June 15

Today is the birthday of actress, Helen Hunt. Remember the scene in as Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson when she's finally had enough of him and then he mentions her son which totally gets him on her bad side. Good movie. I think any of us would like to be told that we make someone else want to be a better person.

It's Native American Citizenship Day. Congress passed the resolution in 1924 recognizing the citizenship rights of Native Americans. Wow! How nice. There's a good old boy saying down South, "That's damn white of them." I wonder if Native Americans have a special day where they recognize our existence.

It's the birthday of poet Amy Clampitt, 1920. Here's a poem:


Beach Glass
by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water’s edge,
turning over concepts
I can’t envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty
driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it’s hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass
amber of Budweiser, chryoprase
of Almadî and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I’m afraid) Phillips’
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with the treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

Amy Clampitt