This Week

This week I got my hair cut and got news of a suicide and news of a murder and cried in the car and drove over a bridge with my mother and son and read a poem in the state capital and stood in a circle of magnolia trees on the verge of blooming and had an extra night with my love and wrote a poem while sitting on the floor and led a writing workshop in a mansion and started an essay under a painting and cried in bed while reading the news and read poems into a microphone at the library of congress and got caught in the rain and stood on marble steps and sang into a camera and danced in the early early morning and performed poems between the sounds of the door slamming in the county jail and held my child and yelled at my child and cried on a yoga mat and cried with a towel over my face and cried in the shower in the too short shower and went to a fancy party in sparkling clacking shoes and ran out of milk and didn’t bother buying more and distracted, took the wrong exit and waited at the middle school and forgot to charge my phone and heard a new song and bought tooth cement and sent emails and got cuddled by a dog and ate chili cheese fries with a fork while walking down U Street, stepped around a sleeping man’s legs, looked in the window of the empty mattress shop, stood next to a poster size version of myself and read an article about missing ruby slippers and drank coffee and drank gin and drank a smoothie and not enough water and took aleve and excedrin and a gummy for good measure and rolled the tooth cement between my fingers and pushed it up into a tooth and winced and sometimes I laughed and sometimes I charmed and sometimes I smiled and sometimes I didn’t mean it and I looked at a power point while passing time at an outlet mall and wore my grandmother’s earrings and when I pulled my father’s watch from the drawer to fasten it around my wrist it bore the date of his death and I bought papusas from a trailer and searched my horoscope for clues and mailed two postcards and listened to a short story with three thoughtful men and cooked salmon and all the while nine pink tulips opened slowly in a blue glass on a wooden table in my apartment.

Today’s poem is by Susan Paris

Nothing Is Fine 

Should you marry the perfect
person in wingtips or the cute
one everyone says will never
be marriage material? Good
question. Wrong answer.

My heart leaped, and God said
To have and to hold and do all
the right things. One boy, one girl,
scrape the weeds from between the
patio brick and make the sandwiches
with butter not mayo, spread all
the way to the edges.

Follow the advice of old aunties
who tell you to have a career to
fall back on because poetry
won’t buy the groceries and the
city is no place to raise a child.
And stay home—they are
only young for a little while.

But along the way you forget
what you like for supper, and
every day is just like
last week and tomorrow and
you can’t remember who your
favorite author is anymore.

Then one day the sunlight taps
her pointy finger on your
shoulder. Turn around quick and
look for Something with your
name on it—something that finally
lets you dream without fighting
battles in your sleep.

They say, “what do you want?”
Good question, but this isn’t it,
and nothing is fine. Some
people know what they’re going to
wear next Friday and look at
you like you should be satisfied
and not make waves and are “fully
vested,” whatever that means.

If the pot of dreams you’re
searching for isn’t behind door
number three, what do you do
when the big four-oh demands:
“Come here now and be Somebody?”
Good question. Right answer.

Tell it you’ll look forever
if you like and not settle
for the handy life, thank you
very much. And when you
finally come out of the
basement and into the glare,
no one will be strapped
to your back.

I love this poem, but “every day is just like last week and tomorrow” only if you’re not paying attention. So pay attention: to the little moments, to the things that broke your heart and the things that made you laugh and the odd places you waited, the lines you stood in and the dinners you ate and the stories you read. “This week I…” like in my intro above.