happy birthday sidney

Today is Sidney's Birthday!
Many Happy Returns of the Day Sir!


















Sidney is my commrad of oh sooooo many years!

He likes dogs, vernacular, NY Times crosswords, Doctor Who, bicycles, dark chocolate, buckwheat waffles, quarter horses, black and white photography, good wine and cheese, ballet, bombastic music...and infinite other amusements!

Here is a poem he recently composed amidst the snowstorms of 2oo7:

NEW SNOW; QUARTER HORSES; January 5, 2007

Cold loose and dry, the horses run to food;

Kicking up the white powder before, like hooved snowplows,

Scutate snow shaped in the air before each hoof.

Icicles formed in the night at the hair ends of fur and manes.

Like giant deer they look at me, and look, and eat and eat;

Loving alfalfa - For the thousandth time I wonder:

How can they eat that stuff?

We are bonded by the animal cold, the giant domestic deer of burden,

And I, the oddly trained giver of dry green summer alfalfa.












And another one from the previous snowstorm:

WRAITHS FROM DENSE FOG: QUARTER HORSES EARLY IN THE MORNING OF
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2006 
Hayflakes put in the empty pasture, my feet padding soundlessly in the
snow;

After a time the tinkle of an icicle perhaps

Or the smell of alfalfa - the dog suddenly alert 

And pointed at what I cannot see -

Has drawn the the big round roan shapes

Looming into substance from the deep whiteout.

Barely visible, they become whole,  

Breathing, heads bobbing from side to side with that quarter horse
ambling walk we all love,

The dog and I fixated by their gentle eclosion from the refuge of night
and fog.