There are days we live
An apology of sorts, not that it's needed, I know. It's just I'm trying to love being alive out here, which isn't always easy. Oh and also a peach by Li-Young Lee.
All I want to do is feed you poems and offer what little I know, and yet.
I also want to do everything else.
Here, with summer running out of its runway, I want to be with it entirely.
I want to make lovely little snack plates every night, so I can have a little bit of a lot of things.
I want to attend to my little small dog with all the love and attentiveness and patience I have in my heart, and make sure she can drain her little weasel every hour on the hour, as her body is tiny and her tiny bladder tinier, and with all the meds, and also miles on the engine, you know, she pees a lot. Sometimes inside. We get to choose what bothers us. This doesn’t.
I want to read a book of poems a day, and spend hours rolling around with my own; I want to locate my joy in the absolute mess of it, to tear these words apart and put them back together again, in all the ways I’m learning they’d like to go.
I want to see my friends, outside and gorgeous, where we can eat olives and smuggle smirks and tell ourselves it’s safe, we’re safe together. I want to spend hours and hours touching grass and shaking off sand and laughing our dumb fucking heads off, I want my friends, my friends, my friends, with me as long as we’ll have each other, I want a world to makes us possible.
I want to make my house beautiful. And reasonably tidy. I want everything everywhere to have a place. I may settle for not a disaster.
I want to walk for miles with my friend who I married and the puppy he fell in love with the first time we saw him, who even at now a full year old is as infantwild as ever. I want to watch the dog play in the waves of Lake Michigan, and trot around the park with his tail held high, even as any dog close enough to smell him seems to want to kick or lick his ass to oblivion.
I want to do good work, as well as I can, at a pace I can manage forever.
I want to see my parents. I want to build a home. I need to do laundry. I want to read cards for Belinda, and tend my small garden, and learn to bake bread even though I know better. My god, how I’ve become fixated this week with learning to make bread, despite baking being nowhere near my brain’s strong suit, the grams and the mystery of it, which I’m told is only science, which is simply not my particular magic. I read other stars.
What I’m saying is yet again, this week, I have failed to read you the poems that I want, or to write the words I’ve been needing to. They start like this: Lately it’s been harder to ignore the possibility of god.
There’s always next week.
Until then, I need you to have this. I share it all the time, always.
It’s never not near to my mind.
From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Okay. I hope you can do the things that make you come to life today.
