January 11: Last day in the Keys

Paul came up with another haiku today, to commemorate our morning visit to the Key West Cemetery:

 

Epitaph on stone

reads, "I told you I was sick."

Death gets the last laugh.

 

We also came upon a stone for a family's pet deer:

 

Later today we visited the National Key Deer NWR on Big Pine Key for the first time to see the little Key Deer, a subspecies of the (much larger) White-tailed Deer.

 

We once had a dog

bigger than this dark-eyed doe

and much less placid.

Posted with Blogsy

January 10: Southernmost haiku

At the Key West Literary Seminar this afternoon, former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins addressed this year's theme "Shorts" by reading several haiku. Because it was Billy Collins, they were humorous haiku. My husband Paul and I were thus inspired.

 

Me:

Free bacon happy hour

with $2 cocktails--

don't hit that rooster!

 

Paul:

Eating key lime pie

we pass the all-nude strip club--

au revoir, Key West!

 

And here's a pair of mating birdwing butterflies at the Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory, for some tropical color

 

Posted with Blogsy

January 9: Impermanence

Stopped in a Tibetan market tucked inside St. Paul's Episcopal Church and bought from a Buddhist monk a bracelet made of turquoise skull beads. The helpful enclosure reads: "Buddhists incorporated skull images into bracelet to represent the impermanence of life and the limits of human knowledge. Skull-shaped bracelet beads help chanters reflect upon the inevitability of death and the necessity of embracing lives filled with compassion."

We pondered death further on a walk amid the white crypts and statuary of Key West Cemetery: all those above-ground tombs, and also, quite surprising to us, many very large reptiles crawling around the kingdom of the dead as if they owned it.

Tibetan skull beads.

Walk through the cemetery

startled by iguanas.

Posted with Blogsy

January 8: The idea of disorder at Key West

Many well-known literary figures lived in or visited Key West, including the poet Wallace Stevens, who wrote a poem titled "The Idea of Order at Key West" that explores, as many of his poems do, the conflict between reality and perception.

 

Over the bar noise

crows of the junglecock

roosting in the banyan.

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy