Monday, April 16, 2012

Heavy Red Chair

It's sort of a back-and-forth gray day in real life on this Blue Monday in the blog. But it's also a Random Coinciday and a Poetry Someday for me, as yesterday I wrote a poem called "How To Read Me" (in the ongoing tear-your-hair-out inspiring adventure of writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month) and today I found the lovely poem "How to Read a Poem" in Ruth's blog, synch-ro-ni-zing.

I hope she won't mind me quoting a chunk of it here:


He is telling you something
of where he has so recently been,
where you are desperately
trying to go in your perfectly
silent and heavy red chair.

You can go and read the whole thing there.  (There's a picture of a baby!) 

6 comments:

Mark Kerstetter said...

Just read the poem. It's so beautiful, so true, and so good. "Fossick the meaning in his fists" is a great line.

Kathleen said...

I love that line, too, Mark! And, of course, I went and looked up the word "fossick," but not right away. Not during my first, second, and third readings of the poem itself, all joy and now.

It is worth the wait and worth the digging to find out the meaning of "fossick" in this context!!

Maureen said...

Ruth nailed it!

And "fossick" is perfect. I love learning something new by reading a poem.

Kathleen said...

Me, too, Maureen! And I agree. That IS how to read a poem!!

Ruth said...

Yippee!

It IS a Poetry Someday, for me too. So I see this here from you, and that you wrote a poem yesterday called "How To Read Me" (YAY), and now I'll tell you that in the English department where I work, in an old building that is being torn down in the coming year (sad, sad, sad, all that oak trim), we just had a literary graffiti event, writing on the walls of department rooms. I wrote out a passage of Diane Wakoski's poem (she who taught in our department) "Blue Monday" which is what prompted my poem "Driving with Pink Angels" which somehow prompted "How to read a poem."

Ahhhh.

Thank you!

Kathleen said...

Oh, how I love this kind of synchronicity!!