early hours of sky

i like this blog i just tripped and fell into by poet teresa ballard. she is crazy well read and makes lovely recommendations. but it seems to have come to a standstill last april, and this is sad.

at any rate she did a post where she took ten lines from poems or songs that she could remember off the top of her head. they are all poets i love if not poems i know and love but i could never have recalled these lines. im very impressed if they really do come to her from thin air, unfortunately all that pops into my brain are cliche lines from ancient cobwebby poems i was forced to recite in middleschool.
repetitious conservative early education: 1
self taught post-grad poetry explorations: 0

i have often thought i should memorize a poem each week, as an exercize, as a way to keep my brain lyrical... as an attempt to one day be that awesome older person who can quote poems... maybe that just my idea of awesome. im going to do it though. yeah. im going to DO IT. maybe ill start with a pavlova one i just posted. yeah. YEAH!

anyway i thought id post this here because i want to do one myself later and i want to make sure i know where each of these lines comes from. when i have a chance. i need to get back to work. the work im paid to do.

god DAMNIT i hate mondays.


1. lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. – Anne Sexton

2. I could see as I laid the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes--Brigit Pegeen Kelly

3. One day it happens: what you have feared all your life— Marie Howe

4. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary-- Margaret Atwood

5. I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning. Stevie Smith

6. And the three men I admire most, the father, son and the holy ghost – Don McLean

7. I am in love with a certain kind of cloud – Olena Kalytiak Davis

8. Smart lad, to slip away from fields where glory does not stay--A. E. Housman

9. All my gods are profane, speak without purpose or memory--Ballard

10. We whispered yes, there on the intricate balconies of breath, overlooking the rest of our lives—Carolyn Forche