#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Morning Goose, Charles River

Moon that is linking our daughters’
Choices, and still more beginnings,
Threaded alive with our shadows,

These are our bodies’ own voices,
Powers of each of our bodies,
Threading, unbroken, begetting

Flowers from each of our bodies.
These are our spiraling borders
Carrying on your beginnings, . . .

~ Annie Finch, Excerpt from Moon for Our Daughters

Just as I approached the river, with the fat sized flakes of white falling briskly, a swan swooped in for landing on the river’s surface, a fine gliding, wide-winged spectacle of elegance––and now there were three fine white long necked beauties gliding unselfconscioulsy in the narrow, unfrozen river band of blue. Also, a pair of noisy geese honking along the edge. Quite an arresting show. And the fat flakes stopped falling, and there was stillness. And I had been so fatigued. And now all my energy shifted awake and grateful. And my friend and her dog arrived; she parked and we walked the property, my dogs being friendly, and I we tromped over all the broken sticks and patches of ice and slushy snow, and talked and talked, wearing our masks, of course, about children and daughters and grandsons and fantasies of places we will go when the time is right. And there is an unburdening of the heart that can only happen with this particular friendship, these ears for each other, what we can hear and how the listening brings a special relief. It’s the muscle of decades of moments devoted to each other’s welfare. The whole mood and attitude of a late February day shifts. What a moon in the sky tonight over all of us. Frank and I work in the afternoon on the project of making over a room, making it cleaner and comfortable and inviting with easy chairs and plants, plants plants and a rug and it’s fun to do this together: how we say yes to each other’s ideas, how we agree. I went into the room before dinner and sat in this new comfortableness and read some of the monologue drafts for my course that are being written—so good. And I’m eager to hear them in person tomorrow when we meet. I started a new book, in paperback: City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. What will my friends, the swans and the geese, be up to tomorrow, I wonder.