Today I made a mess of lentil soup. (Literally.) A pound of lentils, an enormity of water, carrots and celery and potatoes, several leaves of lacy purple and latticed-red-and-green chard, served with very garlickly garlic bread. Just splendid.

And then putting up the leftovers, of course, they get all over the sink and the counter. Ah well. It'll be nice, though, having soup for Sunday dinner, and probably for lunch on Friday. Likely to be enough left over to freeze, too.

A big batch of soup every month seems to be a Good Thing. I think I'll try white bean soup in March.

The other night I was waiting to catch a bus on Market Street. As the bus pulled up, a boxy orange streetcar pulled up behind it.

I love the San Francisco streetcars. I take them every chance I get - but I'd never been on one of the orange Milan streetcars before.

Wooden benches! Beautiful lacquered wood, wood trim between the windows ...

Instructions in Italian on plaques affixes to the walls ...

I'm always in the middle of half a dozen books. One of the ones I'm reading at the moment is The World Rushed In, which I picked up at a garage sale for a buck.

(Garage sales and library sales have ruined me for regular book-buying. If it costs more than a dollar, I can rarely bring myself to buy it.)

When I picked it up, I thought it was a basic historical account of the Gold Rush. It turns out to be a much more interesting thing: one man's Gold Rush diary, supplemented with excerpts from other Gold Rush diaries.

My Heaven On Earth anthology introduced me to Les Murray. He's written some extraordinary poems, and there are hundreds of them online. What a mountain of wonder.

"Spring Hail" is lovely, so vivid and specific. The repetitions (not just the first line, but eating ice as well) breathe rhythm into the whole and make the memory more immediate.

(I'm not sure how he's using "prop," and my dictionary isn't helping; I'll have to look that up some more.)

I'm pretty sure this is the first Rebecca Wee poem I've read.

I especially liked the ambiguity or double meaning of

"On a beach a man pushes a cart with his life
through the sand."

I also read "Mrs. Darwin" by Carol Ann Duffy.

I love villanelles, and I love how Stallings follows the rules of the form until she makes the choice to modify that last line (and add a blank line for emphasis, or at least mindfulness).

I love how she invokes the whole of the typical morning - toast, and, sensibly, butter, and then also the morning mail.

There are actually only a few references to burning and smoke, but the whole poem seems infused by the scent, the way everything takes on the burnt smell when something gets blackened in the toaster.

She is so brilliant.

Other poems read today:

Little Donkey - Wendy Cope

I found this in my 180 More anthology. I love the careful rhyming that is quieted by the lengths of the sentences, how, reading it aloud, I want to pause mid-line, making the rhymes fall irregularly internally.

That structure, that soft nudge toward reading it conversationally, in a low voice, finding my way to the invisible punctuation, made me want to read it three times, four, five, and I in my initial rush read it as if it were a poem about travelling, about the dust on your own feet as you rush through and across the world, but no, it's an ode, to dust, to road dust,

I picked up my copy of 180 More, and instead of picking a random poem, I decided to start with the first one:

"First Hour," by Sharon Olds.

This is a lovely, jarring poem that lifts me out of my immediate life into the moment she's describing.

I immediately wanted to know more of her work, and found a large collection at PoetryFoundation.org. I haven't read them all yet - I want to take them slowly - but I'm anticipating more surprising, welcome alien images.

I recently discovered that WikiHow articles are often available in other languages - and now they're my favorite source of dual-language practice.

I can bring up an article in the target language (Spanish, French), and read it to practice comprehension and find new vocabulary words. It's terrific for the specialized vocabulary that goes with a particular hobby or daily activity, like playing the piano or making an omelet.

This is a fantastic biography. It's incredibly well researched (literally: I find it hard to believe how much time and trouble the author took to talk with everyone, read every archived document, chase down every source), and clearly and compellingly told.