Lest I not seem ungrateful: part of the wonderful gifts that Boy-Dublin-Patron-Saint-of-Great-Books brings me are new things, wonderful things as well as reminders of things I had loved and lost track of--like Sandra Gilbert.

Her books Blood Pressure and Ghost Volcano were old companions and thanks to my dear book-gatherer, newly-re-gifted me in her collected, re-found. In honor of that and all that is right and more right in my life, this passage:

The meadow's silent, its dead grasses
ignore each other and the evening walkers
who trample them. What will you be,

I wonder, when the night wind rises?
Come back as yourself, in your blue parka,
your plaid flannel shirt with the missing button.

These fields that hum and churn with life
are empty. There is nowhere
you are not, nowhere

you are not not.