Speaking for Sarah

[apologies as usual for missing indents--does anyone know how to do this?]

To Kevin O'Leary, Wherever He Is

Denise Levertov


Dear elusive Prince of Ireland,
I have received
from Arizona
your letter, with no return address
but telling me
my name in Hebrew, and its meaning:
entrance, exit,
way through of
giving and receiving,
which are one.
Hallelujah! It's as if you'd sent me
in the U.S. mails
a well of water,
a frog at its brim, and mosses;
sent me a cold and sweet freshness
dark to taste.
Love from the door,
Daleth.

Haven't posted here at any length lately--I think I'm having one of those blogging crises you hear tell about. Partly this has been provoked by Sitemeter. I have had a sense of who is reading, because some people leave comments. Mostly, I have envisioned my audience as a cozy network of the few friends I have told about this and people whose blogs I read and/or other bloggers who have similar interests and pursuits and have found me through the network of hyperlinks that lead you from one blog to another. Now that I have discovered Sitemeter, though, and can see that there are people who land here from searching for a particular topic, I feel, well, exposed. This is really public, isn't it, even without names? I have enjoyed writing about my teaching and especially getting responses from people about what I have written. But, it occurs to me that someone, hypothetically, say, a student, even one of mine, might be looking for information on the internet about a particular author and stumble across my blog that way and recognize details about our class and, well, there goes anonymity.

Leave it to me to find an angle to worry about. I'll have to think about this a little, let it settle. Maybe stop looking at Sitemeter.

Mostly I just wanted to check in and say I'm still out here doing my thing: teaching, editing, worrying, taking naps when I can.

Here are some pictures taken during the snowstorm last week. The snow is mostly gone now, so I'm glad I got out with the camera on Sunday.

Yesterday I was sad and a friend sent me to this post at The Ice Floe. All I can say is, everyone should read it. Even if you're not sad.

For today's Friday poetry blogging, here's another one by Tess Gallagher. I borrowed Amplitude from the library to find "Black Silk," and I've been reading the collection all week.

Conversation with a Fireman from Brooklyn

He offers, between planes,
to buy me a drink. I've never talked
to a fireman before, not one from Brooklyn
anyway. Okay. Fine, I say. Somehow
the subject is bound to come up, women
firefighters, and since I'm
a woman and he's a fireman, between
the two of us, we know something
about this subject. Already
he's telling me he doesn't mind
women firefighters, but what
they look like
after fighting a fire, well
they lose all respect. He's sorry, but
he looks at them
covered with the cinders of someone's
lost hope, and he feels disgust, he just
wants to turn the hose on them, they
are that sweaty and stinking, just like
him, of course, but not the woman he
wants, you get me? and to come to that --
isn't it too bad, to be despised
for what you do to prove yourself
among men
who want to love you, to love you,
love you.

I know, it's not Friday, but a little extra poetry can't hurt, can it? This is a Tess Gallagher poem that I first saw and cut out of the pages of the The New Yorker many years ago. It's in her collection Willingly and also reprinted in Amplititude: New and Selected Poems.



Black Silk


She was cleaning -- there is always
that to do -- when she found,
at the top of the closet, his old
silk vest. She called me
to look at it, unrolling it carefully
like something live
might fall out. Then we spread it
on the kitchen table and smoothed
the wrinkles down, making our hands
heavy until its shape against Formica
came back and the little tips
that would have pointed to his pockets
lay flat. The buttons were all there.
I held my arms out and she
looped the wide armholes over
them. "That's one thing I never
wanted to be," she said, "a man."
I went into the bathroom to see
how I looked in the sheen and
sadness. Wind chimes
off-key in the alcove. Then her
crying so I stood back in the sink-light
where the porcelain had been staring. Time
to go to her, I thought, with that
other mind, and stood still.