I got a craving today

for words that weren't newspeak, journalism, grant fodder, the litany of global injustice. Which is to say I haven't read any poems for a while. I don't notice the absence, the way you don't notice a nutritional deficiency in your diet when you're busy, until you start gnawing hunks of cheese, or downing M & M s like water.

So there I was at my local library, scanning and yanking in the poetry section, like any junkie on a binge. Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Ana Castillo, Philip Levine. I devoured The Gold Cell, by Sharon Olds, in one voracious 40-minute gulp over a cappuccino. Felt the driven, insatiable itchiness ebb out of my bones with each rock-salt poem.

I laughed aloud in the cafe at The Pope's Penis:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat - and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

Sucked on words like glaucous and integuments.

Took a sharp breath at the poignant sweetness of the final lines of the final poem (about her children):

...When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

from Looking at Them Asleep