nervous energy

I don't know what it is but, for the past couple of weeks, the sentries who guard the border territory between my detached rational self and my furied emotive self seem to have gone on vay-cay. I'm having trouble keeping that which is usually subterranean in its proper spot. I feel sort of like a live wire and it's disorienting.

The pool at my condo complex opened up this weekend and, as I was feeling out of sorts, I thought I might trigger some serotonin production by sitting in the sun for a few hours.

I was, as usual, the only weird girl reading poetry poolside. I had brought Marie Howe's new The Kingdom of Ordinary Time with me.

It is a lovely, lucid little book-- as are her two other rare gems. But this one shook my bones even a little further.

Is this where I'll be? Am I already here?

Fifty

The soul has a story that has a shape that almost no one
sees. No, no one ever does. All those kisses,

The bedroom chair that rocked with me in it, his body
his body and his and his and his.

More, I said, more
and more and more. . . . What has it come to?
Like dresses I tried on and dropped to the floor. . . .

A lifetime in little more than three couplets. Good god.

This poem arrives near-ish the end of the book and it certainly wasn't the first heartbreak I encountered therein. The book's been a long time coming, though. For as many times as I've read and reread The Good Thief and What the Living Do, I feel as though I've been starving for this poet's perspective even anyway.

I do not feel any less raw, though. Perhaps only moreso.

NB: Poetry and Blogger are just not compatible. Try as I might, I can't get Blogger to digest the spacing HTML code... so, the above poem isn't typographically exact. Dammit.