Tuesday, July 28, 2015

From an email I received last night about The Conversation:
I . . . find myself moved on a number of fronts: your genuineness about poetry, your acumen, your conversational yet acute style and the range of your citations, among other things. I love how particular the book is, how it shows a poet--you--in the midst, as it were, of poetry. It's a marvelous and utterly original book. I hope it makes its way into some receptive hands. 
--Baron Wormser
***

And today is my older son's 21st birthday--a day of passage and celebration, and of elegy. He has become the adult version of the boy he always was: self-reliant, excited, funny, clever, adventurous, loving, hot-tempered, curious, concentrated, willful, talkative. This is the glory of watching a child grow up: discovering that he has become a friend for life.

***

I sit on the grass and
Start a poem, but the pathos of
It overcomes me. The future
Slips imperceptibly away.
Who can say what the years will bring?

--from "The Jade Flower Palace," by Tu Fu

***

Don’t be afraid to

lug a fat kid into rain, laugh when his mouth
flaps opens like a chick’s, stumble south
through weary dumps and truck-torn
roads, past autumn gnats who mourn
at Greaney’s turkey farm, where redcoats
sling up roosters heel by heel, slit throats,

drain hearts, while maples twist an eye-
blue sky, a rush of wild geese swings by:
good enough day to kill or die,
perch shivering on a tailgate, fly.

--from How the Crimes Happened, by Dawn Potter (CavanKerry Press, 2010)

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