Easter from Virginia

Sorry for the several days absence. Henry and I are on the east coast visiting some colleges. I've mooned around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my alma mater. I say mooned because I was so struck by emotion that I could barely speak. I was twenty again. The five years that I spent in Chapel Hill were some of the happiest of my life and pretty much unadulterated by anything other than some heartache over one boy or another and maybe that final D in Advanced Calculus. We're now in Virginia, staying in a pre-Civil War home on the Yeocomico River and later today will leave for Salisbury, Maryland.

I hope y'all have a happy Easter. Here's one of my favorite Easter poems:

The Palm at the End of the Mind


After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the 
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by 
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures--his 
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.


Kay Ryan