"What if the moon was essence of quinine" —Frank Stanford everyday antidote to numerous maladies my grandmother drank tonic water in yellow bottles—something to do with her restless legs at night or was it the morning in Florida maybe after the Early Bird Special which was actually afternoon with that blistering sun on the Boulevard along the ocean & then the Intracoastal where signs warned boats propellers from manatee since some creature was near extinction, some creature bled— or was it something to do with the girls who had Russian soldiers chasing after them, since it was always someone during the war or after but no one mentioned the war exactly: a story without an end in which they all came to America to play cards & raise children—my grandmother, you should have seen her at poker in her turban, North Miami so hot anytime including December but no one minded—not the grandparents, not the children, not the grandchildren since the humidity was our country: the humidity & the night-swimming, our slick adolescent bodies like dolphins until golf-cart security chased us out, though the condo pool was lit—even when it was shuttered & locked— with underwater domes that pockmarked the surface like luminary moons even when nothing shined down on the Atlantic up the block where we escaped to dodge man-o-wars on the beach & shiver exquisitely in each other's dark arms then hopped chain-link fences or tore across metal drawbridges past midnight to florescent elevator banks with someone else's grandmother yelling: I thought you were dead, I thought you were in a ditch, but it wasn't a ditch: we were drunk on strangers who were not strangers: we were the same tribe of survivors, a dream country everyday in this state of ocean & oranges & tattooed Yiddish grandparents—so what if at night we were restless and overly-loved & only the sounds of chairs scraping linoleum waiting up: a tissue, a wheelbarrow, the shovels, the camps, the cards, my grandmother asking if I wanted something to eat & there I was always saying yes—there's no choice—because in this place no one is really in danger & no one ever gets full
ADAM NICOLSON’S THE MAKING OF POETRY: AN "INVESTIGATION INTO THE BIRTH OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT." "From June 1797 to the autumn of 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, known as 'Dolly,' lived on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset and began to explore a new way of looking at the world, and their place in it, as devotees of nature and the unfettered mind, almost single-handedly inventing the Romantic movement in whose long shadow we live today." via THE GUARDIAN
WHAT SPARKS POETRY: AARON MCCOLLOUGH ON WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS'S "THIS IS JUST TO SAY" "The poem is ultimately more about what isn’t there (the plums, the speaker, respect for the beloved’s property) than it is about what was there momentarily (the sensual pleasure of something 'so sweet / and so cold' or the speaker’s remorse, however genuine)."
