a little skip for your step

There are a few things I've been wanting to start for a while. I'd like to memorize a poem a day. Well, at least a stanza a day. I came across this article while hopping around poetry blogs, and it resonated with me. There's something so enchanting about the repetition, recitation, and rhythm involved. The poems become yours to shuffle through in your head - roll around your tongue, swish between your cheeks. A channel to the poet across time, space, distance. Like reading aloud, intimacy abounds.

I'd also really like to learn to identify birds, flowers, and trees (all plants for that matter, I suppose). Maybe it's the same sort of inclination. A desire to hold those names and images, delicate scents and feel, in my head, internalized, make them mine without having them physically in my hands.

For the past I don't know how many years, I've had an increasing problem with spoken and written language. Sophomore year of college I learned the vocabulary of semiotics, and reading and discussing Saussure and Irigaray, among others, helped me vocalize that plaguing intangible distrust for the confines of language.

While I'm consistently preoccupied with language's inefficacy and frustrated that natural feelings, meaning, and interaction are trapped by arbitrary words, I can't help but love these classification systems.

I can't explain it, but there's something inexplicably romantic to me about these names. Maybe it's uniting the natural world in my daily discourse. Integrating language, man-made and enforced, with the mysterious and beautiful. Maybe words can't rationalize it.

(here)

the key to this girl's heart

Peonies

By Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

to break my heart

as the sun rises,

as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open ---

pools of lace,

white and pink ---

and all the day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes

into the curls,

craving the sweet sap,

taking it away

to their dark, underground cities ---

and all day

under the shifty wind,

as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,

and tip their fragrance to the air,

and rise,

their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

gladly and lightly,

and there it is again ---

beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.

Do you love this world?

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,

and softly,

and exclaiming of their dearness,

fill your arms with the white and pink flowers

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,

their eagerness

to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are

nothing, forever?

(here)