Sinister: Otters are terribly funny

[Will Porter]

I've been giggling for about half the day.  Among that staff at the
library where I work, "I'm going to run down the hall" has become the
euphemism of choice when one is going to abandon the circulation desk to
use the bathroom.  Of course, every time someone says to me that they are
going to run down the hall, I immediately picture them jogging quite
comically up and down the hall for no reason in particular.
That seemed like it was going to be a much funnier anecdote that it turned
out to be.

I'm trying to find a poem by Bill Knott.  The trouble is it's not a
particularly famous poem, and I'm pretty sure the title of the poem is
"Poem".  Incidentally, Bill Knott calls a lot of his poems "Poem".
Anyway, I committed it to memory years ago, and I'm not sure I remember it
correctly, so I'd very much like it if someone could point me to a book
that contains the poem.  What I can remember of it is at the bottom of
this message.

katy sed:
> Because even 
> kissing people that you half-like always leads to confusion.(I'm 
> guessing that Sinister people will understand this kind of thing.)

Do I ever!  It seems most of the time like the people who want to kiss me
are not the ones I'm particularly interested in kissing, but when the lips
are in your face, it's not hard to fall into the belief that some kissing
is better than no kissing, because when you get right down to it, kissing
is a pretty swell thing to do.

I think there must have been a genius convention at my library today. (by
which I mean that there was nothing of the sort, but rather that...  oh
you know what I mean)

I've decided that I like LLPJ, though for a long time, Monica Queen's
voice seemed like something that I very much did not like, though now it
appears as though I was mistaken.

On a separate note, I've just bitten my tongue and it hurts quite a lot
and I feel very much like cursing very loudly.


adios,
Will 


The poem goes something like this (the bracketed [] comments are my
comments):


The way the world is not
astonished by you
(it doesn't blink a leaf)
leads me to grop    [if I recall correctly, Bill makes up words sometimes]
that beauty is natural, unremarkable, 
and not to be spoken of
except in the course of things:
the course of singing and work-sharing,
the course of squeezes and neighbors,
the course of you, tying back your raving hair to go out,
and the course, of course, of me,
astonished by you
the way the world is not.


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