Tell Me Tuesday

What are you reading this week?

Another Poem from "Bright Wings"

A Bird at the Leather Mill
by Joshua Mehigan

The crane stood in the center of the floor
of the mill, lost and tentative. Its bill
looked like a fancy awl with a down handle.
It wore its wings as though they were a shawl
thrown on an idiot. At first the men
imagined that a person had strolled in
like a green salesman or a debutant.
And when the crane walked toward the loading dock,
the men on tiptoe prowled with laundry bags
to grab and hold it like a secret hope
harbored in exile. Later on, at lunch,
they took turns, each explaining what he'd do
if it came back. They bragged , or chaffed, aware
the thing was lost, but never saying so.

Tell Me Tuesday

What are you reading?

The Work Speaks for Itself

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Nine Stories (1953)

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction (1963)


Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010

Tell Me Tuesday

What are you reading in these last days of January?

Poetry

I'm also reading this. A book of poems. About birds. Edited by Billy Collins. Illustrated by David Allen Sibley. Smashing.


Here's a poem by Ruth Schwartz. The beginning is regular poetry fodder, a little gritty, a little clever with words, and then, BAM, Schwartz rocks it with a simile that is beautiful and sad and just right. Poetry kicks ass.







The Swan at Edgewater Park

Isn't one of your prissy richpeople's swans
Wouldn't be at home on some pristine pond
Chooses the whole stinking shoreline, candy wrappers, condoms in its tidal fringe
Prefers to curve its muscular, slightly grubby neck into the body of a Great Lake,
Swilling whatever it is swans swill,
Chardonnay of algae with bouquet of crud,
While Clevelanders walk by saying Look at that big duck!
Beauty isn't the point here; of course the swan is beautiful,
But not like Lorie at 16, when
Everything was possible--no
More like Lorie at 27
Smoking away her days off in her dirty kitchen,
Her kid with asthma watching TV,
The boyfriend who doesn't know yet she's gonna
Leave him, washing his car out back--and
He's a runty little guy, and drinks too much, and
It's not his kid anyway, but he loves her, he
Really does, he loves them both--
That's the kind of swan this is.

SCRABBLE!

Recently, I have begun playing Scrabble (in real life, against the computer, against Sophia through the iPod Touch), and I love it. Had to pick up this book about the competitive world of the game. Do you know that playing all seven tiles on a single move is called "bingo-ing?" And chatting up your opponent while they are thinking out their next move is called "coffeehousing." Ha!
I also checked out The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary from the library. The appendix is very helpful: Q Words Not Followed by U, Short Words With No AEIOU Vowels, Short Words With High Vowel Counts, and 2- to 5-Letter Words Containing J, Q, X, or Z. And every Scrabble player worth his or her salt knows the list of 101 two-letter words by heart. Qi is a nice one if you can play it on a triple letter tile.