Angieville

Talking about reading with Will put me in mind of this exquisite poem by Diane Swan that I ran across a year or so ago on Kristin Cashore's blog . I was transfixed reading it for the first time. And I think of it, the lines running hauntingly and beautifully through my head, all the time now.  *** Soup and Bread by Diane Swan Christopher's girlfriend has a green cockatiel and he tells the family at dinner that cuttlebone-- what the bird sharpens its beak on-- comes from a squid. I am startled. He knows more than I have told him. One lunchtime years ago he called me an  instructicon and often I did talk as if my children were tall glass vases formed to contain my twigs of trivia, long branches of perennial wisdom. What I wanted, though I didn't know it then, was that clean clothes, knowledge, bread, everything good would come to them through me. Now they are walking ahead toward the theater, two young...

I love Billy Collins. But it took Chelle referencing it in her Reading Meme to lead me to this gem. I read it for the first time two days ago. Left me breathless. Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes by Billy Collins First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before my hands can part the fabric, like a swimmer's dividing water, and slip inside. You will want to know that she was standing by an open window in an upstairs bedroom, motionless, a little wide-eyed, looking out at the orchard below, the white dress puddled at her feet on the wide-board, hardwood floor. The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, a...