Why should the fire die

After a day of slow-going research on poetry, I needed the actual stuff. 

Even reading quickly, it's time consuming just to read and summarize one article. Let alone the masses of books and websites and journals out there. So I spent the day immersed in a collection of interviews with poets from the early 1970s (in which Allen Ginsberg feverishly declared that all the oceans would be dead by 2000 and the apocalypse is here and if only people would recycle their bottles maybe we could avert disaster), and reading articles with titles like "Song, Ritual and Commemoration in Early Greek Poetry and Tragedy." 

So I needed to remember why I am doing this. I fished out my high school copy of Sound and Sense and re-read some of the stuff that made my heart stop four years ago, before I knew anything about poetry, or even liked it (yes, I used to hate the stuff. But I also used to loathe Kait, who has been a dear dear friend for nigh on ten years now. What can I say? I deal in extremes). I read "the mother," by Gwendolyn Brooks ("Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get"), and discovered another villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop.

And then. I re-found "Sorting Laundry," one of those poems I love and cannot say why. I have loved it from the first reading when I was 16 or 17. The first stanza is my favorite.

Folding clothes,

I think of folding you

Into my life. 

Simple, no? And yet I love it so much I couldn't for the life of me be objective. I quote it to myself when I'm walking around the house, or going to class, or yes, folding laundry. And each time I hurt because I love this poem so much. Whew. Go read it, that's all I ask. Just don't tell me if you don't like it.

***

In other news, the smoothie obsession is still going strong (today's lunch = blueberry banana oatmeal, with the ubiquitous Greek yogurt and vanilla soymilk. Purple but good). Dad is watching Shane - oh good, here comes another brawl (I love Westerns). The Sweet Dog has not indulged his lust for chicken blood recently (though he does show up for breakfast each morning covered in mud and obscenely happy). And the moon is waxing, not waning. 

If you were to leave me, 

if I were to fold

only my own clothes,

a mountain of unsorted wash

could not fill

the empty side of the bed.