poetry + bus + enigma + fires + cats

In preparation for the Poetry Bus Tour, happily coming to Missoula this Wednesday, I am perfecting my best pie-baking skills. Tomorrow, I will be making a fruit salad to top all fruit salads. And thus, my menu continues to grow.

This week I've been reading Wallace Stevens, including his heartbreaker of a poem, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven". If you can, read it, re-read it, cry, sigh, fix yourself an egg nog (of course it's off-season for that sort of thing, so it may be difficult). In it, Stevens searches for the essence in language, and for the moment when an object is simply itself. He gets away with the line "The enigmatical / Beauty of each beautiful enigma". And he has a poem about citrus, too. I'm also going old school with some Emily Dickinson and Yeats. Neruda has a nice ode to celery in Residence on Earth, too.

I'm gleeful to report I have an office now. My office mate noticed on our window crank there is an arrow pointing outside with the word "truth" etched in below it. The font is so particular and tiny, all caps "TRUTH" and the arrow is this big heavy thing. I find this a peculiar, fascinating little addition to our office. I wonder what the window manufacturer was trying to say when they added this on the metal.

Fire season is going crazy here, and the wind is smelling like a fireplace tonight. And my skin is dry and pissed off. And I'm always thirsty.


And, as always, there's this: stuffonmycat.com


The Dylan album "Love and Theft" isn't too shabby either. I've had it on repeat for a couple of days now.