My new friend is teaching me about permaculture.

Are we close because we hold this thread in common? If there is already so much distance, even between us, is there hope for me to connect with those I don't share threads with? Over whose lands I've never crossed; never left?



How can I sing to those of you I've never met?



Anne Carson, a poet I like, writes:

"We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here's why. It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it? Herodotos begins history with such a lock. First sentence:

Of Herodotos of Halikarnassos' history this [is] the showing forth, so that deeds done by men not go extinct nor great astonishing works produced by Greeks and barbarians vanish, and in particular on account of what cause they went to war with one another.
(1.1)

He says he wants to lock deeds to showing and prohibit all of it flowing away into nothing. But the relation of the parts of this sentence, of this project, to one another is obscure: [is] at the start added by me, the first sentence of history has no main verb. What action links him to extinctions and vanishings the historian does not exactly say. He does say, in particular, that it has to do with what cause."



Do we write for history? For those of you "fifty years hence...one hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence"? Can we write for now, now?

Is there a way to do both?























I am not one of those who thinks poetry has no power, in the world.
I do not think poetry does anything.
I do not think poetry can inspire.
I do not think poetry can help it.
Do I contradict myself?
I hold my Big Gulp in my hand.
I do not hold my ampersand.
& when the time has come to stand
I will be sitting with my pen

& and & and & and


















I am one of those who thinks actions speak louder than words;
And I am one of those who thinks words speak.
I am one of those who believes in words;
and who believes in action
& who doesn't believe in anything.

I am of my time;
Like you, I am of my time
I am unlike you & like you.



















I am a man with little hands
I identify American
I have degrees to speak and mount
and roll up in my hands of dirt.

This is how I've come to speak this way:
advantages unfair; a loving mother
...with both my parents still intact.


I must seem a circus clown to you!
Who've been locked for years in oceans blue
Or behind bars, or locked up ears
Or used to used to something new!

It must seem lame
The way I speak
As if my words
Were doing do.

And yet you must understand part of them;
surely you understand nearly half of them!

Words: you must understand next-to-none-of-me.
I must relearn my ways to speak.














I thought for National Poetry Month, I would do something American, and different.
I thought I would write a poem, every day, and that part of it I would not write, but would be written for me, by others.
I encourage you to try it, it has been very curious...