It has been a very busy day.
I was invited to lead a youth poetry workshop and participate in a panel discussion today. It was the annual meeting of UPPAA (Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association) at the library where I work. Maybe four years ago, I delivered the keynote address for UPPAA, so I am familiar with the organization and its people.
Doing these kinds of events always makes me a little anxious. Some of the questions running through my head: Will these kids like me? What do I know about recording audiobooks? Did I leave the iron on? (Okay, that last question was an allusion to the movie Airplane, but you get the idea.) My inner Catholic schoolboy was fully present for most of the day. Lots of noise in my head.
Marie Howe writes about finding a quiet place . . .
Keeping Still
by: Marie Howe
If late at night, when watching the moon, you still
sometimes get vertigo, it’s understandable
that you wish suddenly and hard for fences, for someone
to marry you. Desiring a working knowledge,
needing to know some context by heart, you might
accept anything: the room without windows,
the far and frozen North, or the prairie, the prairie
even, if it means that.
The long wide space and cold dirt that will not
be seduced into hills, and the dust, that even after
you have kicked and swept and fallen on it pounding,
will not produce a tree. It will allow you
to rise with certainty and move with the relief
of necessary things to the wash on the line,
to the small maple you brought here that must be tied
for the winter or die.
Even the prairie night, blind with snow,
when no one comes, and you no longer look
to the mirror but force your fingers to the stitching
and produce a child to help with the lambing
and the carrying of water. Although it might be years
before you turn and stop, startled
by the sweet and sudden smell of sheets snapping
in the sun, and the drunken lilac, prairie purple,
blooming by the doorway, because you planted it.
Keeping still is difficult because there’s so much noise in the world these days. There are wars and inflation and soaring gas prices and an idiot tearing down/destroying national monuments. (Said idiot is responsible for everything else in that previous sentence, as well.)
I don’t keep still very often. Even when I fall asleep at night, I have to have some kind of noise. Lately, it’s been old movies like Steel Magnolias and Crocodile Dundee. My ADD mind doesn’t rest easily. It requires distraction and, sometimes, medication. (Not afraid to admit that I have a customer loyalty account at my local cannabis dispensary.)
Today, keeping still was impossible for me. Too many things happening. However, after my youth poetry workshop, I was able to sit in my office and write for a while, and it was glorious. I rarely get more than 30 or 40 minutes of writing time in a 24-hour period. Plus, I went to the laundromat after supper tonight, and I was able to write there, too. So I found a few still moments during the parade of this day.
I wish I was more like my puppy. She can fall asleep practically anywhere, and very little disturbs her when she’s dozing. (Every once in a while, in the middle of the night, I’ll hear her quietly bark in her crate, undoubtedly chasing a bunny or chipmunk in her dreams. But that’s it.) Dogs aren’t gifted with consciences or concepts of sin. They just eat and sleep and (if they’re not neutered or spayed) fuck. That’s it. Maybe everyone should aspire to a dog’s life. The world would be a much happier place, I think.
Saint Marty wrote the following poem at the laundromat tonight . . .
What a Wonderful World
by: Martin Achatz
No offense, Louis, but it’s pretty hard
to notice rainbows in the sky or friends
shaking hands, saying “How do you do?”
or even imagining those three words
(I and love and you) uttered in polite
company these days, when poets
are murdered in their cars and bombs
fall on school buildings filled with girls
too young to even know how to hate
anything but peas or an 8 p.m. curfew.
I want the world to be wonderful.
I really do. But even bees are having
trouble finding the wonder of pollen,
and polar bears drown because the wonder
of ice can only be found in poems like this
by people like me who remember their parents
swaying in the kitchen, holding each other
close as you, Louis, growled your way
through that wonder-filled song, their hard
bodies shining like new pennies, the kind
no longer being minted these days. Oh, yeah.
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