Heed the crow, friends.
Today is Great Poetry Reading Day, and you can learn more about it at that link. As for me, as soon as I realized this, I went right to the Houndstooth library and took out this book. I don’t know why I thought to check, because I rarely do this anymore, but I looked inside the front page and I had, indeed, written my name and the date I got the book, which in this case was 1997. I wonder what prompted me to purchase it that year, whether I had a hunger to read more poetry or I was in a bookstore, saw it, and decided, I need that!
I paged through the book randomly, reading poems, and came to a section with work by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve always read with pleasure. Full disclosure: In 1995, I bought the book Safe As Houses by Alex Jeffers and wondered if he was related to Robinson Jeffers, but these were the days before I had the entire world of information at my fingertips. I reminded myself that just because two people share a last name… Lucky for me, one of my literary icons, Edmund White, had blurbed the novel on the back cover, and he shared that Alex is Robinson Jeffers’s grandson. Curiosity satisfied. Since I’m off-track already, I want to reiterate that it’s among the highlights of my writing and editing career that I queried Alex about submitting a story to Timothy and me for Best Gay Romance 2014, and I was delighted with his submission, “Shep: A Dog,” and really excited to include it in the anthology. If you have interest in reading an excerpt, I provided one at this old post.
Today, I relished Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Love the Wild Swan,” because I really hungered for more of the validation I got last week that yes, I am a writer, and no, I’m not on the wrong path, I’m on my own path, a path where I can and do love the wild swan.
I even crafted a bit today to showcase Jeffers’s poem in between periods of writing, all while listening to music. If you can’t read the words on the photo below, I’ll add the poem at the end of this post. The swan outline came from ColoringAll.com, and I bought that floral paper (to the right) the swan is on at the bookstore where I was an assistant manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I met so many good people there, one of whom, of course, was another of our assistant managers, Steve R.
I didn’t forget for a minute that today is Steve’s birthday, and as I do every year, I whipped up something chocolate in his honor (we’ll be adding a dollop of ice cream to those brownies). We love you always, Steve. 
Love the Wild Swan
“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your. . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
Thank you, Taylor, for today’s creativity soundtrack. Your lyrics mean a lot to me and to some of my characters.
Fun fact: In An Aries Knows history, I launched Button Sundays on September 17, 2006.
When you get to my age, you need ‘twilight mirrors’.
I can never see a raven without thinking ‘Nevermore!’
I once told a friend, “NEVER look at yourself in your sun visor mirror or your rearview mirror in your car in full daylight. NEVER.”