Alice Persons, "Police Notes"

from The Writer's Almanac.

"First Kiss," April Lardner

"First Kiss," April Lardner

This collision of teeth, of tongues and lips,
is like feeling for the door
in a strange room, blindfolded.
He imagines he knows her
after four dates, both of them taking pains
to laugh correctly, to make eye contact.
She thinks at least this long first kiss
postpones the moment she'll have to face
four white walls, the kitchen table,
its bowl of dried petals and nutmeg husks,
the jaunty yellow vase with one jaunty bloom,
the answering machine's one bloodshot eye.

It is not a race

but if it were a race:

Four:

1. Kody [10] (403)
2. Taylor How.
3. Cara
4. Rachel
5. Karah
6. Austin
7. Mara
8. Ian
9. Lori
10. Emily (153)

Six:

1. Chris [2] (765)
2. Alix N. [6]
3. Ryan [7]
4. Alex O. [8]
5. Christina [9]
6. Nicole
7. Spencer
8. Sirena
9. Kelsey
10. Ty (206)

Checklist for Friday, 9/9
By 5:00 on Friday, your class blog should contain the following:

-at least six total responses that total at least 1800 words (2 posts / week x 3)
-"Currently" posts for each of the first three weeks that show at least 100/150 pages of reading for each week.
-the "Friday" response post from week 1 (relating to the personality profile).

"Wild Geese," Mary Oliver

"Wild Geese," Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Today

Let's spend our day like this:

1. Update your reading with one post that lists the books you've read in the last week, shows the pages you read last week + the total pages for the semester, and shares / discusses your sentences of the week.

2. Take a Blog Tour: Visit at least nine classmates' blogs. Please make a post entitled "Week 2 Blog Tour and identify the 9 blogs you visited.

During your tour, leave a friendly, thoughtful comment on at least three, and then vote for two blogs of the week in the comments below. Please say which period you are voting in.

"To You," Kennth Koch.

Today's poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

"History of Desire," Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.