So I have a poem here at Amethyst Arsenic you can read. Funny story: The title for this poem is actually the title to a different poem. I emailed the editors if they could change it, totally panicked at the mistake--and they said they would, but I know life gets busy and they haven't yet. And now I kind of like this title better than the original title. I may permanently change it.
Update: So they changed the poem to the correct poem and have nominated it for a Pushcart Prize!! That sure makes things better!
From Anne Truitt, in her memoir Prospect: "We can understand what it is to be human only to the degree that we are willing to endure all that it is to be human" (64).
"Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself" --I had misread that as empathy is finding echoes of yourself in another person when I first read this. (Mohsin Hamid in Poets and Writers Sept/Oct 2015 in "The Time Is Now" column.)
Autogeography
Finally, the body is littered with landscapes,
the brain all map and diligent chart.
The three-story row houses line up like memories
over the barbershops and the gas station
along a street grooved with trolley tracks.
A town at the center of a stubbled cornfield
blinks under an unnecessary stoplight,
waits in bone for the winds to come at dark.
There are two lakes breathing in the chest,
one north and large, the other south and smaller,
freezing over each year, but still breathing,
the avenues rough with fleets of gypsy cabs,
the bus idling in front of the YMCA,
the national road with its angry pickup trucks.
There is so much soil in the creases of the skin,
feet black with asphalt, toughened by brown glass.
Finally, the wanderer will settle into one place,
laying the back's weight on the pavement.
The world will take root—
the world will be buried in that place.
No comments:
Post a Comment