Tonight will mark the last regular DJ night that Michael Absher will have at Churchills. Starting in the New Year, Michael will DJ once a month in combination with the Poetry Readings, but he will no longer spin weekly at Churchills. Please come on out and give him a good sendoff! Note: I have been really lazy about bringing in featured readers because I think that approach is a little stale and contrived. Any thoughts on slam format? Post them here or e-mail me. Love, love, love.

I wrote this lengthy poetic diatribe and I hadn't even gotten to the point, which was that my daughter started bawling in the car, four miles from home last weekend because she was holding the garage door remote and pushed the button. She thought I'd be mad at her for opening the door and she panicked. I just told her to push it again to close the door. I've learned the hard lesson of saving articles in progress. Poetic diatribe to follow ...

who wanted a trombone for her third birthday.

The Mechanics of Forward Flight
for Grace

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me ...
--Walt Whitman


Today you are three, and this is no trombone,
no glittering horn to breathe ancient secrets through,
but you'll have a candle with a three and fire on it.
This morning, we were driving through the August fog
that tells the corn tassel and the polliwogs morph
to toads because summer is a milk tooth. You

were shifting and chattering in your buckle. Showing
your bare feet, the tinkerbell nightie beaten
clear in spots, down one arm. Designed to cap
the slightness of your shoulders with lavender, the undone
button at your nape skews it. This happens
all the time. Farm on farm, the crops flipped

by us in rows like a playing card in bicycle spokes
or the pellucid wax pages of a ratty book fluttering
open on a window sill. I saw through the haze,
a sapling growing in the middle of the road. Because
it was so whist, I thought it couldn't be a living thing,
but the blue heron stood, one-legged, with so many

sleeves around it holding in their fruit. I depressed
the brake pedal with the same counter-pressure
and evening primroses that the mid-woman applied
to your head to keep me from bursting at the seams
when you came out of my body. Your sleeping brother
and you, thus, were not thrown from your small frames,

sleep or the safety of baby talk. The gray weed stared
back at us. When it flopped it's wet-bedsheet arms,
twined its sink-pipe throat, chuffed and flew, you tweeted
Mommy, that bird is big. It's big like a rainbow. This happens
all the time. You speak hand-blown glass. You make me
consider the size of light refracted through rain. Yes,

what moves through prisms must be vast, indeed. For you
the sky is full, not of cumbersome hollow-boned slouches,
but feathers and blush, fabric and light. You direct me
to missed drupelets in our backyard raspberries, smiling,
blond-skinned and wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Two weeks from now, Mars will be closer to you

and to me than to anyone in seven thousand lifetimes,
and the glob of peach will most closely represent the smear
of those raspberries washed from where they were pressed
to a blend of the same light broken by rain, its hugeness
in the threads of your front sun suit pocket. This is
the vagary of flying things, the vagary of flight:

the galactic maypole looses and reclaims
its streamers, marking the cosmic
footpaths for globes and cranes,
rock and tooth, circumducting seasons
with the scrutiny of babies and birds,
whose whole bodies quiver when they sing.

Scotty was a way debonaire pirate. I about peed myself when I drew a small little curly mustache on him. He refused to wear his eye patch or scarab, so the eyeliner stache distinguished between piratesque and a kid with a red anchor shirt and a belt. The little red wagon that I thought quite a smart utility purchase just one week earlier, I forgot, of course. So I carried him, which he resented, making the task not unlike holding a greased pig between your knees. Grace was a superstar in her fuzzy green alien costume.