grape leaves

Amidst all your bounty -- and it was bounteous, the way you always had homemade goods to distribute, bottles of wine to share, a smile and a limmerick for drunken friends and strangers alike, sharing of your sweet bread and mellow wine -- you were the stingiest man I've ever loved.

You masked your withdrawal in droves of generosity, you drowned your guests in welcome, and you made me feel the most welcome of all. At the same time, you obfuscated with your eyes, circumnavigated with your words, and did everything in your power to appear open and willing while doing nothing in your life to be so. It was the perfect ruse, and you wore it as well as you wore those sexy cutoffs you gardened in (a spectacle appreciated by neighbors and friends of mine alike, who always seemed to stop by when you were outside glistening with a light coat of sweat and orange dirt accentuating your tan).

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dating professors

Me:  It's not fair that so much in a small supposedly
neutral midwestern town reminds me of you ...I miss you.

Him:
a) Nothing's fair.
b) I'm very, very happy that you do.
c) Me too.
d) You give good pocket.

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naive diatribe

A snippet of a naive but heartfelt diatribe in response to a friend's query today:

I guess my response to the student who thinks poetry is a waste of time could be some diatribe about the value of human expression and how human cognition is closely related to our modes of expression, so we learn so much about what it means to be human when engaging with fiction and other types of cultural products, even if we don't find personal interest or beauty, etc., etc. Or, that the thorny problems of being human are often best (most interestingly? poignantly?) addressed not in a documentary (although those are valuable), but in a piece of writing that seems to do something other than tell a story.

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invito lectore

I'm not sure why I've stopped writing my blog. At first sign of the slow-down, I raided my own past and stole posts from less bloggy (and more social) spaces, migrating them slowly over to this, "the blog" that was to be my means of expression. The space that was to serve as the anonymous locus of my meandering mind, the poetic wrecks of my love life unfurling, the beginning of my fictionalized autobiography, even. I've let it go silent.

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