What would you burn?

Summer is ending and school is starting and there are things to do and while I’ll miss sitting by the pool (the five or six times I did it this summer), I’m ready. I have a busy fall of teaching and am really looking forward to the school supply trip, the focus and organizing and intention and priority setting. The structure. Also it really annoys me to see kids doing nothing, I’ll be glad to see them off working and learning.

I’m excited to teach a memoir class at the Fine Art Work Center in October. Please join me if you’re able. The discount code EARLYFALL19 gives you 15% off through September 27, 2019. Register here. I’m looking forward to sharing essays I love and prompts that have helped me move through stuck places. The challenge, based on the list that’s growing on a big piece of paper on my bedroom wall, will be choosing excerpts for us to discuss.

So this week’s poem (I say it like I’ve been posting every week which of course I have NOT been doing, I’m so sorry) is “Metronome” by Jeffrey Morgan. Yesterday I was listening to Alain de Botton on TED Radio Hour on “What Atheism Can Learn From Religion”and he talked about how with most things, we’re taught them once (history, sex ed, literature) and expected to know them, but religion doesn’t expect that we’ll remember them. We pray five times a day. We repeat mantras. We arrive each Sunday or Saturday or Friday to be reminded of what we believe.

How do we keep repeating and reminding ourselves of the important things, of who we want to be outside of a religious structure? Well, you know what I think the answer is. Poetry. Through reading it and through writing it. So recalibrate for the school year or the next season. And keep recalibrating, keep reminding yourself of who you’re going to be, who you were trying to be, even if you’re not entirely there yet. Have some faith in yourself. “This year I resolved…”

Metronome 

by Jeffrey Morgan 

On New Year’s Eve my family burns things
about ourselves we want to leave behind
by writing them on thin red slips of paper
and feeding them to candles.
The slips are translucent, delicate as membranes
but also rectangular like fire engines.
I would describe the tone of the ceremony
as twee emergency.
I wonder if the gods are appeased
or aggrieved. The gods are hard to read.
This year I resolved to stop nodding
in the direction of other people’s talking.
I resolved to stop personifying winter sky
as “knuckle white” and “the whites of their eyes.”
I don’t know if this is one of those instances
where if you tell people your wishes
they won’t come true
like maybe those who lose weight
and keep it off
are now full of secrets.
I’m willing to risk it.
Mostly, I think this year we’ll still be people
who would introduce a virgin
to the bad breath of a volcano
if it meant better harvest,
or even just that the zealots would shut up for a minute.
Anyway, I put a whole fistful of faults into the flame.
I love how they curl libidinously in the heat
like sin putting the moves on hope.
This year I will try again to be a better person.