Poetry season is setting in. We got our second batch today, and they're nothing but delicious fruits of poems -- pretty things about death and absence and looking up at people in trees. Love songs about fungal emotion, a perversion of the Garden of Eden, a description of a poem "left on the page/ like a slice of apple turning brown, seeping into the paper, drying out." The yumminess of poetry persists. I'm hoping my poems will grow in delectability, surrounded by such gems.

Poetry, it seems, is almost all I can talk about. I have never been so excited about sentences and punctuation. Good poems seem almost formulaic -- always with words like "milk" or "crescent" or "vein." Words that taste good. It's like there's some equation behind the words that I can't see, like a silhouette behind a paper screen. I know its form and its outline, but not its face. If the paper of a poem is too thick, you can't see it; too thin, and it disappears in fear.

Sometimes I try to look at photos of myself the way I look at photos of writers. Or, rather, I look at photos of myself and wonder if one day people will look at them the way I look at photos of writers. There is something about writers that begs to be photographed -- something quiet about them that you can really capture, that sometimes eludes the less-careful of viewers. Writers are sexy, even if they're beasts (--now you know the initial reason we write).

And also, lately, I've been taken with Kenneth Branagh. Carolyn and I share him. He is on our desktops at school. Since we've been reading Hamlet and listening to his performance as the lead (God bless you, English class), I have melted into a puddle that, dripping, swoons. You should hear him To be and not to be. He speaks like it hurts to breathe. I will listen to him sililoquoy his way through tragedy until I know every word by heart.

Now you see what poetry does to me: I drip, I swoon, with melodrama. At least it tastes good.