how this longing grabs me

Chickadees, good news! I got into the Tinhouse Summer Writer's Workshop with a full scholarship! I had given up thinking about it, because I just assumed I'd hear by May 1 if there was a scholarship for me or not. But, then today came good news. I was at the gym, in the locker room, when I got the call, and hopped up & down in my too small white towel like a maniac. So excited. Wouldn't have applied if it weren't for my darling Tom Johnston, who believes in me like some weird little moon, and always has the best advice. Going to be taking a workshop with D.A. Powell:

corydon & alexis, redux
by D. A. Powell

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god's own ribs



what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of the honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape



guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him on my tongue



silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes