Twice I sat down to write about free speech, Twitter, hypocrisy, and whether or not a business should be forced to serve people when doing so would violate their religious or ethical beliefs (current supreme court case). I didn’t get very far in either attempt – a few paragraphs here and there about the state of affairs in America and the ugliness (and blatant lies) that is/are so often put on display. In the end, I’m not sure the attempts were worth the effort. I suspect I allowed some things I had read on social media to borrow (maybe not hijack) my amygdala.
I set the morally indignant writing aside and read. On the end table by the couch, I have a small stack of books – maybe ten or twelve volumes of poetry. I try to spend parts of my free time picking them up and reading one or two poems from each. I also bought a kindle version of Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart (though I think I should have gone with one of the books by Adam Grant). I worked on a poem called “my time? your time?” but I couldn’t get it to go anywhere. My one dating profile is still out west, and I was thinking about how at 8 in the morning on a weekend, nobody out that way is awake. 8 am my time, 5 am their time – as though we could have two separate versions of time. This got me to thinking about how three hours time difference is a few thousand miles of actual distance and several hours of travel time. Right now, it’s more of a concept than it is a poem: time and distance and the way we try to shrink both or the ways in which we live our separate lives: my time, your time. I couldn’t come up with the small event that would lead to the larger concept – maybe a father away on business trying to minimize the distances with nightly calls back home, but in the end they’ve all gone to bed and he has empty hours.
One of the poems I read did a lot of what I want poetry to do. It tells a story. It uses clear and simple language. It zooms in and out from small mundane events to larger philosophical statements and observations about being alive and being human. It contains a dark humor that acknowledges we’re all bad at this life thing, but what other choice do we have? I’ll include it here because I think it’s good and because I haven’t shared many poems lately. It’s called “Homework” by Tony Hoagland.
I had to redrill the holes in the base of the downstairs door
a little higher so the rubber apron of the sweep
would not jam but barely brush against the floor
to keep cold rivulets of air from leaking in.
There is a right way to do things and
I would have done it that way the first time,
but I was in a hurry and grabbed the wrong tool–
that’s how I came to gouge my second knuckle
and drip blood onto the rug,
then furiously kick the antique molding loose.
Sometimes I think I’m not really qualified for this job,
the job of my life, I mean,
and yet I keep on doing it,
with more enthusiasm than skill,
as if jamming things together and twisting them hard
was an Eastern philosophy,
which claims not that life is beautiful
but that jagged edges and dried blood
are part of being here.
The damage proves that we are real.
About beauty, I am not prepared to say.
My field is wobbly table legs
and spreading ceiling water-stains.
The truth swings a little crookedly,
it has a faulty seal
and lets outside air leak in.
At some point, it may need fixing.
I probably won’t return to my moral indignation over free speech and hypocrisy and politics – mostly because the truth swings a little crookedly and I seem to get caught in the vacillations. I doubt I’ll return to the poem about time and distance – I have more coherent threads to follow and better lines to explore. It snowing here and the outside world feels muted. I ran my errands yesterday so that I could sit and read and maybe make some banana bread. Tonight I’ll cook a pot of chili and I’ll try to remind myself that it’s ok, and maybe even more honest, to approach most things in life with more enthusiasm than skill.