Stories and pieces

There's an art to it: letting go.
Or perhaps that's what art is. 
I'm a monkey, hand in jar, and craving
every candy, but I'm trapped
with full hands and an empty heart.
where every one is a child,
smiling, vested in filthy rags and hungry,
let them, too, find the world and love -
peace without me, or pieces
crushed in my unyielding clasp.
there is always a choice
there is often a goodbye
hello, mon ami, farewell.



I'm appreciating Ted Kooser more with each poem I read. He captures moments of time as exquisite pictures, as though he's frozen moments of ordinary and, by radically shifting our lens, transforms them into the extraordinary and the beautiful.  A female figure-skating into the future; an overweight fisherman becoming weightless in the moment of reverie, casting into the lake of peace; a poem within a poem on morning rushing over the hilltops.
I felt the need to cry and soak my tears into the moments of incredible joy, melding my experience into those poem-graphed. As Ted Kooser sends me skating, dreaming, trembling at the dawn soaring in like swooping hawks, and Robert Bly reminds me of the Virgin and her candles, and how a starfish is more than it seems, and how to unearth the mystery of the night. Poetry gently soothes me and I wish I could fly on these words and lift others off the earth with mine.
What a magic these poets possess - what pulchritudinous prowess.


-- I invented the word poem-graphed
-- I had to use the word pulchritudinous. It's the lumpiest word for beauty ever imagined. Like if I was writing a story from the perspective of toads, they wouldn't consider each other beautiful, but pulchritudinous.