I’m staring at the sky and asking myself its color—not blue, not white, not gray, but a pale mix of all three. NPR is on in the background with more hashing over of the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha. This seems like an Oedipal struggle, doesn’t it?

Last night I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR when Alan Cheuese, novelist, professor, and a regular book reviewer for NPR described five new volumes of poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. The story can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89993088

A year or so ago I wrote several columns on writers creating a word list. I was out walking with a friend of mine and confessed I needed an idea for a column and she suggested that I write about a word list. A friend of hers, Lise Goett, a poet, had sent her several words lists she uses in her work. (Lise’s poem Conversion can be found at http://www.poets.org)

So I also started a word list and I try to add to it regularly. It’s simply a Word document where I capture words, placing them under appropriate letters of the alphabet. When I was editing my book Between the Lines, I noticed that I used dazzle, simmer, and whisper too often. Since I try to respect “word territory” that is, try not to repeat words too often or place the same word too close to its twin, this has become a fun practice of scavenging words from what I read and hear. I especially like to find words that are fresh and muscular. But lately, I haven’t kept up on this habit, so am rededicating myself to the task. And in the past few months I’ve talked to several of my clients and students about using a more energetic vocabulary since their writing was flat because their words choices seemed uninspired.

The newest words for my list are: Bulletproof, buzz kill, benediction, partisan, purposeful, squander, impasse, saddle up, moxie, befuddled, pratfall, mine field, heretical, unfrock, furor, deride, outlaw, moonstruck, unhinged, infamous, man love, improbable, tactics, obliterate, fray, soured, unvarnished, mewling, lovesick, slush, predicate, do-over, de facto, chortling, dissect, gasbag, scofflaw, minstrel, disavow, handmaiden, chivalrous, demented, ouster, rapturous, flagging, fuhgetaboutit, hapless, discreet, moiled, obliterate, bitey, fug, spunky, amiable, brawling, Bible-thumping…..

Try it, it’s fun.

The morning sky is finally appearing, a dusty, pale, blue-grey. I woke at 4:30 to the sounds of rain as soothing as a far-off train whistle. Sometimes like a train whistle, the rain before dawn sounds mournful and lonely.

I’d been dreaming about my friend Barbara who died a few months ago and she was showing me a manuscript of hers that someone had worked on after her death. And then as dreams do, it seemed like she had been the one working on the manuscript and interspersed in the pages were diagrams about the characters. As the dream continued I jumped off a ship and into the ocean. There were two other people in the water and I asked them the shallowest, safest route to shore. They told me that they were illegal immigrants and weren’t taking the safe route. Beneath the water was machinery parts and perhaps the hulk of a ship and I kept trying to swim away to deeper water. And the dream kept morphing and an old boyfriend from my twenties appeared and then I was in a house and people were zipping past in red and blue kayaks and I was almost safe, but surrounded by water. I mused for the longest time on the meaning of the dream and kept trying to see Barbara’s manuscript again, but the memory was too elusive.

Because April is Poetry Month last night I had good intensions of attending a poetry reading and perhaps popping into a gallery or two. But I was waiting for a delivery from Fed Ex and needed to stick around, so I started gardening. Yesterday the temperature rose to about 75 and it felt too warm, as if the oven was turned on a summer’s day. In the afternoon I was running errands and the check-out guy at Fred Meyers complained that he hated the weather, that he always preferred the rain. And as I left the store I kept thinking about him. He was about 25 and was wearing a gray, V-necked sweater over an Oxford shirt. And I was thinking that if he likes to dress in that fashion, he might particularly dislike a warm spring day. He also told me that he collects rare punk records. Finds most of them on E-Bay, collects only vinyl, and was recently outbid for a rare edition when the price went to over $2500. And I asked him how he could afford his collection on his wages. [I tend to ask people, especially strangers questions that most people with better manners would keep to themselves] But he answered cheerfully that he saves his money and from time to time makes a killing on selling a record.

So I left the store with my groceries musing about people and their collections and eccentricities and tastes in weather. I was still thinking about this while I gardened, planting mostly fuchsias and geraniums that I bought a week ago and tidying up flower beds and planters, taking stock of where I’m going to fill in with new flowers and ferns.

By the time the Fed Ex truck pulled up it was 6:30 and I was dirty and sweaty and decided to abandon my arty plans and kept gardening until about 8, when I went for a walk, noticing the clouds rolling in while following the songs of birds in their evening rhapsody.

In honor of Poetry Month, here is a poem copied from Poets.org—a terrific site and another from Ted Kooser’s site at AmericanLifeinPoetry.org a site he started about poetry to make it more accessible. Kooser is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and you might also want to check out

American Life in Poetry: Column 106

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
By describing the relocation of the moles which ravaged her yard, Washington poet Judith Kitchen presents an experience that resonates beyond the simple details, and suggests that children can learn important lessons through observation of the natural world.

Catching the Moles

First we tamp down the ridges
that criss-cross the yard

then wait for the ground
to move again.

I hold the shoe box,
you, the trowel.

When I give you the signal
you dig in behind

and flip forward.
Out he pops into daylight,

blind velvet.

We nudge him into the box,
carry him down the hill.

Four times we've done it.
The children worry.

Have we let them all go
at the very same spot?

Will they find each other?
We can't be sure ourselves,

only just beginning to learn
the fragile rules of uprooting.

Poem copyright © 1986 by Judith Kitchen, whose most recent book is the novel, "The House on Eccles Road," Graywolf Press, 2004. Reprinted from "Perennials," Anhinga Press, 1986, with permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

Dishwater
by Ted Kooser
Slap of the screen door, flat knock of my grandmother's boxy black shoes on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride out to the edge and then, toed in with a furious twist and heave, a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands and hangs there shining for fifty years over the mystified chickens, over the swaying nettles, the ragweed, the clay slope down to the creek, over the redwing blackbirds in the tops of the willows, a glorious rainbow with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright 2004 Ted Kooser