Ah, spring. The dog has killed two snakes so far, the grass got cut yesterday, and there are carpets of phlox down the street.

At Vary the Line, I mentioned a story that mentions me (in a way) and a bit about my Easter Sunday. The day after Easter, in response to a sieve metaphor in her sermon, I sent my minister a link to Naomi Shihab Nye's Sifter, a poem I'd read aloud for the Talking Library a couple weeks ago.

In her weekly e-mail to the congregation yesterday, she quoted my favorite lines:

What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.

Other poems that have caught my attention lately include Gwendolyn MacEwen's Magic Cats (via Joanne), Ibaragi Noriko's What a Little Girl Had on Her Mind, and Alison Townsend's Persephone Under.

Today's subject line comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Spring," but I don't actually like the poem as a whole -- in fact, the opening lines ("To what purpose, April, do you return? / Beauty is not enough") seriously piss me off.

Ahem. Things more bright and beautiful:

* Two poetry acceptances, both with requests for audio.
* The older black woman who grinned at and chatted with me at the gas station because "we drive the same car!" The younger one at the grocery store - more cheerful than most cashiers. The tattooed Asian girl at K&S rambling about some hot-sweet tofu she'd eaten in Atlanta.
* "summer hair from a cow's ear" in Buddhist brushes
* I haven't figured out why, but I like the name "ununseptium." And I'm not above feeling pride in there being Tennesseans being involved in its discovery.
* Reading bits of an outdated chemistry textbook during lunch and marveling over and over and anew at how we have made sense out of so much in spite of our limits.