On the Road Again

I thought my clinic appointments were for Wednesday and Thursday. Wrong. Tues. and Weds. So I went today and got the bone scan, and will get the mammo tomorrow. Then maybe they'll leave me alone for a while, dadgummit! Every time I'm almost making some progress on the poems, Mo hollers for water or something, or the phone rings to confirm an appointment.

I had picked out about a hundred and twenty poems for my book. But every time I look over it, I add a few more. So what if some of them are bad, or silly? Show me a hundred poems by anybody, and some of them will be less than top-notch. Unless it's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins didn't write many poems, but every one of them, you can just read it over and over and find new magic every time. His rhythm is strange, so they're not easy to remember. "The Wreck of the Deutschland," and those nuns panting, "Where--where was a--where was a place--?!" And "The Wreck" (in my opinion) is not the best of his poems. Boy, if I was going to copy anybody's style consciously, that's where I would start. Or try to start.