Yesterday was Poem In Your Pocket Day (or: Are You Happy to See Me?) I didn't have pockets yesterday, and I've never been much of a poetry person, but I did spend a long time yesterday morning cleaning out my folders in Microsoft Word. While there, I came upon a paper I wrote in my junior year of high school about James Merrill where I acknowledged my ambivalent relationship to poetry and then proceeded to rhapsodize about his poem "Family Week at Oracle Ranch." I also provided a handy excerpt:

10. The Desert Museum

—Or, as the fat, nearsighted kid ahead

Construes his ticket, “Wow, Dessert Museum!”

I leave tomorrow, so you get a pass.

Safer, we both feel, instead

Of checking into the No-Tell Motel,

To check it out—our brave new dried-out world.

Exhibits: crystals that for eons glinted

Before the wits did; fossil shells

From when this overlook lay safely drowned;

Whole spiny families repelled by sex,

Whom dying men have drunk from (Randy, frightened,

Hugging Little Randy, a red hound)….

At length behind a wall of glass, in shade,

The mountain lioness too indolent

To train them upon us unlids her gems

Set in the saddest face Love ever made.

Yep, still a fan.