World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day is tomorrow, and here on campus we're reading poems through the noon hour, a more-or-less annual event now (three times since 2003). This year the reading's held in the Samek Gallery, up in the student center, where all week there's a display of panels from the NAMES Project, including, I anticipate, the one I made for David back in 1995.

Can it be ten years? Eleven? Twenty-five now since it all started?

This year's reading is all Tory Dent: 24 poems from her long sequence "Black Milk." I wish we had time to read the whole set.

There's a reading of the names going on all week as well, interrupted tomorrow by an hour of poems, then back into the litany of the fallen.

* * * * *

High wind advisory for tomorrow, and possible snow in the evening. Damp and mild today, more April than November. Walking to class this morning, I stopped to pick up a large caterpillar from the wet sidewalk: putty-colored with a slight yellow-green cast and a double ridge of small triangular markings down its back. Hairless caterpillars always seem ready to burst: I can't not think of the goo inside. This one was over two inches long and resembled a cutworm, except that every cutworm I've ever picked up instantly coils into a defensive spiral. This one lay stretched out, rigid, barely moving.

[photo: natural (?) indentations in limestone, Bald Eagle State Park]