Belated Poetry Friday

So, yesterday I wasn't online at all in a mix of doctor's visits for the ear infection that will not die (seriously, it's like I'm 7 again), grocery shopping, reading, and generally sleeping a lot. So, I missed Poetry Friday, but here's my belated entry, and my all time favorite poem:

"Losing Track" by Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down,

the tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.


Blue Rose Girls has an amazing roundup of everyone, too. So amazing, that I'm not copying it all down. Or, if you do a google blog search for Poetry Friday and limit to last 24 hours, you get an impressive list.

And, as bonus in this post (or a navel gazing distraction, take your pick) I'll tell you a little story about myself.

I went to a very small college in a very small town in the middle of a corn field. Lately, I discovered that Kelly knows exactly what I'm talking about. Anyway, second semester of my junior year, my friend John decided that the campus need some more poetry. He rounded up a group and we founded SITS (Shakespeare in the Sh**-er). The bathroom was the main communication forum, you see. That where the Student Health and Wellness Committee posted their newsletters (and their pleas for hand washing) and where the Student Government Association posted their joint board meeting minutes. We posted poetry. Every week for a semester, we rounded up oodles of poetry and plastered it in all the dorm room bathroom stalls on campus.

Then, senior year rolled around and Kate and John graduated, and I fell in love (and for some reason thought that my thesis, Classical Chinese, a history seminar, a Chinese calligraphy private lesson, a guided reading in Ancient Chinese Astronomy [under the guise of the physics department] and some other class, as well as working 20 hours a week sounded like a sane and rational plan)... anyway, SITS died, and I mourn it.

I miss Iowa.