blueberry picking with finnegan-almost-five/ love-spots

 small story of belief.  i believe the act of creation itself is what sustains me and i have a very strong belief that it will continue to do so for the rest of my days.  this, i think, may be one of my luckiest things.  i often go walking at gray's lake and one day recently i did, and i had the sudden thought of how courageous we are all are, just to simply choose to live and die and be.  i thought of each person i love, and i sent thoughts out to them, and to people i haven't talked to in years, people who i've somehow disconnected from. it felt both good and bad to do this.  but having love-spots in your mind is lucky too; it isn't just a loss. isn't this stunning, visceral? one main thing i remember from the shakespeare performance we went and saw: the idea that mercy itself is found in the prayer that asks for mercy.  what about pam rehm's line: " the hand becomes rock/ or milky seed." stunning, visceral. the word behold is one of my favorites, i can't help it.  melissa: "A nest/ or a breathing of leaves. But I live/ anywhere else." and then, stunning, later "whether or not belief rebounds. The lily will."  so far every year since finn was born we have gone blueberry picking.  if i were a different sort of person i would put up a picture from each year of blueberry picking with finnegan.   there have certainly been times of doubt and/or co-dependence in my life but right now isn't one of them.  finn put on a play--he was the fins of a fish in one part of it.  in another part he was a cow and he had to ask the spider if she wanted to eat some grass.

summer threads/ summer lines

summer thread story.  this summer is a green and classic summer.  we found a colony of cliff swallows at ledges state park and the beautiful charmed little city they've built of mud above the creek.  a thought i think often: one thing i should do today is write poems. i mean as  a practice, the urge to do this as a practice. i shall write you a letter deep in the poem forest.  how far down do the patterns go?  i have an urge to cut out words.  i have an urge to not have anything. to not quarrel. to think of my audience as other people's souls.  perhaps fanny howe helped me come to this when she wrote: "One could think of the material world as something like an air that one runs through at high speed, in order to get past it. This thought would reverse the usual sense of being as being stuck in a body moving along with time." i want to write songs of the human beings, i want a typewriter.  we saw buffaloes on the preserved prairie, saw milkweed and butterflies.  we went boating. i would like to write letters all the time; perhaps that is all i wish to write.  call it the everybody thread.  writing a kid's book too called perhaps "the invisible world".  i want to be old-fashioned and write letters to those i admire.  what do you think of what alice notley said? ". . .world dissolution/ of national borders through computers. . ./conquered, everyone conquered--"    i love this bit of one of her poems "In the aetherial or crystalline / morning, room floats/ into the other/ time. This is the act of writing/ the only poem." do you like the word person or human better? an urge to do something with air.  children. poems. love. other forms of creation. i've felt hard truth rocks land in my self-stem.  i want to write an essay called "sounds, music, water."  just like thoughts invade, poems invade.  the beginning of the poem is the word door.  a thought: i would like to feel loss accurately.  the snail eating a mushroom in the forest, our first greeter in the forest.  if water were to get a job, what sort of work do you think water would consider? sometimes i feel more like i belong to the water family than the human family.  there is so much grass in iowa.  the other day we went out for a day at the beach, but the lake was full of nitrates, starkly visible dayglo run-off from farm fields.  i have found so many words related to the word thread but i will write my ten favorites: hymn, mitosis, filament, nematode,trellis, thread o' blue, chromatin, granule, lineage, line.