What was lost

I’m running around like a ghost with a poem stuck in her throat. I’ve been waking up with fragments of really boring, everyday dreams: germinating seeds to plant, plausible emails from jerks, dreams that aren’t all that distinct from reality. Jeez. Can’t catch a break.

Because I don’t want to be the sort of person who writes yoga poems, I don’t write yoga poems. But I think them. Also, I shouldn’t write them because the things I would want to write poems about are probably repulsive to anyone else. For example: Yesterday morning, dripping sweat on my purple mat (never directly under the heater because I think about the heater dropping on me, gravity being the one thing I have the good sense to fear) I pulled up my shirt to wipe my face only to find that the shirt (one of four identical tank tops I own because decision fatigue) was so wet it made no difference. It was disgusting and glorious. I felt like I was using my body correctly.

I spent most of yesterday reworking an essay that’s due back to the editor. But I keep feeling like I can’t quite let it go. So after four hours of writing (and by writing I mean drinking coffee while thumbing through the dictionary), I got up and went to this really hard heated yoga class with a little notebook and pen close by (which I did not use). Then I came home and took a nap and then I printed out the essay and sat by the pool wearing the biggest, floppiest “don’t talk to me” hat and edited some of the essay and then I picked up my younger son and took him directly to Sweet Frog because my day was so hard. And that is what it means to be a writer. The essay is still not done (but it’s close–so close). All that procrastinating to get to the meat of actually writing. Clearing my head, filling my head, taking a nap. To get a measly 2500 word essay in shape. But that’s what it takes, man.

This week’s poem was sent to me by my amazing friend Cynthia via text yesterday. It’s by James Wright from The Branch Will Not Break. I had another poem for you, which is also nice and you will definitely hear about it, but I love this so much:

Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for

Was a wild, gentle thing, the small, dark eyes

Loving me in secret.

I don’t have to tell you what to do with this do I? Imagine the sweetness in yourself that you wept for loving you in secret. Tell me that doesn’t turn you into a puddle. Oh we work on loving ourselves all the time don’t we? What if we believed it was true and oriented ourselves to simply listen to it. Today I met such brave people and I read them this poem twice in a row. They got it.