April 14 - 19, 2006
This Week's Events at Malaprop's Bookstore/Café
55 Haywood St., Asheville, NC 28801
828-254-6734 or 1-800-441-9829
www.malaprops.com

Friday, April 14 at 7 PM: Our event with Daniel Quinn has been postponed. We are working to reschedule as soon as possible. We will post the new date in our weekly email and on our website as soon as we confirm with his publisher.

Saturday, April 15
* 2-3:30 PM: Booksigning with Liz Walker, author of Eco Village at Ithaca. Starhawk calls this book "a great contribution to the sustainability movement."
* 7 PM: Ann B. Ross reads from her latest in the popular Miss Julia series, Miss Julia Stands Her Ground. A booksigning will follow.

Sunday, April 16 at 3 PM: Writers at Home with host Tommy Hays. This month's featured writers are UNCA's Comfort Scholarship Award Winners for Excellence in Creative Writing, Antonio del Toro and Caitlin Shanley.

Tuesday, April 18 at 7 PM: Join the Malaprop's Young Adult Bookclub with host Caroline Green to discuss Stones are Hatching by Geraldine McCaughrean.

Wednesday, April 19 at 6:30 PM: An evening of poetry and song with the Traveling Bonfires.

This week's poem is one of my very favorite poems. I hope you enjoy it too. "On My Own," by Philip Levine from New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf).

On My Own

Yes, I only got here on my own.
Nothing miraculous. An old woman
opened her door expecting the milk,
and there I was, seven years old, with
a bulging suitcase of wet cardboard
and my hair plastered down and stiff
in the cold. She didn't say, "Come in,"
she didn't say anything. Her luck
has always been bad, so she stood
to one side and let me pass, trailing
the unmistakable aroma of badger
which she mistook for my underwear,
and so she looked upward, not
to heaven but to the cracked ceiling
her husband had promised to mend,
and she sighed for the first time
in my life that sigh which would tell
me what was for dinner. I found my room
and spread my things on the sagging bed:
and bright ties and candy striped shirts,
the knife to cut bread, the stuffed weasel
to guard the window, the silver spoon
to turn my tea, the pack of cigarettes
for the life ahead, and at last
the little collection of worn-out books
from which I would choose my only name?
Morgan the Pirate, Jack Dempsey, the Prince
of Wales. I chose Abraham Plain
and went off to school wearing a cap
that said "Ford" in the right script.
The teachers were soft-spoken women
smelling like washed babies and the students
fierce as lost dogs, but they all hushed
in wonder when I named the 400 angels
of death, the planets sighted and unsighted,
the moment at which creation would turn
to burned feathers and blow every which way
in the winds of shock. I sat down
and the room grew quiet and warm. My eyes
asked me to close them. I did, and so
I discovered the beauty of sleep and that
to get ahead I need only say I was there,
and everything would open as the darkness
in my silent head opened onto seascapes
at the other end of the world, waves
breaking into mountains of froth, the sand
running back to become salt savor
of the infinite. Mrs. Tarbox woke me
for lunch, a tiny container of milk
and chocolate cookies in the shape of Michigan.
Of course I went home at 3:30, with
the bells ringing behind me and four stars
in my notebook and drinking companions
on each arm. If you had been there
in your yellow harness and bright hat
directing traffic you would never
have noticed me, my clothes shabby
and my eyes bright; to you I'd have been
just an ordinary kid. Sure, now you
know, now it's obvious, what with the light
of the Lord streaming through the nine
windows of my soul and the music of rain
following in my wake and the ordinary air
on fire every blessed day I waken the world.

Enjoy your weekends!

- News provided by Linda Barrett Knopp, Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe

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