Hello friends,
This poem was originally published in April 2023. I forgot how much I loved it until I reread it. We live in a world where everything is new all the time, but art should be revisited.
If I see you in the cemetery, I won’t tell you I’m sorry. But I will hold your hand if you want me to. I’ll lend you my life for an afternoon as you give some of yours to the dead. Don’t give away too much. The dead don’t need you anyway. They lie there in the ground, breaking down, until they build themselves back up again. The dead are in the trees, giving themselves shade. The dead are in the bees, pollinating and producing honey so sweet you can taste their memory on your tongue, coating you in a slow warmth usually reserved for summer afternoons. The dead know they’re good for the soil, feeding the earth and scattering themselves across the universe. The dead know they’re still alive. If I see you in the cemetery, I won’t tell you not to cry. Crying pulls the loss from your soul. You’ll feel lighter when you’re finished. Besides, salt makes everything better. It cuts the bitterness and makes it bearable. It removes rust from neglected things. Salt forces you to feel the pain, but it knits you back together in the end, just long enough for something else to rip you apart. If you see me in the cemetery, don’t leave me flowers. Flowers die. There is enough death here. Leave me a stone, one smoothed down by water and worried thumbs. Or find one sharp and jagged like your anguish. Hold it so tightly that it’s the only thing you feel. Then let it go. Let me watch after it for you. When you visit, you can see how the wind and the rain have tempered it. You can see how time softens all things.
WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
Humans sync our behaviors when we spend enough time together. But we might also be syncing our brains.
If you need a good laugh, watch Red Sox broadcaster Don Orsillo get roasted back in 2003 for not knowing what a lunar eclipse was.
A poem:
PORTRAIT OF THE RAIN
By Jan Wagner
Translated from the German by David Keplingerit appears as a hand-kiss, gentle nudge, spray of memory: remember where you came from, frog. or galloping, as a thundering horde, to tender unto caesar what is caesar’s, until everything flees into the entryways under the cover of newspapers and briefcases: whoever listens at the open window senses that he may be dry, but the weather has long since been inside him. or how the gutters become musical, when laundry lifts off the lines and rivers flow out of their beds, and the secret scent of earth and asphalt unveils itself; when mushrooms, mosses, vineyard snails run rampant; it makes the outlines visible: where rain ends, we begin. it treks across the landscape like a circus, the spectacle and curtain at the same time: scenery loft of the great weather- and wandering theaters; bestows upon blonds darker hair, and on the bald the radiance of billiard balls; to the hens it is a cage that doesn’t imprison them. so often divined, yet no church is founded on it. good ears can still hear, if you bend low enough, the songs of humpback whales, glacier calving— one geyser over north america inspires umbrellas to blossom from shanghai to rome. each drop contains the whole book, water, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world. resurrection—the easiest exercise. meanwhile it slumbers in car tires and from puddles and cisterns stares back toward its own origin, while the trees for hours and hours are immersed in their soliloquies. the soothing swoosh between the radio transmitters. the wind in the forests yet to come.