May 2013
5 posts
"Identity" (excerpt) A.R. Ammons
it is
wonderful
how things work: I will tell you
about it
because
it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
and stars and spider webs
and known
is loved:
in that love,
each of us knowing it,
I love you,
for it moves within and beyond us,
...
“everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:...”
– Pablo Neruda
April 2013
4 posts
"Honeysuckle" Lyn Lifshin
bees, my
skin smells
of sun, the
insides of
roses. I want
to eat that
light. Every
thing that
grows does.
"The City Limits" A.R. Ammons
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and...
March 2013
3 posts
1 tag
1 tag
February 2013
7 posts
1 tag
"Knoxville, Tennessee" Nikki Giovanni
I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy’s garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep
"To Wendy from the Crow’s Nest" David Biespiel
My Dear — If not from dream, before dawn, When the rain has not perished over the house, And you have sworn off four nights of sleep, And I have wrestled with a mind of airplanes and birth, And to know that you are leaving again in the morning, With me staying — or is it the other way around, Me leaving, and you staying, or both of us Boarding another flight to a strange city? —...
“There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon...”
– Edwin Morgan
January 2013
8 posts
“When me and Hushpuppy’s Mamma first met we was so shy, we used to sit around and...”
– Wink, Beasts of the Southern Wild
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
December 2012
5 posts
“Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been...”
– Robert Hass
1 tag
"Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo" Ntozake Shange
The South in her, the land and salt-winds, moved her through Charleston’s streets as if she were a mobile sapling, with the gait of a well-loved colored woman whose lover was the horizon in any direction. Indigo imagined tough winding branches growing from her braids, deep green leaves rustling by her ears, doves and macaws flirting above the nests they’d fashioned in the secret,...
1 tag
“What small grace comes must
count hard
and then”
– A.R. Ammons
November 2012
6 posts
1 tag
“Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what...”
– Flannery O’Connor
“Why fret
if all it wants
is to lay one heart—
shaped palm
on your sleeping...”
– Beth Ann Fennelly
1 tag
“If somebody asks you to marry them, the polite thing to do is marry them back.”
– Sheriff Andy Taylor
October 2012
5 posts
“Tell about the South,” said Shreve McCannon. “What’s it like there. What...”
– Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner, of course
September 2012
3 posts
1 tag
"Turning" W.S. Merwin
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice where they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying
Are you ready this time
August 2012
2 posts
“I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but...”
– East of Eden, John Steinbeck
July 2012
7 posts
“Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date....”
– Walker Percy
