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Dancing

Me: (Desperately trying to get another biker's attention with the bike bell to avoid running them over.)

Caleb: Mom - I think he has headphones in!

Me: Yep - that seems dangerous!

Caleb: Yeah mom! You might start dancing and fall off your bike.

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My favorites. Happy Father's Day!

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#friday #summer

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The sign of a successful week at Nana and Pop Pop's - the awesome family photo pose!

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So proud to see all that hard work paying off. What a show.

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School is OUT.

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Art Institute with my most favorite. Mid-week frolic!

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Ending a long day just right - feet up in a new pair of wedges!

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Oh my goodness.

Nancy Willard, a Knopf poet and novelist, and a beloved author of books for children, whose 1982 picture book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn received the Newbery Medal, died in February. Today we remember her with a pair of poems which remind us that the child’s view is essentially poetic, while the poet’s view retains something of the child’s curiosity and hope.

Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him

1. Do gorillas have birthdays? Yes. Like the rainbow, they happen. Like the air, they are not observed.

2. Do butterflies make a noise? The wire in the butterfly’s tongue hums gold. Some men hear butterflies even in winter.

3. Are they part of our family? They forgot us, who forgot how to fly.

4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it? God made the thread: O man, live forever! Man made the knot: enough is enough.

5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone will it go through the wires and bite someone’s ear? I have seen earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel. It loves what lasts. It does not love flesh. It leaves a ring of gold in the wound.

6. If I stand on my head will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head? Does the dream know its own father? Can bread go back to the field of its birth?

7. Can I eat a star? Yes, with the mouth of time that enjoys everything.

8. Could we Xerox the moon? This is the first commandment:

I am the moon, thy moon. Thou shalt have no other moons before thee.

9. Who invented water? The hands of the air, that wanted to wash each other.

10. What happens at the end of numbers? I see three men running toward a field. At the edge of the tall grass, they turn into light.

11. Do the years ever run out? God said, I will break time’s heart. Time ran down like an old phonograph. It lay flat as a carpet. At rest on its threads, I am learning to fly.

Swimming Lessons

A mile across the lake, the horizon bare or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches. No sand. No voices calling me back. Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair  push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns, an inch here. Or there.

You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life vest for your lazy little daughter. Under me, green deepened to black. You said, “Swim out to the deep water.” I was seven years old. I paddled forth

and the water held me. Sunday you took away one block, the front one. I stared down at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale, not fit for a place without roads. Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them except the toeless foot of the snail.

Tuesday you took away two more blocks. Now I could somersault and stretch. I could scratch myself against trees like a cat. I even made peace with the weeds that fetch swimmers in the noose of their stems while the cold lake puckers and preens.

Friday the fourth block broke free. “Let it go,” you said. When I asked you to take out the block that kept jabbing my heart, I felt strong. This was the sixth day. For a week I wore the only part of the vest that bothered to stay:

a canvas strap with nothing to carry. The day I swam away from our safe shore, you followed from far off, your stealthy oar raised, ready to ferry me home if the lake tried to keep me. Now I watch the tides of your body

pull back from the hospital sheets. “Let it go,” you said. “Let it go.” My heart is not afraid of deep water. It is wearing its life vest, that invisible garment of love and trust, and it tells you this story.

More on this book and author:

Browse other books by Nancy Willard.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Easter weekend!

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@urbanlibra

April 7, 2017: A Sunset, Ari Banias

A Sunset Ari Banias

I watch a woman take a photo of a flowering tree with her phone. A future where no one will look at it, perpetual trembling which wasn’t and isn’t. I have taken photos of a sunset. In person, “wow” “beautiful” but the picture can only be as interesting as a word repeated until emptied. I think I believe this. Sunset the word holds more than a photo could. Since it announces the sun then puts it away. We went to the poppy preserve where the poppies were few but generous clumps of them grew right outside the fence like a slightly cruel lesson. I watched your face, just out of reach. The flowers are diminished by the lens. The woman tries and tries to make it right bending her knees, tilting back. I take a photo of a sunset, with flash. I who think I have something to learn from anything learned nothing from the streetlight that shines obnoxiously into my bedroom. This is my photo of a tree in bloom. A thought unfolding across somebody’s face.

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On this day in:

2016: Coming, Philip Larkin 2015: The Taxi, Amy Lowell 2014: Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana, Joe Hutchison 2013: The Last Night in Mithymna, Linda Gregg 2012: America [Try saying wren], Joseph Lease 2011: Boston, Aaron Smith 2010: How Simile Works, Albert Goldbarth 2009: Crossing Over, William Meredith 2008: The World Wakes Up, Andrew Michael Roberts 2007: Hour, Christian Hawkey 2006: For the Anniversary of My Death, W.S. Merwin 2005: The Last Poem About the Snow Queen, Sandra M. Gilbert

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Yes.

April 1, 2017: Better Days, A.F. Moritz

Better Days A.F. Moritz Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas’ whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night’s one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where’s he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

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On this day in:

2016: Jenny Kiss’d Me, Leigh Hunt 2015: The Night House, Billy Collins 2014: Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls, Nico Alvarado 2013: Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare, Wendy Pratt 2012: A Short History of the Apple, Dorianne Laux 2011: New York Poem, Terrance Hayes 2010: On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes, Mary Szybist 2009: A Little Tooth, Thomas Lux 2008: The Sciences Sing a Lullabye, Albert Goldbarth 2007: Elegy of Fortinbras, Zbigniew Herbert 2006: When Leather is a Whip, by Martin Espada 2005: Parents, William Meredith

National Poetry Month! IT BEGINS.

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On my own this year. Single day. But still - tradition.

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First position. ❤

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Supporting my other Wildcat family today. GO CATS!

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Ready! Sorry Kentucky - please prove me wrong!

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Damnit.

Damnit, lululemon.