Review of David Ray's New & Selected

Cool beans. My write up on David Ray's selected poems in up on Rattle now.

Blackberry Eating - Friday Finale (Late)

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.

10 Minute Spill

Today marks the third day in a row I have been jogging after too too much time off. I am working through some ankle pain but am very encouraged.

I am reading Umberto Saba. Yum yum.

New (to me) songs that I am digging ...

This Love is Fucking Right, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Goodnight Moon, Shivaree

Am laying off the hops indefinitely.

Got my first nibble on eLance today.

Rain Rain Rain...

means worms worms worms. Tonight I took Whit out to the curb and we hunkered along through the dirt and grass with the flashlight, snatching up nightcrawlers for fishing. I did most of the plucking. But Whit finally got the hang of it after having many snap back into the dirt and disappear. It was a beautiful thing.

Wow, Phantastic

Hey I love Black and White as much as the next guy but this shit is almost scarier in flesh tone. Feast your eyes, gloat your soul on my acursed ugliness!

The Mower - Friday Finale

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time

P Larkin

On Earth - Friday Finale

I am hoping to get in the habit of closing out each week with a Friday poem.


ON EARTH

Resurrection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the April
called her eyes, forget
forget—
but how
How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died.

Franz Wright

Rainer Woodruff, June 4, 1998 - July 14, 1998

Back in May, I posted about Amy Issacson Price, a librarian at our branch who recently committed suicide – three years after her young son died. I knew her well enough to feel her absence now, but not well enough to know she was in so much pain. We have this in common, losing a child. My infant son Rainer died back in 1998 from a rare mitochondrial disorder. Today is his birthday and he would be 11. So happy birthday Rainer Walker Woodruff.

Last year, as part of my ongoing grief work, I started volunteering at the Akron Children’s hospital, doing in-hospital visits in the neo natal ICU and regularly visiting the home of a young man with Duchene’s MD. I stuck with it for about a year and a half. Then, between losing my job and having this nagging feeling I just wasn’t where I belonged with my volunteer work, I decided to take a leave.

Amy’s death turned me around and now I am getting back into volunteering -- but in a different vein. Beginning very soon I should be doing follow up calls to bereaved parents as part of the hospital’s growing bereavement services program. It will do me good and maybe I can help someone along the way.

Thinking of you son. Thinking of you too Amy.

Lebron James

Here's a little addendum to the post below about Lebron James redefining competitor.

I’m a winner, King James proclaimed. So, there you go. That’s his reason for rushing out of the conference finals without so much as a nod to Dwight Howard(notes) and the Orlando Magic. That’s his reason for marching to the bus and letting the Cleveland Cavaliers’ spare parts take care of his responsibilities in the interview room.

I'm a Winner

"It’s hard for me to congratulate somebody after you just lose to them,” he said. “I’m a winner. It’s not being a poor sport or anything like that. If somebody beats you up, you’re not going to congratulate them. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a competitor. That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense for me to go over and shake somebody’s hand."