Gay for Wallace Stevens

Clees kept making fun of me all week, saying how I am "gay for poetry" every five years. It's true. A poem can carry you above the clouds all day long if you are that kind of guy and I am that kind of guy. You can read a thousand poems and not feel anything, but you only need just one poem to hit you over the head.

I almost have Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird memorized. Clees who is not gay for poetry keeps refusing an impromptu recital. I feel just like Grover going about asking, "Did anyone order a poem. A poem about blackbirds?"

national poetry month

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I've put below my favorite.

Ode to Socks by Pablo Neruda
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.

Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.

I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.

My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
sea blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:

thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.

They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.

Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.

I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.

Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.

So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking
about
a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.

The Freer Jami

In a rare reprieve from Auntie Diaper Duty, Hugo took me to see a few pages of the Haft Awrang at the Freer Gallery. After days of enforced Elmo and Baby Einstein, I almost cried seeing these exquisitely painted folios.

Anyway I got all inspired to start the wikipedia entry on Haft Awrang and upload a bunch of carefully cropped closeups to the wikimedia.