i have gone marking your body with crosses of fire

It is still hard to translate from my head to the blank white "update blog" screen, I think.

In other news, tomorrow is Caturday. Don't laugh at me, I will tell my horse to bite you. I am sad because I am sick and I can't go to karate tonight so I am sitting here not knowing what to do.

Today was a little sad when my Classics professor expressed her doubt that any of us read poetry. I've always read poetry -- maybe not classical love poetry, until now, but give me a break; it's hard to get through if you haven't been familiarized with all those references already. But I've done Keats and both Shelleys, Blake and Marlowe and Marvell and all those other silly dead white men I had to read in high school.

And by myself I fell in love (back in those days when I thought love grew from nothingness and lasted forever) with Shakespeare's sonnets -- I have a complete book of them, each carefully scanned and annotated in my twelve-year-old handwriting. Pablo Neruda still makes me cry and one day I want to read him in the original Spanish because I *know* I am missing things. I spent a week translating T. S. Eliot's French poetry but I still love The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock like none other. I have Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop sitting on the shelf for the times when I need to listen to things that intelligent women have to say. I still look for James Wright's "A Blessing" every time I go to a bookstore, and I can't read Ezra Pound without wishing for the days when A. and I wrote so freely and so together.

I reject a world that lives without poetry. I fantasize about joining the Renegade Poet Society, those masterful night poem-chalkers who use e. e. cummings and Rainer Marie Rilke to vandalize construction walls. And most densely of all, I know those swaying, rhythmic poems that bring us to the sacred, those studied poems that are prayers. Those catholic ones that are milennia old and transliterated directly, those pagan ones that make us divine with ecstasy, ecstatic with the divine.

Last but, naturally, not least, I am always writing poetry. I am pulling metaphor from thin air and spinning nothingness into somethingness and back into infinity again. I am recording that which is in the past (the smell of blood, deeper than roses) and those things that are still coming (my first Paris in Seoul). How could this ever be alien to me?

listening to: Buffalo Soldier // Bob Marley & The Wailers
reading: The Joy Luck Club // Amy Tan