Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sometimes real subject matter is right in front of our eyes and sometimes it's submerged and it's not until much later that we discover what we really wanted to say about what we were talking about.

"When you anchor you're already in the most ancient part of the city, "Janeko says of the cruise through the Mediterranean she and Pierre made last summer. I hadn't thought of travel this way, as being so dependent on arrival, but there was enough logic to her experience to convince me to consider taking a cruise, maybe sometime in my next life, until she admitted the food was bad--a British crew with British cooking.

Because it was Valentines Day Alice read a love poem by Szymborska out loud to the whole party. Alice dressed in bright red and kept up with the pace of the poem admirably. It's a chatty poem, I thought as I listened to Alice, the kind of poem American poets are not allowed to write, with many clever and wise lines about love itself and just as many lines about the mysteries of love itself, so that we in the audience had the opportunity good poets always present to either laugh or gasp when we hear the lines that most pleased us.

When someone asked about Szymborska, Alice didn't know if the poet was a man or a woman. Someone in the audience said, "woman, Polish," and that was that.

Sometime last night, much later, after the party, I asked my wife, a very fine potter, if she'd make my urn. "Yes," she said.

We decided my urn would be modeled after a geode, that all the excitement (colors, light)
would be on the inside of my urn and that the outside would be raw. She invited me to think about shape, size and, most importantly, the lid.