Busy At The Feeders

No walk today--well, at least not yet, but the birds have been busy at the feeders.  I've seen bluebirds, which apparently love the suet, white-throated nuthatches--which are very cool looking, all black and white striped--hairy woodpeckers, tufted tit-mice, chickadees, juncos, and....wait for it...a chipmunk!!!  I was so excited to see the chipmunk because it must mean spring is around the corner, even if we are getting ready for another weekend storm. 

I'm reading Laura E. Davis's chapbook, Braiding the Storm and it is fabulous.  She has fascinating titles such as "Upon Realizing Men Could See Through My White Skirt," and "I Am A Full Glass," and "Dear Outer Space," which is such a gorgeous prose-poemy kind of poem.  Each stanza from "Dear Outer Space" begins with variations of the phrase "I think about your" and I very much want to steal many lines and images from this poem.  But that's not even my favorite poem.  My very favorite is "The Vicenarian or My Twenties So Far," which is this incredible sort of a list poem consisting of 25 couplets that's just amazing.  She ends it with the line, "My heart resting on the kitchen table is a machine gun" which, pow!  I highly recommend buying this book. 

Also, I was lucky enough to be the winner of a Dancing Girl Press bundle of chapbooks (5!) and am reading The Five Parts of Love: Confabulating Sappho, in which each poem includes one of Sappho's fragments. I love Sappho, (I have Jim Powell's stunning translation) and this book is gorgeous.  Kristy Bowen, the fantastic editor of Dancing Girl Press, also sent me these gorgeous note cards and a bookmark which is just so sweet.  I can't wait to dive into the other four books I got: She Preferred to Read the Knives, Circumstances of the House and Moon, She Who Loves Her Father, and Yellow Ripe.  Man, those are such juicy titles, aren't they?

Dream With Water Beneath The Floorboards

Red matchstick I thumb alive and send
ahead of me through the dark little emissary,
little locket of light that lets the eye wick

to the cellar’s walls, the green line of mineral
where flood rises up waist-high. Groundwater
seethes through cracks in the mortar, laces
between stones, their flat smooth faces
already buried. All night I ferry

buckets to the surface. All night my fingers
seam together and I climb, my sleeping
like one long flight of stairs, my bucket

like a mouth that won’t drown. In the end,
I envied the bucket. The way all things
that are empty want to be filled.

Kara van de Graaf
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