opening

there's something about creative writing teachers that seems to continue resonating in my life.

kay merrell, my creative writing teacher from high school (and probably one of the best women i will ever meet aside from my mother and a handful of other women, of course.) is one of them. and i write her name, hoping that maybe one day she'll google herself, and see this post. i'd be flattered if she read it. i hope she'd be flattered, too. i owe a lot of things to the woman who had a love for billy collins and told us stories of paris and new york and penny lane. my love of poetry, for one.

at the end of each semester, she would give us a trinket marbles for the first semester, a rock for the second and with each seemingly useless knicknack not useless to me, mind you, a poem of infinitely useful worth would come forth. i leave you with an excerpt from a poem that she wrote.

---------------

Years later
I still believe "good" and "bye"
are never meant to hold hands,
so I leave you with "good"
in a whispering stone.
My eyes will continue to dance
with days of wild writing
when our tiger tongues
found their prey,
those victimed words we greedily devoured,
tasting what we wanted to understand.
Place this in your road-mapped palm
where destiny lines are as endless
as London rains
and possibility peeks between each crevice.

Listen.

It will always spill its rambling secrets,
sun-streaked afternoons of watery laughter and inky memories
with a woman worn smooth
from too much loving.

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perfect. it's exactly how good and bye should be explained.
it's the good that i leave with you.

you don't know who you are.
but i do.

and hopefully one day you'll realize. there is no bye to these words of mine which have endless meaning. only good. and i hope the good that i leave with you can one day blossom into something better.

something marvelous.

waiting

i just realized i have two linda pastan poems on my wall. i'm a fan.
one is called Waiting for My Life. very appropriate, i think.

"I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.

Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled care about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like birdsong
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life."

-Linda Pastan

very appropriate, indeed. imagine the person in the poem is me. basically sums up how i feel about life right now.

I Heart Poems

I'm a big poetry fan, which I don't know if I've conveyed on my blog or not, but there it is. I. Love. Poetry. I spent a couple months during the semester in two classes that taught me more about poetry and helped me appreciate something that I already loved. One of my favorites is Robert Frost. I attribute this to the fact that "The Road Not Taken" was the first legitimate poem I ever memorized back in elementary school, and he kind of stuck with me.

I bought a book of his poetry last year on my 19th birthday, and I was reading it the other day and found this gem. I'm not sure why it hit me so hard, but I loved it. To me, it was so sincere and kind of an innocent portrayal of love, just by adding those three words at the end of each stanza. You may get something else out of it, because poetry is kind of up to reader interpretation (one reason why I love it), but here it is. :)

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long. -- You come too.