falling into an ant's nostril

I bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. So far it's amazing, but I decided to put it aside and finally finish the Amber Spyglass first. Since I don't want to lug that thing around school. I've started so many books lately, and haven't gotten very far in any of them. I was reading Familiar Heat by Mary Hood but it's used so it smells strongly of smoke so it's really hard to read. And Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde, but I can't find it. I think I accidentally left it in Natasha's car or something. And How To Be Bad but I really didn't like Lauren Myracle's part. It was just ugh.

But I have been editing my essay (? short story? nonfictional piece?) that I'm sending in. It doesn't look too good right now, but I'm sure I can work it into shape. I'm using these euphemisms because otherwise I would be saying that I'm ripping up full pages and taking sharpies to entire paragraphs and marking out so many adverbs that my sentences look like they're all three words long and rearranging and then unrearranging everything so much that I'm getting dizzy.

But it's the 10-days-away panic that Caroline has further instilled upon me by constantly bringing it up. I forgive you, though, Caroline, or else it would be the day before it's due and I'd be just beginning this process.

But just to lighten my mood, I decided to throw in a poem:

Vanishing Point

You thought it was just a pencil dot
art students made in the middle of the canvas
before they started painting the barn, cows, haystacks,

or just a point where railroad tracks fuse,
a spot engineers stare at from the cabs of trains
as they clack through the heat of prairies
heading out of the dimensional.

But here I am at the vanishing point,
looking back at everything as it zooms toward me,
barns, cows, tracks, haystacks, farmers, the words,
shrinking, then disappearing into this iota
as if pulled by a gravity that is horizontal.

I am a catcher behind the home plate of the world,
a scientist observing a little leak in reality.

I watch the history of architecture narrow down
to nothing, all straight lines rushing away from
themselves like men who have caught on fire.
Every monument since Phidias converges on this speck.
Imagine a period that could swallow all the sentences
in an encyclopedia.

I have reached the heaven of geometry
where every line in every theorem aspires to go.
Even the vanishing points in drawings vanish here.
And if you do not believe me, look at where
the tangents of your garage are aimed.

You have heard of the apple that astonished Paris?
This is the nostril of the ant that inhaled the universe.


Alas, I wish I could call this my work but cannot because I have not written any good poetry in months. And this is beautiful. And, of course, Billy Collins.

Heather