Hi, MaryAnn, I didn't get to the Thursday OPP until Friday, but I'd still like to comment.

There was something about how Wagoner brought life back to the old car in the second half of the poem, the barnacles and limpets going for a ride, that I particularly liked.

And on my first fast read of the Jeffers poem, I felt it was somehow a little impersonal. I didn't even catch the two "we musts" and the dictatorial tone until others commented on it. I usually bristle at being told what to do, so I can understand where they're coming from. I also had to downgrade "Carmel Point" by a fraction of a percentage point because of the term "milch cows." Come on, what's wrong with "milk"? Even though milch cows is a legitimate term, I felt like I'd taken a wrong turn and ended up on a German coastline.

One other thing: Both poems had a common theme detailing what man has done to nature. But I prefer a poem that reminds us what nature can do for man. Here's one more offering to the OPP:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's
lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the
great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of
still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Barry