I would celebrate magnificently if I hadn’t just discovered that I have a new eye illness brought on by my nasty rheumatoid arthritis, a severely painful eye disorder, called something like Uveitis. Well, the iPad knew what it was. Just for the sake of caustic humor, I have been working on a character verse that delights me far more than it should.

THE FISHWIFE

The fat fishwife from Hell, frequently screaming,

Her husband’s demeanor, always demeaning;

The harder he tries, the shriller she cries,

Reducing the poor soul to whispers and sighs;

Alas, for this marriage, bound for hard rocks,

To sink in an ocean of marital shocks.

I love the first two lines and the entire verse seems to have a Shakespearean flavor (pun intended; “fishy”) to it. The only way to get it out of my head was to write it and lock it in, so to speak. It seems to require a special illustration that my middle child might bring to it. Michael, are you listening?

Yesterday I carted my iPad around the backyard trying to take pictures of the various lovely flowers, the turtle (all I got there was roiling water where the turtle was swimming), and stuff. At one point, according to my photo app, I had 152 images of my feet on our pebbly path. The machine deleted all of them, thankfully. My hands really do not work well and I press things I do not intend. However, on to my shaky photo images.

I love the beautiful flower garden we have in our backyard, and it is all my wife’s arduous, vigorous, and frequently back-damaging work. In any case, I have been so astonished by the beauty of the blooming plants this spring that I felt the urge to attempt (you will notice the use of attempt) to capture a fleeting glimpse of that beauty in my weblog, fittingly, of course, following the ugliness of the somewhat Shakespearean fishwife. Sometimes I hear the fishwife in my dreams. I sat next to her once in an old and rickety passenger bus in Mexico. She has a penetrating, shrill voice that even, I think, wakes up little Simon who has a truly penetrating and demanding bark of his own. Ugliness of human character; the exquisite beauty of blooming flowers. I await for tomorrow with great anticipation.

My favorite though I would reduce it a bit if I knew how.

FISHWIFE and FLOWERS