Hil stopped by for dinner last night so she and Matthew could talk to us about possible summer plans. Bouncing around the table: A return to Nicaragua, but pick a different city and a different activity. Matt wonít again sit for four hours a day of Spanish lessons. Guatemala, but it is safe? Colombia, but would they return home alive?

Knocked from the list: Costa Rica and Mexico – too ordinary, too safe. South America? Who knows anything about those countries? If they go somewhere, everyone, even Matthew agrees that they should have structure, as in community service, etc. . Preferred by the ërents and maybe even the deal breaker, known contacts in the area.

Anyone out there with ideas?

From the book The Unsubscriber by Bill Knott:

Untitled

Fingerprints look like ripples
because time keeps dropping
another stone into our palm.

From the review of The Unsubscriber in Poetry, the magazine Adam and Tricia gave me for my last birthday.

The Unsubscriber is Knottís first new collection in a decade, and it is something of an event, in part because Farrar, Straus and Giroux – home to Noble Prize-winning Derek Walcott and Pulitzer-winning, John Ashbery, as well as many distinguished others – is publishing it. And a good thing, too, because, as it turns out, Knott is an underrated, or at least an under-read, poet. To be sure, he is also plenty capable of bad – not to mention offensively grotesque – poetry, of a sort that is more unsettling than the average tediously bad poem. But his talent is a kind of live wire: no one, least of all the poet himself, seems to be able to get a consistently steadying hand on it, and if the result is sometimes appalling, it can also make for a kind of terrifying beauty.