Two waffles, two cups of coffee – black. An hour or two or three of reading and writing and reflection. The morning feels cool like an east coast autumn day. I can almost smell the papery mustiness of the used book shop in State College, the leafy path by the canal in Yardley, the crisp air at Tyler State Park where the rows of corn have turned yellow and brittle and rattle in the wind. It’s the type of day where I miss more things than I can name, and I want to name them all.
I don’t know what I’ll do with myself today. I don’t know what turning fifty-one entails other than it probably won’t be terribly different from yesterday. Maybe a run, maybe get some groceries, maybe take a long walk to an open air bar where I can drink a beer in the late-day sun – assuming we get some late-day sun.
On last night’s post-dinner stroll, I had set my iTunes library to shuffle. It played several songs that I had listened to on heavy rotation back in 2016 through 2018. I was newly single and trying to navigate a few short-term relationships that we mostly hoped would be longer-term. It was always summer turning into fall – drinks on the deck or the front stoop, the hum of crickets and cicadas at night… this is part of the naming.
After the neighborhood stroll, which I extended with a trip to the waterfront, I fought the restless desire to go out. It took a while for me to put the phone down, to make a cup of tea, and settle in for the night. I wanted to get a bit more serious about this writing thing. I wanted to get back into the habit of submitting poems to journals. I re-read a dozen or so things that I’ve written and once again the gap between what was on the page and the way I’d like to write was greater than I could suture shut. Too many of my poems have an absent other, a missing “you” – ghosts of past partners or some imagined future that never came to pass or may yet come to pass. The two of them often slow dancing with each other. I didn’t go too far back into the archives. I mostly stuck to things I’ve written in the last two years. Much like this blog, I feel distant from and slightly embarrassed by anything I wrote in 2019 or 2020 yet oddly committed to its preservation as a testament to change and dare I say growth.
When I’m stuck like this – wanting to be a better writer than I am and wanting new subject matter, subject matter from the present moment, I turn to the writers I admire. This seldom helps. I am haunted by Mary Oliver’s quote, “attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.” More often than not, my writing takes one of those two forms – lots of attention and little feeling, or feeling without much attention. I can never seem to marry to the two. In both cases, when I re-read what I’ve written, I find myself saying, “so what?” A case of the “so what’s” is almost always fatal to creativity.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that all of my previous eye doctors have sent emails wishing me a happy birthday and none of my girlfriends from 2016 or 2017 have – but it feels like the kind of attention and “humor” that should be turned into to some type of poem or story. And I’m trying to figure out how to work “bass fishing with guitars” into a poem about a game we (there’s that absent, fictitious other/you/we again) played while eating a slow lunch on hot day at an outside cafe in Asheville – a game in which we had to make up fictitious names of rock bands and you won all but two of our thirteen rounds. What I do know is that I’ve already written two other meditations on turning fifty-one which, like this one, have nothing to do with turning fifty-one or birthdays and everything to do with this game of tag I’m playing between memory and desire and trying to understand who’s “it.”