I have a

really intimidatingly large amount of chemistry to do tonight, so I'm updating my blog instead. I really want a donut. I blame you, Carolyn. And ramen. Yesterday, I bought some balogna and salami, but I don't really feel like eating it anymore.

Again, the Body

When you spend many hours in a room alone
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself--
that is the problem of the body, not that it is moral
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe--
who would have thought cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on each other's thighs
while the moon shone on the river
for the time it took to cross the wedge of sky
making its gash through the trees . . .

- Lucia Perillo

Incredible. ". . . that is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal / but that it is mortifying."

I absolutely cannot

wait for school to be over. You have no idea. You think you want to be out as badly as I do. You don't.

Instead of doing stuff now, I'm going to make a list of things I want to do this summer. No promises I'll actually do any of them.

1) Read books. Read lots of books.
2) Write at least one short story.
3) Improve my poetry skillz.
4) Improve my sketching skillz.
5) Study Roman/Greek mythology (sit in on class?).
6) Sleep
7) Research a lot a lot.
8) Take the bus to D.C.
9) Watch Parks and Recreation.

That's all I can think of right now.

This poem is happy.

Happiness
 

So early it's still almost dark out.

I'm near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other's arm.

It's early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.


-Raymond Carver

I read somewhere

of some poet talking about poetry and how to read it. "Poems just mean what they say," he said. I don't know what I think about that.

Bio lab is over. Thank goodness.

New Year's Eve

However busy you are, you should still reserve

One evening a year for thinking about your double,

The man who took the curve on Conway Road

Too fast, given the icy patches that night,

But no faster than you did; the man whose car

When it slid through the shoulder

Happened to strike a girl walking alone

From a neighbor's party to her parents' farm,

While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed

Your accident into a comic tale

Told first at a body shop, for comparing

That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain

At the house of the stricken parents, and his many

Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck

Has something to do with your character,

Don't blame him for assuming that his misfortune

Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone

If his extra grief was balanced later

By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened 

To include an angel assigned to protect you

From the usual outcomes of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,

The stern enforcer who drives the sinners

Out of the Garden with a flaming sword

And locks the gate.

-Carl Dennis

I have almost

officially decided that I don't want to be pre-med anymore. My new ideal is just becoming a really great researcher and writing while I wait for experiments to run. It fits better, I think.

A Hundred Bolts of Satin

All you

have to lose

is one

connection

and the mind

uncouples

all the way back.

It seems

to have been 

a train. 

There seems

to have been

a track.

The things

that you

unpack

from the

abandoned cars

cannot sustain

life: a crate of

tractor axles,

for example,

a dozen dozen

clasp knives,

a hundred 

bolts of satin--

perhaps you

specialized 

more than

you imagined.

-Kay Ryan

Procrastination means more

poetry. So does getting my New Yorker in the mail.

The Long Up

You can see the
land flattening out
near the top. The
long up you've faced
is going to stop.
Your eyes feast
on space instead
of pitch as though
you'd been released.
The measured pace
you've kept corrupts
with fifty yards
to do--fifty
times as hard
against the blue.

-Kay Ryan

Nothing like a

good poetry reading to make you feel completely inferior. But now I have a new book and an autograph, and a beautiful poem to share.

Paper Anniversary

A forgiving spring and now July's heat. You can almost see
the grass growing. In the mornings, white-throated sparrows take turns
flying through the spray of lawn sprinklers up and down
the street. Our driveway bends around an ancient pin oak--you tell me
it is a willow oak, Quercus phellos, but I will keep calling it
what I have always heard it called. This is how names work:
they come about somehow and stay if they stay. We are still
unpacking, finding resting places for the belongings we brought
to this old house, the silverware and wedding china, odd pieces
of furniture, cartons of papers and books, the heaviest things
to move. It has been the season of discovering the yard's plantings,
blooming in their time to speak what we'll take as a welcome. The azaleas
announced themselves to us as pink or white, solving that mystery
before coloring the lawn with discarded flowers. You were happy for a week
when you discovered the peonies languishing and neglected
beside the one good section of fence on the property and could hardly wait
until their lavish blooms shamelessly came open. The hydrangeas, you say,
have their color decided for them by the soil's subtle chemistry.
You brought in panicles of blossoms mostly the tint of a day-sky's blue
in a cooler season, but also shaded with tincture of iodine and a wash of rust
to complicate the hue. All of this is news to me. Every flower
has at least two names. Butterfly bush, summer lilac, something in Latin
I would have to look up. Since we moved in, you have been arranging
cut flowers from the yard in what vases we have, the widemouth jar
I found in the crawl space, a beaded white stem vase handed down
from somebody's grandmother, the blue bottle vase I paid a few dollars for
at a secondhand shop, purple iris against the parchment-colored walls, a spray
of narcissus on the dresser. Le Corbusier said, "The plan proceeds from within
to without; the exterior is the result of an interior." Outside, on this narrow city lot
a sense of order arises as I take up the chain saw and clear away a decade's worth
of mimosa volunteers and wild cherry trees. I can see the plan that someone laid out
before us, hollies in a line below the dining room window, the bulbs arrayed
around the house's corner and in a long bed beside the garage, a declivity in the lawn
where a flowering tree must have stood. In early summer a single surprise lily
emerged two feet tall overnight with a trumpet flower. We will make our revisions.
I prune the ivy and pull it from where it has climbed the window screens.
The massive oak, seventy years old, planted the year the house went up,
has endured as long as anything on this street. We should stop worrying
what to call things. Something will come to us, a phrase that holds
a like meaning for you as it does for me. I've found the place where the soul goes
when it is set loose from the body. I do not know the word for it.

-Bobby Caudle Rogers

I really just

post poems here, because in the time that it takes me to type them out, I feel like I get them a lot better.

There's a poetry reading tonight. Everyone should go. Hodges, 7 P.M.

This one is unsettling.

On An East Wind From The Wars

The wind came in for several thousand miles all night
and changes the close lie of your hair this morning. It
has brought well-travelled sea-birds who forget
their passage, singing. Old songs from the old
battle- and burial-grounds seem new in new lands.
They have to do with spring as new in seeming as
the old air idling in your hair in fact. So new,
so ignorant of any weather not your own,
you like it, breathing in a wind that swept
the battlefields of their worst smells, and took the dead
unburied to the potter's field of air. For miles
they sweetened on the sea-spray, the foul washed off,
and what is left is spring to you, love, sweet,
the salt blown past your shoulder luckily. No
wonder your laugh rings like a chisel as it cuts
your children's new names in the tombstone of thin air.

-Alan Dugan

So this blog

has basically just become a collection of all the poems I like. I'm ok with that.

Credit to Mark for showing me this.

When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hour of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

-John Keats

Katie showed me

this poem, and I think it is wonderful, so I am sharing it with all of you (Marianela, Babz)!

Vertigo

Mind led body
to the edge of a precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.

-Anne Stevenson

I just keep reading it, again and again. It it delicious.