If this place holds meaning for you, would you consider supporting it? This can be in the form of a cup of coffee (+ other ways). My commitment is that it will always remain free to all. This little corner of the world is my passion project since 2005. This poem appeared in Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, 2006. Happy birthday, T., you old delirious fool. When I sit outside to watch the sunrise, when a laugh bubbles out of my lungs, when I cling to the hope that my friend will come home, when I sit barefoot listening to music while I write, when I am shy to want kisses but I ask for them anyway. Perhaps the poems weren’t the only thing keeping me from drowning. I’m sat all night at my desk working for hours on end, trying to make ends meet, telling myself if I do this one thing, then I can do this other thing, and another, and another. These days my evenings blur into my mornings. I must’ve done something good in my past life to have this. You’re not allowed to be sad today, he says.
And perhaps a litany of please please please please please. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, trying not to rehearse for grief. Last night her husband said, I need your prayers. Two nights ago we had to call an ambulance. Year after year I ride the wave of blackness and cling to poems as if they were the only thing that will save me, and they did. Nine years ago I was thinking about taking my own life until someone threw poetry at me like an anchor, which it was. Or maybe a song that gave birth to versions of myself. I used to think of this as my birth song. The Balanescu Quartet’s Waltz is playing on repeat. Was it really a face or a flower shedding petals? This one brought me grace, and this one, and this one. I often stumbled around in the dark then trying to identify which is which, the tips of my fingers tracing contours: this one brought me pain, and this one, and this one. Most of my days in the past year have been filled with troubling things, and kind things, yet sometimes they have the same face. Has it really been that long? How have I arrived here without dying? It is four in the morning and I am thirty-five today.
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