jamiereadthis
Written on Jan 17, 2019
Completely by chance, last week (thanks to a job wherein I’m typesetting a book of poetry), I checked out a stack of poetry books from the library, among them Mary Oliver’s.
I spent last night and tonight steeped in her words. I stayed awake reading. I had no idea, not until a few moments ago. It feels spooky, in a way. Not in a bad way. But in a way that feels hard to deny, the way when life brushes against you and whispers, listen.
I went back just now and re-read “The Loon” — Not quite 4 a.m., when the rapture of being alive / strikes me from sleep, and I rise / from the comfortable bed and I go / to another room — then found the passage in this handbook that I had marked down last night:
“For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in hot pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.”
Yes, indeed.