Day to Day

March 21, 2009

This poem left me breathless.

From NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac:

Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, ‘We are All Writing God’s Poem’ by Barbara Crooker

Today, the sky’s the soft blue of a work shirt washed a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. On the interstate listening to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist say, “The universe is not only stranger than we think, it’s stranger than we can think.” I think I’ve driven into spring, as the woods revive with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy scarves flung over bark’s bare limbs. Barely doing sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound, and aren’t we just? Just yesterday, I read Li Po: “There is no end of things in the heart,” but it seems like things are always ending–vacation or childhood, relationships, stores going out of business, like the one that sold jeans that really fit– And where do we fit in? How can we get up in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do, put one foot after the other, open the window, make coffee, watch the steam curl up and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls in the open window, while the sky turns red violet, lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.

The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop for the thousandth time.

“Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, ‘We are All Writing God’s Poem’” by Barbara Crooker, from Line Dance. (c) Word Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

I especially love her use of colors– red violet, lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.

On another note, I’m sad that NPR’s Day to Day has ended it’s six year run! I loved that show. It played as I was leaving one of my teaching gigs.

Sigh.

Listen to one of the last episodes: Karen Grigsby Bates musing on her best moments with brilliant authors (there’s a really funny part where novelist Curtis Sittenfeld realizes she made a factual error in her latest book!).