What I really want to do is write poetry...

I take some comfort knowing that there are a few college majors that sound even less practical than mine (directing). For example, a BFA in sculpture. Or collage. Or even in gender studies. Or philosophy. They are at least more... puzzling. As to how it "applies". To anything.

But the best is someone who gets a degree in poetry. Someone who wants to grow up and be a poet.

I can only imagine the parental angst.

Being home this weekend dredged up a lot of, ummm, stuff, as being home always does for me. Even though this is a new home, the artifacts of my life still remain in daunting towers of cardboard boxes in the basement. My parents were remarkably good about heeding my wishes that they "not just throw everything out!!"

So, some epiphanies happened, which I will get into later.

But one minor discovery was a stack of notes from a college romance that I had completely forgotten I'd had. That sounds callous, but it's not callous, it was just a weird time. I was once and for all getting over an eating disorder and planning to transfer schools the next year. Joel was the first guy I'd even tried to date in my two years at Michigan. We met because he was the only guy (maybe one of two) in a women's studies class I took, women in literature or something along those lines.

He had floppy hair and was a poet. But I don't remember if he actually, truly wanted to be a poet, or if he just wrote me poetry.

Anyhow I found this small pile of notes (among so many other letters and notes from the days before email) and remembered all about Joel. I tried to google him, but he is nowhere to be found. The romance ended when Joel came to my place drunk after a bachelor party and spoke vividly about the stripper's boobs. He wasn't a poet about that.

And I was really, really uptight back then.

One of his notes included a Chase Twichell poem. I had no idea who Chase Twichell was at the time, and I only vaguely know of her now. I can't find that particular poem on the internet. It's a great poem. But maybe it is meant to be kept between me and Joel. Joel, to whom I'll never be able to say, "I'm sorry" -- for not writing him any poems back. For being too worried about what would happen tomorrow. For being uptight, about everything.

And for not being as receptive to his poems as one should be to poems.

I will instead post another Chase Twichell poem I found. Because we should all read more poems, shouldn't we?

Road Tar

A kid said you could chew road tar
if you got it before it cooled,
black globule with a just-forming skin.
He said it was better than cigarettes.
He said he had a taste for it.

On the same road, a squirrel
was doing the Watusi to free itself
from its crushed hindquarters.
A man on a bicycle stomped on its head,
then wiped his shoe on the grass.

It was autumn, the adult word for fall.
In school we saw a film called Reproduction.
The little snake-father poked his head
into the slippery future,
and a girl with a burned tongue was conceived.

Chase Twichell