Sturdy red harvest bins line the roadway --
August and almost apple picking time --
these are filled with gnarled trunks, unbudded boughs --
behind them up their hill, lines of waist-high
grape vines fattening blood-purple clusters.
8/11/08 August Postcard Poetry Fest

I've signed up for another every-day poetry writing event. Offhand, in-the-moment, what-the-hay, let it fly, let 'er rip poems or poem-like utterances off into the mailbox to someone I've never met, one poem to one person each August day. Complicated for me by being out of town most of the month, far from mailboxes to send poem and a mailbox of my own to receive poems. I imagine a passel waits for me at the East Union Post Office in Seattle. A PASSEL!

I hope you are well and writing and manufacturing vitamin D on the skin of your bare arms, miracle that you are. We talked books my neighbors on the long long lake and I the other night. She reads throwaway tomes thick with historical reference - I don't feel guilty, she says, when I'm learning something. She pushes the books towards me and I pretend to forget them at evening's end. I like her, and I like that she and her family - husband and their grown son, have spent two weeks lying about reading books. I went home and plucked one of the beach reads someone left here off the shelf. I am a bad snob and I want to scold the author and publisher over the phone, red pencil the pages, but I also want to loll here and let my eyes breeze through to the end.