A Million Empty Branches

From Billy Collins' new collection, The Trouble with Poetry & Other Poems. Read these lines outside in the cold last night. Those lines you read and memorize immediately, imprinting them on your heart. Symphonies built on carefully choreographed, carefully chosen words. Austerity is the heart of poetry. The last stanza from the poem "I Ask You," a perfect winter poem, hit me right in that place of the heart you reserve solely for God:

So forgive me
if I lower my head and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
composed of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

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Kitteh Bed from an Old Suitcase

I just found this on the lovely blog A Brooklyn Limestone which I just discovered via The Times London's 50 of the World's Best Design Blogs list. I think I have to make one for my kitteh. Of course, once I build it, she shall not come. Nonetheless, I love the idea, and the discovery of so many inspiring blogs. xo Ama