Nighttime Morning Page, 20 Feb. 09

Today I spent the morning with a good friend, with tea and fresh fruit, two or three cats and a bank of windows overlooking the coming and going of birds, of ferries and the passing of winter.

We wrote for an hour or more, creating starts to five poems.

Here are two prompts we used:

This one came from my journal:

"Next morning, breakfast"  and from here we spent five to seven minutes finding the poem in the words.

Another prompt was a line from Neruda's "Your Laughter." It was to be used as an epigraph:

"Take bread away from me, if you wish"

This evening I revisited poems I'd written during November as part of Poem a Day.  I still haven't done anything with them yet, but it might be a good thing to work on - see if there is anything cohesive enough to become a new collection.  

Here's a poem for the day:

Dressmaker
by Éireann Lorsung
Nothing touches like tan velvet touches  the palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives  without taking?—Doesn't exist. Say   you forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece  uncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel  of charmeuse lines your sleep. You've lost   what there was before pins & needles, sound  a scissors makes through cloth on a hardwood floor,  thick waist of the dressmaker's dummy. Don't tell me   any more. Without Burano lace, without cinnabar  strung on a cuff, shantung and satin and netting and swiss:  no rich man, no camel, no needle's threatening eye. I'm off to bed. Maybe do a little reading...