Quote: John Hollander Poem: Angel at the Door

John Hollander said, "I want my poems to be wiser than I am, to know more about themselves than I do."








Angel at the Door
Who visited my dreams last night?
The coolness of sheets on this summer
Respite, cuddled my guest towards my door
Of despair.
She, for that gentleness can only be a she,
Kissed my brow so furrowed, her lips
Of dew unparched my lines of worry.

Spending the night on a stool by fears
Door; letting one sleep upon her lap
And then, guiding it to my dreams.

Quote:John Ashberry Poem:The Flying…

John Ashberry “But when you do really need to know the essential nature of a thing. . . you'll be glad you / wasted so much time in youth jotting down seemingly unrelated random characteristics of things, / rested your elbows at the windowsill looking out over everything that was going to be night.”



The Flying…

My family was the Flying Willenda’s
Of the ground.
Watching another immigrant family balance
On a tightrope of survival
Holding each other in anticipation.

Asending to do such feats
Always seemed like over
The top. My family
Hid in plain sight
Or took a falling via open
Fist or verbal assault
From our ringmaster.
There were no tented audiences
To ooh and awe,
Just the familial that knew
Their situation of disappear
Or bow silently.

One thing lacking
By Wallenda senior
Was a circus whip- dad
Had an oak stick
For Christ sake.

Margaret Wise Brown/Poem: Reverant Road

Margaret Wise Brown helped make children's books profitable, because she understood that children experience books as sensual objects. She invested in high-quality color illustrations, and she printed her books on strong paper with durable bindings, so that children could grab, squeeze, and bite their books the way they did with all their toys. And then, in 1947, she published her own book, Goodnight Moon.



Reverent Road


Mostly on Sundays
stuffed in a black
fifty-five Ford.
Some of us with rosaries
others kept track on fingers.
Destination; our sister’s house
by route of Lake City Way.
We saw no lake or skyscrapers.
The drive was longer than the five decades
we prayed.

All praise to Mary fades
as we approach railroad tracks.
Dad slows the car, like a bus
laden with children.
These were dad’s tracks:
Northern Pacific, Burlington Northern,
names that filled the pause
between beads. We, ever familiar
bowed till tires bumped no more
and tracks disappeared into
the great asphalt way.

Dad’s beliefs chugged in my mind,
his gods of steam and diesel-
gods of destination and strength.
His creation brought forth
from steel tracks.


When cancer struck my father;
a derailment of mind from reason,
it rolled him onto deaths spur.

A Story about the Body By Robert Haas

A Story about the Body


The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

Robert Hass

Quote:Edith Wharton Comment: TA

There are two ways of spreading the light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton

As advent begins tommorow, it is good to read about light. That on a cold day like today a flicker is always present. What is light a metaphor for me? It is the possibility that it grows on the plans of the driest imagination. That it can become a major front; a storm aflame or it can be a couple wandering the streets looking for a place to rest and prepare for a birth, while trusting a dream. Which is most definantly light, as it best. TA