I've been spending the past couple of days in the mountains. Same again today.

Google is fun.

You know sometimes you just want to write something in a way that you don't normally write. I suppose that is the thesis behind my bursting out in my quasi verse (and yes there is a meter to it, believe it or not). I suppose it is the Spring break of being all poetic. Like I said previous "You can get away with more/Singing." It is no accident, of course, that lyrics are poetry. I'm taken back to Marianne Moore, however (pardon the disregard for formatting):

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base­
ball fan, the statistician --

(Poetry)

The paradox in her poem, of course, is that all of the things that we don't understand are not useful, but somehow useful. They just are, like poetry is, I suppose.

In the Icelandic Sagas certain characters are wont to burst out into verse--particularly when they are about to bash someone's head in. Is there something comforting to it? Something that assures?

He watched a movie the other day
About the transmigration of the soul:
A little girl burned alive in a fire
Moves on too soon, too fast, too hurt

While Another little girl,
Different but same, alive but dead,
Screams as she sleeps the scream
Of the small girl burned in the fire
Searing her hands on cold, speckled glass,
The mother recites the mea culpa

He backed the movie up then, silencing
The mother in the rewind. She sobbed
In awkward reverse gasps replaying
Her confession as if she were taking it back
Taking back her own guilt

Then The tape slid forward and she
Jerked back to give her guilt away again
He chanted with her having heartily
Offended God and beat his chest three times

And then the movie played out
And the little girl died again
And peace was not found
But only shattered glass

He sat
Disfigured
Unforgiven
Unmoved

In case you didn't figure it out, that thing below is for the WASH thing. Cordelia is a trooper.

Some where, back there, next to long
Abandoned coats, mothballed in their disuse
Like so many winters of drifting snow
It sits,
Crouching next to the dead
It ripped the throat from

Blood coats what would be its mane
If it were on the savannah stalking
Larger prey

Its jet eyes don’t even glint at my
Passing.It still believes, maybe
Like I once did, that if you are quiet
And careful you will go unnoticed
Unbothered

I am leery of it as swimmers are of
Sharks or as mice must be of cats
As if it would take me
At my throat
Shake me five times
And drop me at its paws for dead
But not quite dead, I would twitch
And it would swat me back and forth

No struggle
No frantic scratching to get away
Just a twitch