Daily Archive: March 23, 2006

23
Mar
2006

I’M MORE OF A CUSTODIAN, REALLY

I fight my inner packrat constantly. I can’t remember if it was before or after my father died that my mom told us that he, a notorious and shameless packrat of the First Order, had refused to throw away, among other equally horrifying things, boxes of moldy college textbooks from the 60s that had been caught in a basement-flooding years ago and 10-year old road maps and box after box of computer cables and ports and parts. Boxes of pens. Boxes of paper. Boxes of old magazines. I don’t think my father ever threw anything away that he thought might...

23
Mar
2006

POETRY THURSDAY

The Animal That Drank Up Sound by William Stafford One day across the lake where echoes come now an animal that needed sound came down. He gazed enormously, and instead of making any, he took away from, sound: the lake and all the land went dumb. A fish that jumped went back like a knife, and the water died. In all the wilderness around he drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside and folded a quilt over the rocks, getting ready to store everything the place had known; he buried— thousands of autumns deep—the noise that had used...