Quiet weekend

Yesterday I took a cab to a 9/11 memorial poetry reading (because the two subways I needed to get there weren't running), and everything just seemed so quiet in Brooklyn.  Very quiet.  The reading had entrancing moments.  My former teacher Malena Mörling read her poems in English in her Swedish accent.   I've heard her read several times now, and in my mind the voice of her poems is so tied to the lilt of her accent, the way the English runs over it so that it's plucked at in a lovely way.  Nicole Peyrafitte started her performance piece by saying something like, "Remember.  Reflect.  Mark."  And then she rubbed a bunch of charcoal across a huge sheet of paper.  It went on from there.  There was chalk dust on her head and French lilting singing and marking on her body and more singing.  And, of course, given her presence and her voice, we marked and reflected.  It's amazing to me when people can do that kind of thing and pull it off.  And Dorianne Laux held us all.  Rapt.

What else?  Clif and I ate Tibetan food on Saturday.

On Sunday, we sat in our offices for most of the day, and still I have more to do on my syllabus for tomorrow's class.  Well, I've been mulling it over and making notes on possibilities for about three days.  Yesterday I read some poems and thought about them, the kind of poems that lull you and knit you into them.  The lulling and knitting distracted me from finishing culling down the list and fitting the poems into categories and boxes of time on the syllabus.

We also finally got my tall bookshelves upstairs.  They wouldn't fit up the stairs when we moved, and we (well, mostly he) had to take them apart and put them back together.  Now I have a tiny library room attached to my office, in addition to the built-in bookcases downstairs.  Yay.  But, you know, I still need to arrange the books.  Here is the Collected Frank O'Hara looking lonely.

 Clif says our upstairs reminds him of the Millennium Falcon, and that he likes how we can both lean back in our office chairs and look at each other down the curved hallway.  That hulking black case there is a double bass.