#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Ibis Itch

“Hard to reach, so you yank your clothes

getting at it—the button at your neck,

the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers in

until your nails possess the patch of skin

that’s eating you. And now you’re in the throes

of ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull,

as if sensing the first time the joy one takes

                     in being purely animal. . .”

~Excerpt from “Itchy,” by David Yezzi

Oh, the birds, the birds, the birds, how I love getting up close and personal with them in the morning, watching them in their habitat. I walked and talked a long time on the phone with my human friend, catching up, yet, seized occasionally by the need to stop and watch. The heron, statuesque by the surf, stopped me short, as did the egret in the foamy suds.

I worked on the Cherry Dress poem that I workshopped for the last two sessions of the Monday night poets, and I was really pleased. I think I cracked the code. Okay, so you may not be interested in this process, but I find it fascinating, when it’s not entirely frustrating, to reach the place of pleasure in the process of craft, where I know I have advanced it. How necessary good feedback is. I hacked off the last line, my darling. This line was hard to let go of since when I heard it in my head, early in the writing of this poem, it’s the line that made me trust a poem was even there to write. It’s a line that rushed me back to the writing of it–how could I let it go? But I could. Because I could finally see it was no longer serving the poem. I had the moment of bliss, wanting to shout out loud, I like this poem! I made it work! I’ll tell my friends the birds in the morning. They let me tell them lots of things.

I leaf heart this marvelous habitat.