Li-Young Lee "From Blossoms"

(excerpt)

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

(emphasis mine)

from Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee.
New York,: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986.

W. S. Merwin "Separation"

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

I'M HOME

Now it's time to reenter the world of the living. Not sure if I'm ready for that.

It's 1:52 in Indiana, where I am currently bouncing around the house. I'm still on Arizona time (11:52, then) and we've been staying up until the wee morning hours there.

I spent several hours tonight sitting on my former bedroom floor in my parents' house, going through stacks and stacks of folders, papers, and notepads. I've found poetry, journal entries on loose leaf paper, and quotations galore. I had forgotten I was once quite prolific, even if the quality of writing was indefinably horrendous.

I gawked at the depth of my passion back then, and wonder where it went. Is that something that simply dissipates with age? The toll of the years is sapped energy and strength for plunging head-long into life's big questions and dramas, and reeling from it's assaults?

I also came across mounds of college papers and stories and poetry by me and my classmates. I think I'll have it bound into readable booklets and set them out in my home. It would be fun to pick one up every now and then and remember the people with whom I shared these creative classes.

Here's to the end of an era. I start a real job on Monday!