it wasn't a dream it was a flood:

if you have ever picked up an old Nehi bottle buried in a ditch
for two cents and poured the muddy water and seen a tadpole
beating his tail on the new hot mix asphalt that the prisoners
was made to lay down just the other day that stuff still crawling over the weeds
and all and you see that tadpole like the black rag of a flag
flapping on a dead mast then you know what i mean you know
what people will do to one another
-frank stanford, the battlefield

strange, i think, that we've named our sarcastic, often glib, blog after frank stanford's battlefield where the moon says i love you. to be fair, hannah and i are blubbering, emotional idiots much of the time. true nerds, to the core, who will argue a book's arc, its intentions, its character development...to the death. but rarely does that part of ourselves come to light on the blog. and for good reason, you ninnies.

this morning i woke and put on the dress i wore yesterday and the day before yesterday. i went to a local coffee shop and proceeded to devour the battlefield. i cried on and off at the outdoor table for three solid hours. it didn't help that they played josh ritter's "girl in the war," seemingly, on repeat.

at brown, in 1983, c.d. wright (stanford's lover and estate supervisor...following his suicide?) staged an all night reading. students took fifteen minute intervals to read from the 400 page poem that lacks any punctuation. this included undregrads, but also michael ondaatje, alan dugan, and forrest gander. people camped. the reading began at sundown and lasted until 10 the next morning.

i must say this is what led me, first, to tears. the sheer desire for poetry and for the communion of poetry. how foreign this seems to me, and distantly familiar.

tomorrow morning hannah is taking the children to new york, where they will then fly westward, until they wind up in the east. i am beginning a pedagogy class in the morning where i am to teach fifty year-olds how to write poetry. it is ridiculous, this life, and strange, and beautiful. and so, if we often forget to say so, we feel these things to the dams of ourselves, which is why we often choose to laugh instead.

because none of you know what you want
follow me
because i'm not going anywhere...
-frank stanford