September 5: "Poetry," Illness, Reality Check

It has been a day of illness for me.  At first, I thought I was suffering from allergies--runny nose, cough, blocked ears.  As the day and my symptoms progressed (fever, aches, more mucous than Slimer from Ghostbusters), I surrounded myself with an Appalachian range of used Kleenexes and tissues.  My eyes are gushing, and my throat stings.

Before you ask, I did test for COVID.  Twice.  Both tests came back negative.  So, I can't even claim that distinction.  Basically, I just have a very nasty cold.  Annoyingly ordinary.  Nothing to write home or a poem about.  

Billy Collins tries to define poetry . . . 

Poetry

by: Billy Collins

Call it a field where the animals

who were forgotten by the Ark

come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell

before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,

this is no place to set up

the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb

over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist

with his noisy typewriter

describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,

how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

and a dog curled on the rug

move the characters

from the wings to the stage

to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.

We have enough to do

complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,

and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing--

and all we need for that is an afternoon,

a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

or better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

I couldn't even be a poet tonight, even though Collins says that poets are "busy doing nothing."  I didn't even have the energy to do nothing.  I was supposed to lead an online poetry workshop this evening.  After debating with myself for close to an hour, I came to the conclusion that I would have looked like extra from The Walking Dead if I got on Zoom and tried to write with anyone.  

So I simply grabbed a pillow and blanket and fell asleep on the couch.  Every once in a while, I would climb to the surface of consciousness long enough to take a drink of water or blow my nose.

Eventually, I woke up and decided to type this post.  Now that I'm done, I'm ready to collapse.  Literally.  I think these last few weeks of little sleep and lots of work have caught up with me.  My body is giving me a reality check.  

Here's the reality:  Saint Marty is exhausted.