ewilcox:

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself, 
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do. 

new poet laureate!  

And, I might add: Levine is a Michigan man, a Detroit man. Congratulations Mr. Levine.

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• philip levine
• poetry
• lit
• Michigan

writer-a:

The diminutive figure emerges from the underbrush wearing a Keystone Cop uniform about four sizes too large. He screws up his courage by giving a very familiar wiggle of his butt, followed by a very familiar wriggle of his shoulders.

He’s wearing a little moustache that would soon become world famous, carrying only a nightstick and the possibility of greatness.

It’s Charlie Chaplin, making a cameo appearance in a Keystone comedy called A Thief Catcher in January 1914, just about a month after he started working at the Edendale, California, studio. It’s the 36th film he made in a frantic year’s activity before he left for more green, not to mention greener, pastures…

Individually, Michigan and Chaplin earn automatic reblogs. Together? Get outta here.

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• Michigan
• movies