I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.
When I was in high school I knew nothing of poetry, except a schoolgirl’s frustration at not being able to answer…
0 degrees and another glorious sunrise, which began with deep orange-red, turned redder, faded to rose-pink, then pale yellow and lifted soon enough to a white light. Your sun, wherever you are, has been or will be the same, but will announce its arrival differently, as it will its departure at the end of our individual and collective day.
I have been thinking about Richard Blanco’s poem, One Today since he read it at the inauguration yesterday. His words took me back to my childhood in Northern New Mexico – the Southern end of the Rockies – where many families were linked to the Earth in some way. Gardens were for growing vegetables, not just flowers. Acreage was often for chickens, and therefore eggs, and cows or goats, and therefore milk and cheese, and horses, and therefore alfalfa.
Forgetfulness: The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village, where there are no phones. Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and you watched the Quadratic Equation pack its bag. And even now, as you’ve memorized the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower, perhaps, the address of an Uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away, down a dark mythological river, whose name begins with an “L” as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion, where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night, to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. – Billy Collins, former two-term U.S. Poet Laureate
