A Mess, Spilled

Image of the Day:  some bird in the deep woods, calling, calling.


Dreams:  We had forgotten to have someone come into our house while we're away and take care of our pet monkey.  So I leave early--a campground?--and go home and the fridge is a mess, spilled pasta all over the place.  I can't find the monkey and am super trepidatious.... (We do not own a pet monkey, fyi.)


From an interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths in the recent American Poetry Review:
"Creatively, I had to let go of trying to control myself on the page.  And to give up any attempts to control other people's experience of me" (18).


From Women of Will:  Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays by Tina Packer:
"[Shakespeare] was an artist, and as with all artists, the conflicts they hold beg for attention, so they can be examined, perceived, made whole, made use of"(43). 


I had deja vu when I read this poem and I don't know why...

In the Home for Elderly Vehicular Manslaughterers by the Sea
       

The guilt, like the sand, is in everything,
being so near, as they are, to the ocean,
being so close, as they were, to the end
of their lives, before they took the lives
they took. Someone should have taken
the keys away. In many cases, they tried—
but the old, mottled, gnarled knuckles
clenched, closing reflexively around
that silver promise, its heft, its glinting
mountainous teeth. And they held on to it.
Now the guilt, like the sand, is on their hands
and on their lips. It's the grit in the food
they can't eat. Lucky the demented ones,
with no idea, no memory, blithely chewing.

Paul Hostovsky