And then the aspens, natural Quakers.
Let us sit quietly now, while their
leaves rustle only as spirit moves them,
for there is a wisdom here in this
clump up against the mesa wall:
they may not preach, but they wait
in Friendly silence before their Lord.

.

.
I'm up for talking about any of these poems here, or poetry in general, if you'd like...

Feel free to post...

.

Floating leaves


It is essential that the next poet
modifies this telling, adding
entrances, erasing exits so that
new doorways may be seen,
until all earth has its ways in
and out, and the text like a river
flowing has no final form,
to be captured or enforced but

living spontaneity of utterance
pooling, reflecting, tumbling,
splashing, drying on rock in
sun, the moon a myriad times
told in silent rhymes: leaves
of a book, of a branch, floating.

.

.

Fond memories


This poem, relaxed and somewhat overweight,
recalls when it was young and all the girls
loved it, when it had roses to distribute and
could go down on bended knee without
prior medical advice, when in fact a poet was
a moving festival, and two of them in one
room could sprout halos from their readers and,
life being like that, books were both bought

and read. Somewhat overweight alas, and
weak at knee, the poem now sits. Once -- ah,
once we preached utopia so frank and free
that poets were imprisoned, shot, our each
word read by thousands, millions, copied by
night, passed hand to hand and heart to heart.

.
written for my friends at WaccoBB

Wonderful, this poem recalling its headier heyday. And actually, it has vigorous progeny, just moving under a different banner. I have heard hair-raisingly wonderful stuff from young people in slams (hate that word). Google and hear/see it at Brave New Voices, Youth Speaks, and Youth Poetry Slam. And yes, the girls still love it, and yes, it might actually get you shot. Long may you wave, hipbone.

Elizabeth Fuller

.

As above, so below


You may think of a tree as above ground,
but if asked, you admit it has roots.
You may think consciously of the tree above the ground,
yet somewhere below consciousness,
you are aware of its roots.
One might even say that you appear
to have above ground ideas about the tree, while
your unconscious thoughts give them roots.

When leaves fall from the above ground tree,
they fall to the ground and become mulch,
which over time becomes the ground,
which across centuries becomes the underground,
the dark, unknown air of the roots,
where unknown purposes sing on their branches like birds.

.

.
Well, that was truly pretty wild.

I just saw The Big Lebowski. I hadn't seen it before, because I had it confused with The Big Santini, which I’d seen. But tonight, Gregory McNamee called it a "magnificent, immortal philosophical essay" so I thought I'd make sure it was the one about the guy who played basketball, and it wasn't, and so I checked Netflix, and I could see it on my computer, so I was watching it, and many many years ago I had a buddy called Jimmie Dale Gilmore who was a singer, and there up on my tiny screen was Jimmie live as life, and I wasn't expecting that. Just for a short while, but that was enough.

So it was a good evening.

.

"I like the nature themed ones the best"


Nature, like a beautiful woman, has the advantage
when it comes to choosing a suitable subject,
image or metaphor for a poem. Rivers -- my God, I
would have no idea how to build one, even
with water instead of words, and a full palette
of rocks, a canvas that sloped down from mountain
heights to the sea, or even a stretch of garden,
human in scale, to work with. Women --

Nature. Don't get me started on women. Nature
is supposedly red in tooth and claw, green by
another convention, changes her hues as she spins,
slowly from my perspective -- and fertile,
unimaginably fecund, which is why I let that
feminine pronoun pass. A beautiful woman, nature.

.

.

Differences


If I'm out and about in the countryside
there's a landscape, and a horizon,
and I understand that if I went to the horizon,
I'd have a new perspective,
I'd see another landscape, with
a horizon of its own: but here I am
looking at my own idea of the world,
and it too seems to have a horizon, and

my problem is that you seem to be
standing somewhere on the far side of my own
horizon, perhaps even two or three
landscapes away -- and here we are, talking.
We are agreed, too, that apples
are apples and oranges oranges. And yet...

.

.

The Why of Painting


Get into this Chinese painting: huge mountains
busting into huge sky, okay? Somewhere,
you'd have to look to find it, a ledge
with a couple tufts of grass, what looks like
a cave, and -- yes, someone sitting there, sitting.
Get into this sitting. Now look closer,
there's a monkey on a branch from nowhere,
chattering away the way a monkey might.

Okay, identify the monkey. Not by eyebrows
or tail -- by his stream of chatter. You, he's
on about you -- on and on about you:
you are apparently this and that, stupid, bright,
unworthy, always always right, a failure.

Let monkey chatter, get deep into this sitting.

.

Have been very busy guest-posting at Zenpundit recently -- one piece a snippy rant about trolls in the comment section of a blog I follow, and one a bit of my life story, centered around an amazing set of volumes called The Eranos Yearbooks, which Joseph Campbell edited.

And I just sent Zenpundit 5,000+ words about soldiers (of various nationalities, political views ans religions) who feel they need to obey orders from God and their commanding officers -- and what happens when the two sets of orders conflict. I'm not sure when that will see the light of day...

.

Of myth


If she has a mastectomy, it helps
to have been a devotee of Hippolyta,
not in this life perhaps,
but down in the roots, where
what matters most dwells unseen,
where the only movement
stirs in the only shadows darker
than those of our exposure to sun,

there where you have not yet
been born yet have already passed,
here and hence, in a forgetting
whose surface is memory:
and if she be woman she moves
in that element, past, future and now.

.

.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley


A map, you know, of a country, a good map
printed on linen, I know it'll be tough, but
take it, take it in both fists, bite it if need be
up at the top, at the edge, and tear it, rip
the thing in two, it'll be rough, some of the
thatched cottages will be torn in half, the
families ripped apart, don't worry, keep on
tearing all the way down till there's two

countries, shake off the dead, you'll need
to sweep up later, but for now, set the
two nations down on the table, just a little
apart or one of them atop the other here
perhaps, and let the menfolk have at each
other -- the women, women, let them watch.

.
the british in ireland, 1920s, not something to be proud of

.

Time Drags


And so the emotions, like British schoolboys
in v-neck sweaters and school ties who
clamber one on top of the other to climb a wall,
huddle together as anxiety and mount up
in me, until I can no longer think to write
except to say "the boys are coming, -- in two
days I shall see the boys again -- just
two more days, and my boys will be here".

And so I thought, perhaps I could sleep now,
splice time, wake almost as they arrive.
What's time without them? Why wait, why
drag the minutes round the hours three
whole damn nights and two more days? Time
bites its nails and stops at times like these.

.

.

A harmony of this sphere


The roar of oncoming trains in tunnels,
hiss of hydraulic brakes, voices
modulated by machine, symphonic noise,
that's it -- I mean, the list gathers
to that conclusion -- glass
under foot, or pub noises, wiping,
bar girls drawing pints and comments,
the whole chatter and traffic of

life a symphony: don't deny it,
let it conduct itself, the brute sounds of
steel, rubber, plastic, acceleration,
sex, Mozart -- it will ring on
in God's ear, whether your aesthetic
favors it or not, long after you have gone.

.

.

After Action Report (AAR)


Mistaking wedding festivities for an ambush
on account of the gleeful firing of rifles, or
for that matter, confusing an ambush with a wedding --
both false positive and false negative
cost lives, and thus generate statistics. Lives
also figure in other lives, though -- and
since any and each life story is a river that keeps
overflowing its banks and spilling into other

stories, and since stories are liquid
and of the mind, while bullets are all fire
and flesh, the wounds in stories, the gaping
holes where an aunt or child was, just a moment ago --
these break the fragile dams of statistics
to flood families and entire populations with grief.

I borrowed the idea for this poem from PW Singer's striking turn of phrase, "...upon hearing a burst of AK-47 fire, an infantry patrol leader might mistake a wedding celebration for an ambush, taking the game down a far more dangerous pathway..." in his article, War Games, in Foreign Policy.

I should perhaps add, for those who don't know me, that I monitor religious violence (and thus jihad) and blog about it on Zenpundit, and that I am also a strong proponent of the use of stories rather than statistics when trying to understand the complex and often violent world in which we live...

So that last poem weds two keen interests of mine. And that makes two distinctly anti-war poems in the last few days, eh?

Catching up with the last few days:

Take care


I think much, and
require little: this thinking
must be good for me.

I also pause
between thoughts.

Take a deep breath.

Allow them sabbaticals,
give them sabbaths.

That too seems good.

I use thoughts to open
windows, sometimes doors.

I look,
more than I leave, go, do.

Take frequent naps.

.

[someone asked...]

Bless you


What's a blessing? At first I thought:
blessing is everything -- show me what's not
blessing, it's everywhere.

But then again, it comes down, I'd say.

You can't work your way into it,
worm your way in -- but play will get you
there fairly easily.

A blessing might give money,
but cannot, no, no, no, no, be bought with it.
Blessings are given -- not for the taking.

Blessings seem cruel at times, remember that.

A blessing is whatever grows you --
Rain and sun, two great blessings for plants.
Whatever nourishes, heals, lifts you.

.

.

Either way


Holy Land: you might not think words
could take you some place so fast, but that's
language for you, a key to more
doors than a house can decently have,
instantaneous transport any place
you have been before, any combination
of places, any theoretical place that speech
can conjure for you, metaphysical

places -- a row of windows on other people.
Drop Jerusalem into the quiet hum
of traffic in Los Angeles, of crickets out
in the country, of high music
in the musing mind, and you are there:
at the Wall, praying -- or in al-Aqsa, praying.

.

.

Paradox


The guy with the leaf-
blower blows his leaves from his
yard into ours, while

the zen monk rakes snow
while the snow is still falling.

.

.

Here's how it happened


The monk was sitting there, empty,
so you just climbed right on in:
a little to your surprise, you found empty
was full of pine cones,
sea fog, and things Japanese --
but those things empty
themselves quickly, and then
there's really nothing much until

the next fog rolls in. So
that's what must have happened: you
were just sitting there,
and I must have happened by
and seen you sitting there
empty -- so I just climbed right on in.

.

.

Zeroing


There are way more zen
masters than zen masters and
they move in on you.


*
.
Mist and cliffs


The mountain again --
yet it's not as though the no
mountain went away.


*
.
A koan for our times


How do we convict
a man we've tortured without
torturing justice?

.

Stripping clean

The monk within -- David Steindl-Rast


The monk within -- that's it!
Peel off the business suit and the business
of business and the business
of feeling all businessy and even
just busy and all the rest of importance
and you'll find the monk,
within, perfectly calm and quite
zen about the entire business, and he

(or she) will if you're lucky begin
to peel off his robes and his enlightened
attitude and his zen
this or that and his damned
perfection and peer
deeper inside to look for a human within..


*
.
Possible -- how should I know?


Dying was a great liberation for him,
though he didn't notice.
His mortal coil, you see, had pockets in which
such things as memories
and grievances were stored,
and no sooner had he shucked it off
than the entire web of meaning,
of the importance of this and particularly that

vanished poof! into a general purpose
unlimitedly enthusiastic
light that was in the fascinating process
just then of creating
from scratch out of its own glorious
self reflexive glory the entire blessed universe.


*
.
Metaphorical, metamorphic


They do our thinking for us, the poets,
for we are busy with other things
and have no time for it, time being taken
to change a tire, bring home
bread or ensure that packages are
correctly sorted by zip code: therefore
the poets find themselves thinking on our
behalf, forgetting their shoelaces,

to ask what is behind the stars -- not
taking the black depths of night
for a "heaven of fixed stars" literally, but
as a koan, an invitation to pass
beyond what all telescopes can reveal,
through to the far side of the impossible.


To show us what grows there

of course, we do the thinking (and the sweating) for the poets, the thinking and sweating that provides them with such things as roads, phone lines, airplanes going to Bali, and so forth, when all they need is a pencil and a paper napkin.


*
.

Tidings


Old earth has her meridians, and most maps
ignore them -- lines of force
that have the authority of winds,
and the whorls those winds cause at human birth
which we call fingerprints --
breaking and rejoining lines, fluid
as flow itself, glistening as glisten waters
tumbled over rocks, lines

like those found on the shells of tortoises,
themselves creatures of the great
dividing and rejoining flow we know
as a world. We may see, then, in the lines
broken and unbroken on the back of a tortoise,
or in the book, traces of the Great Tides.


*
.
Mystery


A sheet of paper versus a bath:
the sheet of paper appears to have no
swirling point, whereas
there's a place where the water
spirals on out. Happily
or otherwise, the poet stares
at the blank page long enough to see
a vanishing point. And this

world? It too has a vortex,
all its dualities spinning into mystery
if you peer closely. But try
telling that to the people
who read poems, try
telling that to the piece of paper.

It seems I'll be leaving Forestville and the Santa Rosa area this weekend, and if anyone is going to Sacramento and would like to exchange a ride [with luggage] this Saturday for gas money and a bite to eat along the way, please email me at [email protected] ...

And if you find yourself with a spare room near here where a quietly aging poet could huddle with his books and English accent (and a few pennies in rent) a few months from now -- let me know.

Otherwise, I'll try to drop in some more poems from time to time -- and I envy you one of the finest places to live on God's green earth. I've loved it here!

.
Well, I've been away in Chicago for a few months now, and it looks as though I might be headed back in the general direction of Santa Rosa in a month or so.

Here's a poem I wrote for a friend who had a birthday a couple of days ago:

Happy Birthday


I just saw a room filled with night sky, Chris:
as usual with rooms, one wall was behind me, so
I couldn’t see it -- but the two side walls and
ceiling seemed to be bulging slightly, space is
vast and there were myriads of stars, all
wrapped up in this one room -- vast space in
such a small place -- but it was the small place
that felt cramped, not the vast space inside it.

The stars seemed more densely packed towards
the center -- this wasn't astronomy, just a
blink or glimpse of the non-real to refresh
the real, a touch of dream for our waking lives.
So that's my wish for you today -- a galaxy
or three, gift-wrapped in a small room, in words.

I'll try to drop a few more poems in here over the next few days, and then see if I can find a suitable place to park a bunch of my books and live -- somewhere in the Santa Rosa - Sebastopol neighborhood.

.

Ruin


Once the cathedral
roof falls and the walls crumble,
the doves can get in.

.

.

There, and here
.
.
I cannot know the heart of that African boy,
only that his father's words,
Have you no shame? shame him.
There is no food today, his mother says.
Life is not equal, from here to there,
and yet it is equal. One boy Hutu, the other
Tutsi, life is equal, yet it is not.
That one boy has a mother, and a father.
.
Over here, the mind has no such simplicity.
The heart, perhaps, is simple.
Film allows us to see each other,
from here, to there, somewhat, but
life there and here, it is not equal.
It may be, in the heart, we can find the simple.

.
.

< thanks, sara -- i appreciate the appreciation >