It won’t take long for me to stand up, look around to see if anyone saw. I’ll blush as I see that everyone did.
This title comes from Kemi Alabi’s essay about Jenny Xie’s poem, Ongoing.1 Reading that line I was reminded that evading the status quo will be unwieldy, that departure from this culture—that wants us to fill the voids it produces by achieving and buying more, dominating ourselves and each other—will probably and hopefully crush our egos.
Sometimes I try to take this tripping into my own hands. I try leaping, sliding. It doesn’t always work. It sometimes works.
Poetry aids the leaping. The wonder is what often trips us up in the first place, calling us back to itself.
I read Elizabeth Metzger’s poem, Don’t Make Me, on Poem Per Diem.2
So many of my favorite poems make me go, HUH?! which is the tripping, is the gift. Trip like fall, trip like voyage.
After reading EM’s poem I had to look up what else she had written, and came across her essay Matters of Conception, Reproducing the Unknowable.3 She writes, “We need form to give us a sense of pause even when it’s obvious time will not stop for us. We are forever moving and moved through it.” This, and so many other parts, stopped me in my tracks.
Time will not stop for us! But sometimes it feels like it does. It feels like it bends, pools. We cover a great distance in seemingly no time, mercifully bewildered—or reminded of our everlasting bewilderment.
So maybe I offer myself the form, the pause. And I return it to you, too, as it’s been generously extended to me by countless many.
Raised by Wolves, Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems A Graywolf Anthology. I got to hear Jenny Xie read this poem this week, near Gramercy Park, and as she signed my copy of her book, The Rupture Tense (title!!!!!!), we quipped about how weird it is that the park is locked and she reminded me of the Broad City episode where Ilana Glazer’s character is walking by the park, sees someone inside the park choking, and gives someone the heimlich maneuver through the fence. When he thanks her for saving his life he asks how he can repay her and she says how about with a key to the park?
Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Stored generations of filtered quietude.
And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way
the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what.
She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level,
but they were lower, they were changing all the time.
Great for a daily trip ;) brought to me by poetry devotee MaKshya Tolbert
DON’T MAKE ME When I told you the crab on the beach was dead you asked me what's dead I said This is his shell but you must have heard soul a yearlong misunderstanding a summer later unable to sleep you said No, you told me the body's the part that goes, the soul stays. And I said No, you have it backwards, the shell stays and becomes the beach again. I waited for you to ask after the soul, where the crab goes. Practiced in my head an inconsolable hour I don't know or No- where, scraping my mortal voice like bright meat when suddenly you shot up from the covers done crying. So the going is forever?
I was blown away by this essay please read it and tell me if it blows you away too.