I'm going back and rereading the poetry books that initially excited me about the written and spoken word. First up, Mark Doty's Atlantis. This is the first of probably three interactions about how my response to this book changed over twenty years. Sidenote, the title is a line from my poem, How To Survive A Sixty Hour Work Week On Just Above Minimum Wage. While it is, of course, a reference to the lost city, it is also a reference to Mark Doty's book and the time of my life when I first read it. Atlantis At Nineteen
1. Colorblindness Sun starved leaves A handful of wet beach ready for sculpture The color of a paper bag under transparent tape protecting textbooks from my clumsy adolescence Horseshoe crab shell All of these things we'd touched together And all i could think of when you took off your hat in your parents' basement was You have brown hair It was only in the darkness that I could realize the misdiagnosis of your hair color Two years of loving someone without noticing this basic physical trait I was still flash cards at lust Heart Sex Breath Touch At a bar with my coworkers from the Reconnaissance Faire I didn't note the leather taut atlassing the twin planets of the wax maiden as the exhaust of her day and her bourbon warmed my ear I thought why is this woman blowing in my ear? Everything so straight forward I didn't even know her name just the job she weekended for two months of the year The best part of her year when her ex took her two twelve year old sons and she dipped hands and roses into hot wax and blew hot air into the ears of nineteen year old gay boys too paralyzed to turn their heads I was of course staring at you a single row of straight white stones the lower shelf never cresting your bottom lip On the drive home you kissed your own hot air towards me without so much as leaning closer This was how I learned to love with distance 2. Strangers & Family Members Are Fiction I did not choose Mark Doty's "Long Point Light" for its language for how I would later imagine it an apt description of our relationship You liked lighthouses I was too stiff for "Homo Shall Not Inherit" The assignment read a poem to a diverse group of people ask them to tell you what the poem means Diverse on Cape Cod in 1998 meant my ashen mother my pasty boss the blanched friends of the pale children I nannied the cobweb customers at my corporate record store job my eggshell psychology classmates Diverse meant not the same age job level of education All these diverse listeners patiently described what this poem which was so obviously about how every day was a new opportunity to be honest with you and myself was so obviously about how I could see metaphor only in things you cared about All of these diverse listeners presented me with their own incorrect translations of this obvious poem Mistaking Doty's hazing and flickering as an invitation to build their own lighthouse to monument I bought whiteboard I mod podged photos of your favorite lighthouses printed out all these wrong interpretations of what was obviously our poem and threw away everyone else's truth I drew crude approximations of boats emerald fiberglass like your favorite color of seaglass polyurethaned wood like your hair silver like your car barn red like your duvet Each boat labeled with the description of an imaginary person The waves beneath them fake quotes I attributed to them each one a different way I looked at the poem except of course yours Who else had ever had an opinion that mattered? 3. There Is Never Enough Ocean I was twenty and selfish without understanding what my self was like everytwenty like everyyounglover I read Atlantis but came away with only "Long Point Light" said everything else was ocean and shimmer I had enough ocean around me enough shimmer when I tried to look to the future
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Eliza Griswold was recommended to me by Mckendy Fils-Aime when I asked poets to suggest other poets whose work I wasn't familiar with. Griswold is primarily a journalist, and her poetry tends to be half-page poems that somehow manage to encompass both huge, international events, and small, personal parallels in about eight lines. They're rarely WOAH poems. Instead they're a series of quiet tremors. Pokemon Key Chain
Adam Stone In the winter before the game's bold comeback you bought a Snorlax figure for the keys to my apartment hoping it woud become our apartment if you charmed it with the Pokemon most like me. This first section of the interaction was inspired by the epigraph from Sharon Olds's "Late Poem To My Father". It's also part of a series of poems inspired by a Nicole Homer prompt. The second portion is just my response to how I read this book at eighteen, and how I read this book at thirty-nine. Ten Meals I Don't Remember Eating #10: February 16th, 2016, Cambridge, Massachusetts When I love you now, I like to think I am giving my love directly to that boy in the fiery room, as if it could reach him in time. --- Sharon Olds, "Late Poem To My Father" You were never as eighteen as you were at thirty sitting on my bed in your room playing Kingdom Hearts pretending you didn't hear me knock on the door We had both ordered dinner at the same time from slightly different restaurants Yours arrived first but I had mistakenly answered the door and paid for your meal I knocked louder Not your cluelessly optimistic ex but a parent trying to respect the privacy of an unnecessarily belligerent teenager I had a speech memorized opening with a joke and ending with you moving out again I didn't speak to you for three weeks in case I accidentally recited it You smiled as you took your food into your room I paid for my dinner too sat on the floor in my room watching the door between us imagining I knew how to open it without disturbing you when i was eighteen and less metaphor i read the gold cell from cover to i can't anymore . laughed at the pope's penis and imagined i truly understood the solution . i loved how sharon olds viewed the world outside her own . but when her family came in . her father . her history . her impending children . i . i read them over and over . knowing that i was missing something . all of my love was current . all of my realizations were in other books . all of my love was things . all of my people were something missing .
when i was thirty-nine and prime time soap opera i read the gold cell from back to front . family to the outside world . how much simpler to start with the closeness i don't understand . end with the world i'm afraid to know |
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