"the love a mirror of our valley"

[bronze_ribbons]

Another J. Patrick Lewis poem, this one from A Kick In the Head:

Epitaph for a Book Editor

Miss Spelling's
Exclamation points
Were myriad!!!
She lived on
The margin.
And died.
Period.

Falafel and buffalo wings.

Drafted two new poems and a Dark Is Rising/Harry Potter crack!drabble. Heh.

Sixty Photographs by Alfred A. Knopf (1975). On visiting the Mann and Hesse families in 1932: "...what a pity I did not arrange to become Hesse's American publisher then and there, but the publisher doesn't live who hasn't made similar mistakes, though few ever talk about them." And he considered Henry Mencken photogenic, and Sigrid Undset "became the life of the party" if a conversation turned to Emerson or Thoreau, and Walter de la Mare "used to ask the most outrageous royalties with a smile that was adorable."

Everyone in the the album is now gone, I think, except for John Updike, Shirley Ann Grau, and Muriel Spark. I also found out this afternoon that someone I used to supervise passed away last month. None of this is a surprise, and not a single one of any of these people were close to me -- and yet I find myself staring at the photographs, enchanted by the vitality and intensity in so many of their faces, and dwelling on how it wasn't that long ago, and yet, and yet...