It was gone for too long … not for me because I only really care as a byproduct of my son caring … but gone for too long for my hockey-mad boy. The hockey strike is over now tho’ and the shortened season is better than no season at all, you can be sure of that.

Do the doing things:
be alive in your body
Find a place to go and go there
to Dar-es-Salaam or Dearborn, Michigan
Sit on the tarmac in the time before up
Think of what you thought up and dreamed up

So many boats in my dreams, this last while. Boats and boats and then again boats. I like boats, always have (particularly those powered by muscle not motor), maybe as the result of having for a father a man who in his youth was a sailor or maybe as the result of my Piscean nature.

I’ve been thinking all my life about green and growing things and for weeks have wanted to see Wings of Desire for the millionth time just so I can hear the angel Damiel’s list of what he’s observed that day,

After the Alphabets
W.S Merwin

I am trying to decipher the language of insects
they are the tongues of the future

There’s no rational explanation for how much I love frogs. I mean, there might be a rational tidbitual oddment I could lay down for you  but all the tidy, comprehensible bullet points in the world wouldn’t do justice to how deeply fascinated and charmed and shivered I am by those little half-blood princes, those darling swimmers who leave the water to tuck the soft green of themselves into the grass so they can lie in wait for me, so they can leap in ambush and make me bark a laugh of surprise at their ridiculous bodies, hurled up from the grass, bounced high, airborne.

when twilight grass looks the way velvet feels or the way warm smooth metal can seem in a dream

when you sit outside in a day that’s almost night and the fireflies arrive

all the other places you never know in daylight open out to you

there in the glow

Once I woke up with the words “your fried arm” stuck in my brain so I looked up how to say “I love you” in as many languages as possible, to make myself feel better. It worked, too.

sometimes you have to lie on a bed
so your brain can be all in a floaty place

Because I love the sad and beautiful truth of nothing-can-stay.

I would be brief on the day I didn’t have a lot to say or, really, had a lot to say but wanted to make the thoughts in my head all compact the way a wintertime child can take a puff of snow and squeeze it into a ball of ice, to make it all hard and small.

So yes, I’m making a beautiful bookthing. It’s that wondermental thing known as: a labour of love.

You know how much I love words and the physical act of writing, how much I love the graphemic grace of  the thing that is written? Yeah, you do. And you know how much I like holding a pencil in my hand and making marks on a paper with it — marks with meaning, I mean — and also how much I like reading a paper full of writing from someone else’s hand? Well, I like all that very much, you know I do, but I like something else too:

Swarm
by Cheryl Coon

Dave Kinsey at Fecalface has a treat for you, me, and the lamppost:

In all the annals of object porn, there are no objects that incite greater lust in me than typewriters.

You know what I really love? I love to go to art galleries and museums to look at what humans have made, with intention. But I also love to walk out in the world and find the deliciousness of happy accident. I sure do. I really love both the incidental and the accidental. Like, really a lot I love them. All the funny found little bits and pieces of art or music or poetry that jump out at you and yell “Boo!” or maybe they peer around the corner and breathe “Pssst!” at you but however they approach you, they can all be filed under the heading “Ambush, such a lovely”.

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

I make playlists on my iPod and they’re often very theme-y because I am nothing if not a theme-y woman — I like to group and organise. I like to find patterns, or, in their absence, make them. Maybe that’s the curatorial urge. Or the librarian’s urge. Anyway, I have a playlist on my iPod called “river” and I listen to the songs on that playlist a lot, especially when I am despairing because those songs are very cathartic to hear and especially when I am all joyed-up because those songs are very cathartic to hear.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

Here’s a thing I just realised. Chet Baker had it right: let’s get lost. That’s what running is, for me: a getting lost, the way you can get lost in very few things, maybe only love and sex and music and physical exertion and the way the air smells in the woods in the fall or the way a cold lake feels on your body when you jump in naked and let all that cold swirl across all your bare skin to leave you gasping and shuddering in a strange beautiful release that’s almost like the moment of orgasm, in the pleasure/pain aspect of it and also in the being completely present in your body aspect of it.

A couple of nights ago, a friend e-mailed me with the news that singer Lhasa de Sela had died of breast cancer at her home in Montreal on January 1st, at the young age of thirty-seven. I had had a hard day and my head was full of black miseries, and this news, which I would under any circumstance find dreadfully sad, just undid me, and I cried a long, long time. Which in a strange way is fitting, not just in a crying-is-an-appropriate-response-to-death way, but in a to-hear-Lhasa-was-to-be-moved-by-her way. I’ve had her on my mind since then.

Dock Ellis Pitches a No-No on LSD
By Jilly Dybka
From Elysian Fields Quarterly

The ball’s big — like lobbing a volleyball.
And the batter’s box is so far away.
Tiny ball, red ball, white ball, rainbow ball.
Wasn’t even supposed to play today.
The batters are whiffing in slow motion
Because their strike zone is five miles wide.
The catcher is wavy like the ocean,
Before my release, have to time the tide.
Straight bat, bendy bat, big bat, little bat.
Feels like I’m pitching inside of a dream.
I’m flying as high as an acrobat,
My fingers feel every stitch in the seam.
I wonder what all the fuss is about?
I’m just trying to get the guy out.