Not just because I'm off to see Hem later.

Today is the day: after I complete three writing tasks (because everything happy in my life these days seems to require at least two or three writing tasks), I leave for Cleveland and the Hem concert happening there--which will mean that twice this week I'll have gotten to hear performances of art I know and love well, which means (as if I didn't already know) that I'm blessed, and how. If you have not yet developed your own fondness for Hem, you may wish to do so now, here; some of the songs on the new album are mightily lovely (though others, alas, leave me a bit cold). I have high hopes of returning to Gambier with at least a t-shirt and another poster. I have become such a groupie, with Hem and others.

My ardent soul leaps up: I feel little embarrassment about saying so. The weather is rainy and blechhy (today's picture of these hallucinatorily lovely leaves, close and not-close, red and not-red, is 24 hours old as I post it), and my old, limp-along furnace made a wrong smell when I turned it on for the first time this season last night, leading me to think that it would be better off for now. Thus I am curled in my bednest, in my paisley pajamas, with my tweedy green cardigan on, feeling glad for the invention of polyester super-warmth. And yet, and yet, I will give you the ending of my early fall poem that really is my heart's singing right now. I continue keeping this one mostly to myself. But I'm giving you a taste, because if you're reading you're probably someone I know in some way or another, and you may be happy to hear what's flowering under my fatigue: an at-core content and happiness that's undergirding the various surface things I'm making happen all around me. Know that these lines come just after (surprise, no surprise) lines about birds. Know also that I'm deliberately exaggerative in my similes and my mixed metaphors here; in the working title for this one, I acknowledge myself as an amateur, in an attempt to suggest that I actually do know what I'm doing, to the extent that any of us can:

My laughter is floating like those feathered wings’ riffles;
my joy purrs more plenty than this long path has stones.
And I wave in my waiting like a tree on a shore,
like a slow-budding branch in a sweet swelling storm.
I will whirl giddy beauty like a top on a string.
I will sing to myself until you come with your song.

When I shared this one (in its entirety) with my beloved Brooklynite, she said, "I love that you've written a waltz." Yes I said yes I did yes.