I have spent some of this day with poetry. Sometimes poetry is the Only Thing That Will Do.
For part of the time, I read the poems in the silence of my room, and this was good, because poetry is something that needs to be heard, even if you don’t read it aloud.
More recently, however, I have been reading it accompanied by the din of football on television, a sound that, with concentration, can become background noise like so much traffic several stories below one’s window. And the reason for this is that Bill is watching the playoff games. And the reason I have not retreated to my bedroom is that he has also built me a lovely fire in the fireplace, and the fireplace is not in the bedroom.
I love good poetry. I don’t always understand it, but I love it. I love the sounds it makes, and the ways the language alarms me, and the words. I have made myself a new list around the edges of today’s page in my journal, and here are some of the words: chary, effulgent, osculant, demiurgical, eversible, riposte, lamella, eidetic, paranomasia, lambent, endogenous. Some of these are words I know; none of them are words I use. I will look them up, and write them on index cards, and keep these cards on the window ledge above my kitchen sink. Then I will learn them, and then I will use them.
And here is one of the poems I have read today. I don’t know whether I understand it completely, but I like the way it sounds, and something in it looks familiar and So True. Enjoy, if you’d like.
“Negligee, Negligent, Negligence”
Here, sidling up to the house where she was raised, the rooms aglow with ghosts,
daytime ghosts in cahoots with the sunshine, panes unable to hold a single thing
back: her father, squinting at a verse, her mother, licking stamps.
Nothing here was a waste of time.
Nothing crept so slowly.
Here, the slender neck of Nefertiti rises in limestone from the photographs,
All this fiddle, the ears begin to say,
Beyond, the eyebrows say,
Nothing nefarious, from the slender shoulders, as your own heart.
What in history would you call your own?
She curls against the brick as best she can, the simple girl,
giving her body to the hard wall of memory, the topography of this place
home: once she saw a peregrine falcon, heard a hundred pond frogs.
And wouldn’t you know a girl is only a scrap of soft fabric with legs,
walking backwards toward love,
strolling sideways toward love,
fluttering across the waters in her way.
She turns. For all your permanent shimmer, the cloth of my skin
is young, is questing, dilapidated with chance.
Something, O Queen, knows me better than I know myself.
God shaped the fields of sorghum just so?
–Susanna Childress, Jagged With Love
