Shout out to Dad

My dad might be the most patient person on earth. My mom definitely gives him a run for the money, though. Anyways, Dad is the king of lists, which might be one reason why I love reading and making them so much myself. He inspires me. He is quite definitely also the reason I fell in love with the English language, with the written word, with the art of teaching. My dad is a lawyer, but he could easily be an English teacher if he wanted--and a darn good one at that. He loves literature and he loves people (and I am convinced that simple combination is a lot of what it ultimately takes to be an inspiring English teacher). Dad often sends me and Clay fun lists of his "favorites"--favorite movies, favorite books, favorite quotes, etc.

Over the next few days, I will be posting some of our favorites, starting with Clay's favorite poems. Thanks for inspiring us, Dad.

Meditation at Lagunitas
by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.