My other journal

Last Thursday I made my 11,687th consecutive entry in my daily journal at home; 32 years worth and counting. Along with my drawings, my poems, and this blog it illustrates my world.

To manage that journal, I keep notes in a datebook-type engagement calendar, then write them out in a journal; usually on Sundays. My wife gives me really nice Sierra Club or museum datebooks in which to keep these notes. Many years, I "caption" the accompanying paintings and photographs with poems; inspired by what these images say to me.

This year, the datebook has been the "Group of Seven," Canadian landscape paintings from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Here's the image "Old Store at Salem"by A. J. Casson that faces the the page for the first week in August in my datebook. My poem follows.

Corralled by the coming and going
I suspect the keeper of this carriage shop
opened, at last, the green door; aghast
and fell in with the present, out of the past.