I bet you can guess which book inspired me to draw this.
This is Emily Writes Back, for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.
As you may have noticed, gentle reader, I have fallen short of my intent to send you daily or nearly daily poems and stories. But today marks exactly one month before the big swim, Women Swimmin’ for Hospicare, which has so far raised $203,346 toward its $600,000 goal, and so I recommit to stepping on the gas and sending you little ditties and delights every day, to inspire giving to my fundraising campaign for Hospicare as part of Women Swimmin’.
OK, here’s a poem I wrote this morning about my very acute hankering for a certain kind of book:
Our Books For Lizzie and Amy A curling stem of purest black beneath a deep red burst of care/ reason/smarts/perfume, against the palest blue-- her strands of hair, the sky, the road that leads us there, starting on page one. Mean what? Surety, style, a metaphor, an emblem logo of imagination, branded into memory, a place to writhe in comfort and anticipation. There are places in the mind built from storybooks: underground rabbit kingdoms, remote Canadian islands covered in flowering trees, mansions with overgrown gardens behind a wall, or insides of attics when a storm's outside, the father in a far dimension, roaring rain and wind against the house. Long dark halls and multiple crazy wives hidden away behind closed doors. (Why are hidden women gone insane such a cozy thought?) Boarding schools as familiar as McDonald's ho hum talking portraits... so perfect it's downright tacky. The Silver side of slender leaves, a river boat, and species of animals that follow wherever you go-- daemons-- and in day, that meadow hill we lie on still in our head on our backs, looking at the sky where characters see more in clouds than we could mange to see ourselves. I want to travel back to a Bronte/du Maurier/L'Engle place or a Richard Russo town, with a McMurtry kind of gal who snaps her gum or has peacocks in her yard and says no like "Nah." Make the plains stretch forever, and the house's clapboard bright in sun. Chapped cheeks and snow that crunches, a girl prettier than almost anyone, and a house that's haunted by a tender ghost who only wants what's best. Put me in a ship on a rolling sea with a captain hero who gazes far or a Swedish stowaway aimed to build a life in an America that's good. In the books of my adolescence, parents were tanned and distracted. Little brothers were pains or sages. Teachers were dying of cancer secretly or owned a forest cabin. What else am I forgetting?