Tuesday, April Fools, Second week of Eastertide, 2008. Actually, now it is Thursday the 3rd.

I don’t remember where I came across this prayer:

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt:
Put me to doing: put me to suffering:
Let me be employed for thee, or laid aside for thee:
Exalted for thee, or brought low for thee:
Let me be full, let me be empty:
Let me have all things: let me have nothing:
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, [Mother/]Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth let it be ratified in heaven.

Again, my memory is fussy, but didn’t I read somewhere that Flannery O'Connor wrote this?

“Subtlety is the curse of man, it is not found in the Deity.”


I got this Franz Wright poem from Knopf’s daily April poem. “Sunlight will win, don’t worry.” That’s a quote, not the title.


Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private


National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning


and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I'm in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?


A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

The following block is from a book review of Scott Weidensaul's Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding and Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature by Cindy Crosby in Books and Culture Review (: A Christian Review, that is). The writer internally quoted is Rosen.

Never have I better understood the meaning of Hegel's observation ["the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"], which essentially means that insight arrives when the end is near, or that cultures peak when they are about to die, than when I started birding." Later, he [Rosen] writes poignantly, "If we don't shore up the earth, the skies will be empty." Birding has changed him for the better: "Dawn and dusk matter differently to me now, and the seasons, tied to the arrival of birds and the departure of birds, bind me to the earth in subtle and important ways."

"Dawn and dusk matter differently to me now, and the seasons, tied to the arrival of birds and the departure of birds, bind me to the earth in subtle and important ways."

I like that. It matters to me too.