Please please please, oh great internet, assure me that the huntsman spider is not ever and will never be found in colorado.
“ We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.
— Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
april-is:
Alone
Jack Gilbert
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
[The Dance Most of All, Jack Gilbert’s latest — and probably last — book came out earlier this month. Like all his writing, it’s spare and intense, thick with memory.]
A year ago today: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee
Two years ago: For Grace, After A Party, Frank O’Hara
Three years ago: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Four years ago: A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert
Dear April-is: please keep going all year. I love this poem & your efforts and I love how poetry in my inbox reminds me of how much I love poetry.
