The end of March

A poet,teacher, friend of a friend named Emily Moore makes by hand these amazing yearly calendars and gives them as presents. I have coveted them for years, and Bruder finally scored me one to stop my drooling. Filled with poems, illustrations - and yes, also days of the week - the calendar is almost too precious for me to write in. I carry it around with me and read it everyday, but I don't want to mess up the pages with my scrawl. I'm really digging the blank, open possibility of them. I have another calendar in which I record my real and very messy life (April is giving me an incredulous look at the moment), and while I can't function without it, I don't feel the least sentimental about it either. Just at a loss when it's gone missing.

So here is the poem that Emily chose for this month. Seems to capture that perfect impossibility of my blank calendar, and the reality at the moment of the other.

"The Poem That Can't Be Written"

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished - those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

in the windless lassitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.

~ Lawrence Raab