Tax week.  Trouble has come home to roost.  Days pass as I sit at the dining room table, scribbling notes and deciphering notes previously scribbled and moving piles of paper from one place to another.  Consequently, here I am with very little time to compose my weekly post and with a very great need to clear my head. 

Time for a poem or two. 

I’ve chosen one of my own, and one that a dear friend sent to me this week that has become my new favorite.  Both concern a very analog question.  What am I?  The first, by Walcott, is the love letter each of us should send to ourselves before we die.  It touches, with beautiful simplicity, on the love affair from which all others spring, and without which no love is possible.  And as such, it shifts the context for who, and what, we are – not objects, but rather worlds. 

The second poem I wrote in my early twenties.  Let’s do the math – yikes, almost thirty years ago.  That alone gives it analog credentials.  During this period of time, I was commissioned on occasion to write poems for people, and this one was written for a husband on his birthday, a potter, a lovely man in whose presence one had the feeling that, somehow, everything was going to be okay.  His presence lent the deeper resonance of  the poem, which touches on my suspicion that time does not actually exist, or perhaps that everything is happening at once, appearances aside – and that we are not things but rather moments or places or something too mysterious to ever be explained, but that can be alluded to, experienced, explored.

That’s what poetry is for.

Love After Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

The Desert

By Julie Mathison

I am the desert
in all things, the desert in
a grain of sand, a child’s eyes
that open, close and open,
close,
the sun that poses as
eternity
in the blinking of eyes, I
am the desert who remains.

I am the desert
in a pair of hands, the clay
that shapes us from a shapeless
place, where the voices
sing and rage and
never stop. I am a desert.
Call me silence.

Sands shift in the wind
that is a silence
(call me time), and
I see myself undone in
everything become, in
every death, a dune become
a furrow,
while the hands that are
the desert shape themselves.

Fingers rise like birds, become
whispers in the silence,
ripples in sand, the
flickering of eyes, open
and close and open and
close, and
behind them is a desert,
and that is me,
in everything become,
undone.

Photo attribution: From “Hi-res Images from the Apollo Missions”; source, Flickr: The Commons / NASA; CC BY PD GOV; no additional rights; obtained from www.publicdomainreview.org