Another Sunset

Lovely fast party tonight for Taylor's 23rd birthday. Jill made Chinese chicken salad and lemon bars. Daylann brought her special deviled eggs and toasted cheese on Ciabatta Bread. Cousins and aunt came. Kevin and Ian, also, and a neighborhood kid, who almost burned his gullet on the hot mustard with sliced pork and sesame seeds, and then finished the rest of the plate.  A growing boy. And on the way home this sun was setting. Just so.

And I could have sworn I saw a beaver swimming away from me upstream just before dinner. Will be checking. And checking.

The new American Poet is here. And Brenda Hillman is in it because she got this year's fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for distinguished achievement. Which pleases me very much!

Here is a Hillman sample from the periodical:

The Unbeginning

--or maybe you could just
give up on beginnings. After all

this notion that things start
and end somewhere
has caused you so much trouble!

Look at the wild radish in the fields out there.
Isn't it always row
and row of pastel pink-
yellow-blue
like some bargain
print of itself, in new pillowcases, on sale;

and you stumble
through it thinking art must come
from the book of splendor
or the book of longing
until the rhythms curve

and the previous music
hasn't ended yet:

the whir that blackbirds make,
as they land, sound like velcro,
like a child undoing
velcro from the winter jacket

(from the hood
of a winter jacket)

From Loose Sugar, by Brenda Hillman, reprinted in American Poet, Spring 2013, page 34.

OK. Here you have a poem that starts with a dash and abjures beginnings. that ends with a close parenthesis, that strings three colors together with hyphens, whose only period is near the beginning, which has a colon and a semi-colon and an exclamation point, but asks a question without a question mark. And yet everything works perfectly!! I might not even NEED a beginning! I'm in love!
Good night!