GOAT SUMMER

Friends and Strangers, I don't know what's going on with me, as I haven't been here in over a month! I wrote a wedding. And then I agonized over it. And then I sucked it up and performed it. I'm envious and glowing like some green jewel at 4amSonnets for his June poems, but mostly I spent my early summer working on this wedding. Now my head's full of HAMLET and summer essays to grade, a couple of reviews and a new essay I'm working on, but the real work is in a current just peripheral and intense enough to make me both depressed and crazed--

Here is what one of my colleagues at school wrote me about my wedding to assuage my panic:

"Your poem is intensely romantic. It is also, as you
wondered, morbid in that its backdrop seems like
sunset more than sunrise. In other words, your poem
is a cabernet more than a pinot."

That made me feel great! I'll take that any day--Basically it's a pagan vision of marriage, something Prufrock worries is impossible--and I think my sister had a couple of ultra-conservative midwestern republican in-laws none too happy about it, but in the end we were happy.




"The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful . . . and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.

I go from bedside to bedside. . . I sleep close with the other sleepers, each in turn;
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.

I am a dance. . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast.

I am the everlaughing. . ."

WHITMAN