gratitude and poems

often one and the same

I can’t decide whether April is flying or dragging, but in any case it has been non.stop., and NaPoWriMo has been an unexpected anchor. Every morning (and sometimes a couple more times throughout the day), I come back to the desk to draft a poem. It has invited and often challenged (sometimes dared) me “to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive,” as Tracy K. Smith wrote (the former poet laureate is now transmitting from this very platform, by the way).

The dis-ease in my joints that arrived at the end of March has stayed through April. I can’t move my body as much as I’d like or in the ways I’d like. So I’m grateful to have other forms of meditation to move to the fore, incuding this daily poem project. It is reminding me how many ways there are to move, to practice, to be a conduit.

In honor of my gratitude for this project, I’m sharing two more (as yet untitled) drafts with you this week. And if you feel like it, I’d love to hear your experiences with ‘poetry-writing month’; with the word ‘sapidity’ (which I learned last week and knew it would be in a poem); with Sicilian produce markets and other sensory extravaganzas (and also if you know a great acupuncturist in Southern France?).

#19
having slept too late
morning is thick water
						not mud. not honey. water
						without its sapidity, its luster
						its relief.
all the movements and words and rhythms 
of morning are unclear, 
deadened, distracted
as if in two 
time zones at once.
minimalist piano with Duke Ellington
and his band. candle glow swallowed whole 
in broad daylight. lark and dove and gull
and squawking crow. i need three words 
at least to describe any thing
						the here-ness and lost-ness
						and both-at-once of it.
Rumi was right
						(Rumi was always right)
‘don’t go back to sleep,’
						it only gives the weariness
						a head start.

//

#23
after a darkness, when
the world is technicolor, i
think about the market
in Palermo 
where my senses were born
again. arugula so sharp
it’s almost mustard greens
basil so deep 
it’s almost mint. olives
you can smell from 
three stalls down. hands
waving, pointing, pressing,
testing firmness of a melon,
fullness of a face. and fish
by the pound
by the pound, by the pound
color and light and sound
that take your breath 
and give it back more full
of life. yes, you will live 
more life having wandered 
the market in Palermo, 
and having let it in.

//	

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talk soon. sending love from here.

💚//mischa