Poem for Tuesday

The Round
By Stanley Kunitz

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed..."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

--------

Kunitz, a former US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, died on Sunday at 100. In an obituary at The Los Angeles Times here, poet Jay Parini was quoted as saying that Kunitz's poems "are rooted in earth, dirt and bodies. That gives his work a sensuousness I adore."

I have nothing really exciting to report. Wrote, edited, betaed, posted three articles -- Shatner visiting Israel to help set up therapeutic horse riding centers, scientists proposing antimatter rockets to go to Mars, and Star Trek stuff for sale that personally I think should have been a news bullet because now everyone who gets any license to sell Star Trek anything will want equal time. Younger son had his final Mad Science of the year and an after-school pizza party; older son had fencing, we carpooled with another boy in the neighborhood. I had leftovers from yesterday for lunch (bagel) and dinner (chicken). Also did three loads of laundry that I haven't folded yet because I got distracted watching Digging for the Truth (about the Holy Grail) and Beyond 'The Da Vinci Code' on the History Channel. Yeah, I am looking forward to that movie and I don't care who knows it and it's not even because of Ian McKellen or Paul Bettany or anything, though those are nice bonuses.











I've mostly missed the news in the past two days (President Santos vastly preferable to President Bush) but I hope everyone in Sao Paolo, Indonesia and New England is out of danger and no one in Florida has encountered any alligators. Is there any connection between the wildfires and the roaming gators? British newspapers have much better headlines: "Florida in fear as alligators go on killing spree", as if the alligators planned it! Maybe we can use the Halliburton detention centers for the terrorist alligator conspirators, whom I am quite sure did not vote for Jeb Bush.