A bag of leaves

Vaughn returned from Nana's today with a Ziplock full of orange, yellow, and red leaves. I didn't mow the lawn for like the twentieth day in a row—it makes a great pretend jungle. The Cowboys' first team didn't look so hot this time out. Could be a long season, especially if T-New misses significant time. A few things conspired to have me thinking autobiographically today, from Reginald Shepherd's "Working Class Hero" blog post to Kent Johnson's "competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters" in the new Absent issue to Lisa Jarnot's post with pros and cons of academia—the universities are packed with worse poets and minds: it's a sad commentary that she hasn't landed a full-time gig by now. Also, up late last night reading how Creeley “never forgot Williams’ contention that ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity . . .’ ” What have I never forgotten? There must be something substantial at the core.

In Honor of the 2006 Football Season

 
2005

Poetry could not
sustain me through
the dark hours of
the Cowboy season.

When lusty Panther
cheerleaders got
busted, I barely
noticed the void

chicken-scratched
across its once-blank
check
          or how I felt
setup.