it's the great pumpkin

A must watch -- at least once a year.

unfathomable discoveries

"Auntie made me believe we live in a discoverable world, but that most of what we discover is an unfathomable mystery that we can name -- even defend against -- but never understand."
--Harry Crews, A Childhood

well-chosen beats many

"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
--George Eliot

want

"We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move."
Nick Hornby, The Long Way Down

soul food

Sleep Positions

This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses.

In Iowa on pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.

This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.

O hairdresser, auditor, hard-knuckled puller of crab traps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(read by the poet for the WSU Visiting Writer Series this evening)
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Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(poet's comment: "You can't write a poem called 'Love' until you're over a certain large age."
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"The truth is horizontal and vertical."