Put a Poem in Your Pocket
One good reason to get out of bed this rainy Friday: the magic of alliteration.
National Poetry Month winds down this weekend, and to bid a fond farewell, the city of New York has teamed up with a bevy of august organizations to get poetry out into the streets (or, at least into a certain Manhattan park). Bring a poem to the Bryant Park reading room any time today and receive a free book of poetry. Students can participate in an open mic all afternoon.
Poem in Your Pocket Day
Friday, April 27, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Bryant Park, 40th to 42nd streets between 5th and 6th avenues
In my pocket today:
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Haas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that
talking this way, everything desolves: justice
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words. Days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
