April is National Poetry Month!

I had no idea when I left the house at 1pm this afternoon for a kickball game in the park that I wouldn't be back until after midnight, or that I wouldn't be able to move my legs. Totally worth it, though.

Mary Oliver, "August."


When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

April is National Poetry Month!

Stone is a great metaphor for trying to transcend mortality. I get very blithe and silly about it sometimes, and then I go walking down next to the Christian Science Monitor building in the Back Bay area of Boston, and I am stunned by the size and beauty of the building and the courtyard, and suddenly I can't laugh at stone anymore. God, I love that place. If I don't live in the country, I have to live in the city, so I can walk amid the next-best thing to mountains.


Robinson Jeffers, "To the Stone-Cutters."

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.