Haiku Sonnet: Reading Li Po*

You were always drunk—
so the poems make it seem—
stuck in a winejar.
Pink blossoms or moon
in a black pond might summon
you to your senses,
but your wakefulness—
your sort of sober—felt too
tuned in to bear, like
carrying lightning
through nerves. Did wine help you to
heaven or save you
from it? Every moment was
time to drink again.
*Li Po (also Li Bo, [...]

Meme Guilt

I wish I were a better sport about memes. The tasks are interesting—even if they’re challenging—and I like reading other participants’ responses. Plus, memes are blogosphere-specific. I approve of anything calving posts from other sorts of writing.
But the meme I received from G at How To Survive Suburban Life [...]

Haiku Sonnet: The Big Top

As a child, I saw
just one circus, a show whipped
by snaking roads and
tired of carrying
itself between towns like ours.
The ringmaster roared
with boredom, his voice
ripped from rotten canvas. As
his wife—stuffed in sequins—
prepared to climb an
elephant, he pulled her stool
too soon. She fell and
broke her leg. The show ended—
her sharp cry so real.

14 Years Later

My older brother is a physician and told me once I shouldn’t expect to remain slim forever. Most men, he said, gain one pound for every year after 35. At the time I resisted—an inveterate athlete, I told him I’d be the exception—but, as with most of his statements about aging, [...]

Haiku Sonnet: On Reviewing Fagles’ Homer*

We’ve read the story,
should know. Amid the weapons
hung an unstrung bow—
Odysseus’s—
old but turned in servants’ hands,
oiled for use, waiting
for its moment in
a tale already written.
It couldn’t harbor
a deep, unseen crack,
wouldn’t snap in his hands, or
bend like one finished
with resisting. Only we
can picture another end.
*“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats

Thanks for Thanksgiving

Despite its dubious origins, Thanksgiving is a holiday for which I’m thankful.
It isn’t the days off, though for teachers like me, the break comes just as the last of my early-year energy gives out. As I begin to think I might lose my patience with students, when I can’t look at one more [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Ready

Every haiku a
vessel, rooms of buckets wait
for a leaky roof.
But there will be no
rain tonight. Tonight the moon,
through the window, sends
crescents of half-light
to illuminate buckets’
mouths, mouths that couldn’t be
any more open,
any more set to receive
life—too bad they’re mute,
deaf to summons. They’ll sit
and wait forever.

Bobbing in the Ocean

Derek Gordon, vice president of Technorati, reports that just over 99% of blogs receive no hits. If he isn’t pulling the statistic from his posterior, it’s a mighty sad fact—the blogosphere is a sea of bottled messages.
Technorati is tracking the sum of blogs—a figure that increased by 16% in the last two [...]

Haiku Sonnet: I Remember Winter

I remember winter
now that it’s here—the next word
in a song, a plea
for love you forget
until a character speaks.
Now I remember—
outside this window,
one leaf clung all winter. Wind
set it fluttering
like a hummingbird.
Its sociable flicker was
like life. One day
it flew away, and I thought—
it wouldn’t ever come back.

Finds: Thanksgiving in Perspective

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, I thought I’d include three sites about the holiday. Warning: approach them in the sequence they’re offered, and you may have a different vision of the day…or develop a different way to commemorate the day.
Here is a video from The History Channel, an account of [...]