When the Time Comes

Spring is here and this little air plant is blooming in our kitchen.

I'm very into strange and beautiful.

Are you sick of looking at pictures of this thing?


I should be studying for my final on Thursday, but I'm watching an old episode on Flight of the Conchords and reading Twitter and blogging. I'm drinking a cup of procrastination that I had to go out to Starbucks to pick up. I don't want to study.

It's still poetry month. Here's a poem by Mary Oliver who knows important stuff:

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.