TODAY

Normally you know

what

day it is there’s a

rhythm to things

but I didn’t know until

I saw

the Times section this morning

that said

Weekend Arts

that it was Friday.

When I was little

we’d get to have fish sticks.

 

Here’s a 60-minute video talk, an excellent one, about the upcoming-in-April six-hour Ken Burns PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway. One of the participants in the discussion is the editor of the new Library of America collection which I bought, actually ordered and had sent to me in this virus time, from an independent bookstore here and feel lucky to have:

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1758-the-genius-of-hemingway?no_lightbox=1

 

THERE

Coming out 

of the kitchen

just now

I liked

the look of

my desk.

I just got an email from a woman who would stop and talk to me when I held my sign. She wondered if I was still going there with the sign. I wrote back that I’m not because there’s unlikely much foot traffic there. I said I wouldn’t really want to take the subway every day now anyway. I said I’m itching to get back there with the sign. Literacy didn’t get talked about in the campaigns or in the street protests these past months. I think the issues they raised can’t be seriously addressed without addressing that.

 

GREEN

I had tea yesterday.

I have many boxes 

of it

trying to be one of 

those people.

Yesterday I walked over to the Strand bookstore. It takes 15 minutes at the most. I had time till the college football games came on on my iPad at 4:00. I don’t have a TV. My parents didn’t really watch TV. The big console TV was in the living room and nobody hung in there. I went to Strand to see what I could see that might jump off a table into my hands. Something always does. Yesterday it was a thin paperback. $6.95. The Hatred of Poetry by smart young poet guy Ben Lerner. I also got a little Moleskine 2021 planner/calendar notebook. There was a line outside and a store clerk manning the door letting us in when it seemed right. 

DESKTOP

The orange I just

peeled 

in the kitchen 

over the sink

and brought in here 

to my desk on a 

green plate 

under the light now

is more bright 

and gloriously

orange than

the colors on the dust jackets

right next to it or

the colors on the apps 

on the computer screen 

behind it.