We have been reading a wonderful book by Willa Cather, called My Antonia. We have often said, as we read it, that the the book has a splendid simplicity, a complicated type of simplicity, you might say. Cather does not try to impress the reader. She seems to be interested in simply telling a heartfelt story and describing the story as carefully and accurately as possible. It's almost like the author disappears in the story, and we feel like we are simply listening to the narrator of the story, Jim Burden, tell the story exactly as he remembers it. I read this book many years ago, as did Delycia, but we both feel that it is coming alive in a wonderfully fresh way.

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12:45 pm

Just read "Touch Me", a lovely poem by Stanley Kunitz. Cia brought it to me and asked if I would read it to her, and I was honored to do so. 

TOUCH ME

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.