After a long dry heartless and unfathomable spell of silence I thought of another line of a poem last night – I thought that the stars were scars on the sky’s face. Although this is a personification, it does not bother me, because it is a comparison both in rhyme and in content.

It’s probably not good for anything. When you take time off and have to start up again you always think of such bland stuff. Stars, roses, the moon – too much poetry about all of them. Blah.

Speaking of roses, I was in Letizia’s on Division last week, which may as well be last year for how different it is from this week, and a man was handing out pink roses from his garden to all the girls in the muffin line. Chicago springtime – exuberant. Excessive. My friend from the yoga studio calls it “overcompensating,” and she makes it sound like she’s talking about a short man with a big car.

I took a rose, and the man behind me struck up a conversation about roses, and he couldn’t remember the Shakespeare line he wanted to remember, which I was able to supply to him, having assisted on ROMEO AND JULIET.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I said.

He looked at me like I had memorized the OED. I have never impressed anyone so much with so little.

Sometimes I think that if I could only remember everything everyone has said to me, all the conversations with strangers – like the guitar player in the Seattle train station, like the Coors employee in Colorado, the woman in the bathroom in the basement of the downtown Chicago library – I would have enough material to write for the rest of my life.