simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said
they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences
silences: sometimes a boy will slip
from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,
sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.
arboretums are the best though
“ I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself. ”
Warsan Shire (via wordsthat-speak)
The questions of bodies have
answers in a language I cannot
read or speak. Bathroom scales remind me
that weight is just how much I lean into the
earth: in another atmosphere
this would be a slimmer heart.
These wrists, I come back to these wrists,
ridges of unfragile bone where hands and
arms make covenants, where fingers
agree to thankless work, where pulse
blooms and
blooms like oleander
Went to see Bob Hicok read at the 92nd Street Y tonight, and when I had him sign my book afterward I told him I had done a presentation on it for my poetry class and he got all flustered and was like, I was really nervous about this book, and I was like, don’t be, it’s a good one, and then I had to run away because I was too starstruck to say any more good words.
I am just in love with the fact that despite having won all these important prizes and fellowships and being a ridiculously good and eloquent poet on paper, he’s actually a nervous wreck of a middle-aged man who wears t-shirts and jeans to his readings.
Heart eyes.
“Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject. We are the subject matter of poetry, not vice versa.”
—John Ashbery (pictured here with Frank O’Hara)
So Mark Strand is teaching the advanced poetry workshop at Columbia next semester and that might, in all seriousness, be reason enough not to go abroad.
Writing a leaving-Ohio poem for workshop next week as a companion to the going-to-Ohio poem I wrote last fall, and it’s kind of wistful and odd to memorialize the end of an adventure rather than the beginning or middle of one.
The great Toni Morrison, the U.S.’s only living winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is 82 today.
Today also would have been Audre Lorde’s 79th birthday.
