I'm a nineteen year old political science major at a university in Missouri. I am the worlds greatest defender of cliches and I generally have no idea what I'm doing.
Put your hands beneath his armpits, bend your knees, wait for the clasp of his thinning arms; the best lock cheek to cheek. Move slow. Do not, right now,
recall the shapes he traced yesterday on your back, moments before being wheeled to surgery. Do not pretend the anxious calligraphy of touch was sign beyond some unspeakable animal stammer. Do not
go back further into the landscape of silence you both tended, with body and breath, until it nearly obscured all but the genetic gravity between you.
And do not imagine wind now blowing that landscape into a river which spills into a sea. Because it doesn’t. That’s not this love poem. In this love poem the son trains himself on the task at hand, which is simple, which is, finally, the only task he has ever had, which is lifting the father to his feet.
Maybe, since you’re something like me, you, too, would’ve nearly driven into oncoming traffic for gawking at the clutch between the two men on Broad Street, in front of the hospital, which would not stop, each man’s face so deeply buried in the other’s neck—these men not, my guess, to be fucked with—squeezing through that first, porous layer of the body into the heat beneath; maybe you, too, would’ve nearly driven over three pedestrians as your head swiveled to lock on their lock, their burly fingers squeezing the air from the angels on the backs of their denim jackets which reminds you the million and one secrets exchanged in nearly the last clasp between your father and his brother, during which the hospital’s chatter and rattle somehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatable song between them, and just as that clasp endured through what felt like the gradual lengthening of shadows and the emergence of once cocooned things, and continues to this day, so, too, did I float unaware of the 3000 lb machine in my hands drifting through a stop light while I gawked at their ceaseless cleave going deeper, and deeper still, so that Broad Street from Fairmount to the Parkway reeked of the honey-scented wind pushed from the hummingbirds now hovering above these two men, sweetening, somehow, the air until nectar, yes, nectar gathered at the corners of my mouth like sun-colored spittle, the steel vehicle now a lost memory as I joined the fire-breasted birds in listening to air exchanged between these two men, who are, themselves, listening, forever, to the muscled contours of the other’s neck, all of us still, and listening, as if we had nothing to blow up, as if we had nothing to kill.
I’m for reckless abandon and spontaneous celebrations of nothing at all, like the twin flutes I kept in the trunk of my car in a box labeled Emergency Champagne Glasses!
Raise an unexpected glass to long, cold winters and sweet hot summers and the beautiful confusion of the times in between. To the unexpected drenching rain that leaves you soaking wet and smiling breathless; “We danced in the garden in torn sheets in the rain,” we were christened in the sanctity of the sprinkler, can’t you hear it singing out its Hallelujah?
Here’s to the soul-expanding power of the simply beautiful.
See, things you hate, things you despise, multinational corporations and lies that politicians tell, injustices that make you mad as hell, that’s all well and good. And as far as writing poems goes, I guess you should. It just might be a poem that gets Mumia released, brings an end to terrorism or peace in the middle east.
But as far as what soothes me, what inspires and moves me, honesty behooves me to tell you your rage doesn’t move me. See, like the darkest of clouds my heart has a silver lining, which does not harken to the loudest whining, but beats and stirs and grows ever more when I learn of the things you’re actually for.
That’s why I’m for best friends, long drives, and smiles, nothing but the sound of thinking for miles. For the unconditional love of dogs: may we learn the lessons of their love by heart. For therapy when you need it, and poetry when you need it. And the wisdom to know the difference.
The solution to every problem usually involves some kind of liquid, even if it’s only Emergency Champagne or running through the sprinkler. Can’t you hear it calling you?
I’m for crushes not acted upon, for admiration from afar, for the delicate and the resilient and the fragile human heart, may it always heal stronger than it was before. For walks in the woods, and for the woods themselves, by which I mean the trees. Definitely for the trees. Window seats, and locally brewed beer, and love letters written by hand with fountain pens: I’m for all of these.
I’m for evolution more than revolution unless you’re offering some kind of solution.
I’m for the courage it takes to volunteer, to say “yes,” “I believe,” and “I will.” For the bright side, the glass half full, the silver lining, and the optimists who consider darkness just a different kind of shining.
So don’t waste my time and your curses on verses about what you are against, despise, and abhor. Tell me what inspires you, what fulfills and fires you, put your precious pen to paper and tell me what you’re for!
And still you can hear the lines going up. And the words, the vocabulary words— Glaconian, distemic, irrepscenteelia— Thrown in to remind you “I am a writer! Eat my Verbal dust!”
And then the end Spoken softly, hauntingly tender, Though not devoid of irony, Ending abruptly as if there is more …
As in light coming distances in the humming blankness from stars already shuttered and collapsed, as in the volume of water not in a bottle, the area of the shadow of a missing limb. The way winter light through glass warms nothing. The speed at which, on the rain-slick leaf-scattered Kittaning Pike, the accident doesn’t happen, the car doesn’t slew and swing out against the oncoming traffic, the horns don’t blare, glass doesn’t turn to a geometry of pain and so she returns home after work with the dusk already clambering up the house, the porch light out, haphazard mail and the message light flashing down the hall.
It could be that her child, gone to stay with his father, has called to say he loves her, or that her husband has left her for another man, a rodeo clown, and she won’t know whether to be enraged or amused. Or perhaps it’s her dentist confirming her appointment as her cats twine between her legs, demanding to be fed.
If possibility is the square of experience, what can she say of this day, its unknown grief haunting the house, painting the walls with its brushwork of headlight and shadow? Would she wish to take it to the root, the absolute i on the margins of a tertiary world? Outside, the rain begins again and slaps the grass, the trees’ bare limbs scaffolding the exponential dark. She snaps on the light and sees herself repeated in the mirror, at once doubled and inexplicably exhausted.
"Maybe it was Richard Hugo who said it: Only love of someone’s work can conquer the jealousy we feel when we look at it. When I’m in the presence of a poem that’s good, but doesn’t move me deeply, I’m more apt to feel jealousy. And when I’m in the presence of a poem that is in other ways superior to what I do but I’m truly moved by it, I become part owner of that poem and it doesn’t bother me so much that I didn’t write it."
