Some Different Kinda Books She asks why we always read books about black people. (I spare her the news she is black.) She wants something different. Her own book is written in pencil. She painstakingly goes back & corrects the misspelled words. We write each day. Each day the words look like a retarded hand from Mars wrote them. Each day she asks me how do you spell: didn't, tomorrow, done husband, son, learning, went, gone . . . I can't think of all the words she can’t spell. It’s easier to think of what she can spell: MY NAME IS CARMEN LOPEZ. I am sorry I was out teacher. My husband was sick. You know I never miss school. In that other program I wasn't learning nothing. Here, I'm learning so I come. What's wrong with my husband? I don't know. He's in the hospital. He's real sick I was almost out the room when I hear the nurse ask him, Do you do drugs? He say yes. I say what! I don’t know nuthin' 'bout no drugs. I'm going off in the hospital. He's sick. I'm mad. Nobody tells you nuthin'! I didn't hear that nurse I wouldn't know nuthin'. Huh? Condoms? No, teacher. He's my husband. I never been with another man. II I think he got AIDS he still don't tell me. I did teacher. I tried to read the chart at the hospital but I couldn't figure out those words. Doctor don't say, he say privacy. The nurse tell me. She's Puerto Rican. She say your husband got AIDS. I go off in the hospital. Nobody tells me nuthin'. He come home. He say it's not true, he's fine. He's so skinny without his clothes he try to hide hisself nekkid don't want me to look. I say you got to use one of those things. He say nuthin's wrong. with him. III He stop sayin' that. Now he just say he's gonna die all the time all the time dying. I say STOP that talk, the doctor say you could live a long time my sister-in-law say, he got it so you got it it's like that. I say, I don't got it, my kids don't got it either. Teacher, I need a letter for welfare that I'm coming to school on a regular basis. IV He's in P.R., before that he started messing around again. Over the Christmas holidays he died. That's where I was at in P.R. I'm fine. Yeah, I'm sure teacher. What do I wanna do teacher? I just wanna read some different kinda book Poet: Sapphire Collection: Black Wings & Blind Angels

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Poetry Month: John Hollander

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

Poet: John Hollander

Collection: A draft of light

...in Pittsburgh ... to Pittsburgh

J.R. Weldin Company; 415 Wood Street; Pittsburgh, PA 15222 This is Pittsburgh's oldest store since 1852. It has stationary, pens and more.


Good Sushi, great pastry, wonderful bread.

Eat out as often as possible.

Suzanne's journal prompt

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
~Helen Keller

Today's Yahoo Prediction

Everything is right in front of you, waiting for you to just reach out and grab it!

Poetry Month: Mark Strand

The Midnight Club

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon's light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

Jill Bialosky: 7 April Poetry Month

Jill Bialosky's Intruder is a volume which stretches our understanding of the creative process and the mind behind it, as in "Touch-Me-Nots," given below.

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Touch-Me-Nots She brought a little of the country into the city in the pots of impatiens she had planted. The petals white, pure, the opposite of color. She had transferred the impatiens from the garden, digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam, one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing the roots into the earth. Despite the quality of the soil—its rich decomposition of life— still they would not last. The plants were hardy and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves, the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air awash in pollen. She looked into the flower as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering sustenance independent of a body, free floating and regenerative and wholly belonging to what was impossible ever to touch.

Dreams, quote

“Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.”

Dale E. Turner quote

Ruth Padel? 3 April Poetry Month

Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes

He’s standing in Elysium. Palm feathers, a green
dream of fountain against blue sky. Banana fronds,
slack rubber rivulets, a canopy of waterproof tearstain
over his head. Pods and racemes of tamarind.
Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn.

‘I expected a good deal. I had read Humboldt
and was afraid of disappointment.’
What if he’d stayed at home? ‘How utterly vain
such fear is, none can tell but those who have seen
what I have today.’ A small rock off Africa –

alone with his enchantment. So much and so unknown.
Like taking a newborn baby in your arms. ‘Not only the grace
of forms and rich new colours: it’s the numberless –
& confusing – associations rushing on the mind!’
He walks through hot damp air

and tastes it like the breath of earth, like blood.
He is possessed by chlorophyll. By the calls of unknown birds.
He wades into sea and scares an octopus. It puffs black hair
at him, turns red – as hyacinth – and darts for cover.
He sees it watching him. He’s discovered

something wonderful! He tests it against coloured card
and the sailors laugh. They know that girly blush!
He feels a fool – but look, he’s touched tropical Volcanic rock
for the first time. And Coral on its native stone.
‘Often at Edinburgh have I gazed at little pools
of water left by tide. From tiny Corals of our shores

I pictured larger ones. Little did I know how exquisite,
still less expect my hope of seeing them to come true.
Never, in my wildest castles of the air, did I imagine this.’
Lava must once have streamed on the sea-floor here,

baking shells to white hard rock. Then a subterranean force
pushed everything up to make an island.
Vegetation he’s never seen, and every step a new surprise.
’New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’

Listen to Ruth Padel reading a poem of Darwin’s boyhood, “Stealing the Affection of Dogs.”

J. D. McClatchy: 1 April Poetry Month

J. D. McClatchy's new volume of poems, Mercury Dressing, brings us fresh tales of the drama of love and its aftermath, exploring figures by turns heroic, operatic, and simply human.

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Going Back to Bed Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday's attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I'd stay, not knowing where I'd been.

John Updike: 1 April Poetry Month

Half Moon, Small Cloud, John Updike

Caught out in daylight, a rabbit’s
transparent pallor, the moon
is paired with a cloud of equal weight:
the heavenly congruence startles.

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system’s less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid
of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,
not burning too close like parents, or too far
to spare even a glance, like movie stars.

No star but in the zodiac of stars,
a stranger there, too big, it begs for love
(the man in it) and yet is diaphanous,
its thereness as mysterious as ours.

Today's impersonal horoscope

"You are holding yourself to standards that are too high to reach. Scale them back."