"Do you read a lot of poetry?" he says, nodding toward my stack of books, making idle conversation with me as he refills my lemonade and sets out my napkin and utensils. He's struck the balance just right, personal but not intimate, professional but not recited. His comments are focused on the books on the table, not my tear-stained cheeks or the dinosaurs falling out of my purse. I know how he will respond, how he will flex to my response, because there is a pattern to him. He is poetry.
Everyone is.
I read a lot of poetry.
Neruda, Cummings, Eliot, Wilcox, Silverstein, Bukowski... you.
In the mornings, I drive to work with Mamasaur. She is a haiku and I feel almost sorry for the people who don't understand how the structure of her is designed to be self-sustaining, to fold up upon itself. They re-read her lines as if her story can be found in the confines of the structure, as if the simplicity wasn't just a guise for a complex juxtaposition.
Lines, unseen.
Heart, beats uncounted.
She, a poem.
I read a lot of poetry.
I was born from it.
In the mornings, I drive 28 miles to work, I pass a thousand cars, and it is flipping through an anthology of poems. Sometimes a stanza catches me and I stare through my window, through their window, into their eyes. I read their poem backwards, then forwards again. Their poetry moves in ways their cars do not allow, in ways the California Highway Patrol does not allow. It ebbs, and the lines flow with me.
Life is moving water,
and poetry is motion,
We all swim our stanzas,
but some see the ocean.
People are poetry.
Everyone.
I read a lot of poems.
In the mornings, I reply to my emails, send messages to my friends. This one is a limerick, this one an epic poem. This one might be a classic one day, a poem that all other poems carry in their heart.
This one rhymes with me. It's not a perfect rhyme, but we are jagged, broken in the same way. In the cosmic table of contents, we are filed under the same words, and it is no wonder that our feet found their way to the same streets. The universe is an organized thing despite all the seeming randomness.
It is no easy job to hold so much poetry, and that is why her stars die and explode into flame. That is why she orbits, why she spins. That is why she has cavernous holes within herself that eat away everything she thought she knew, and that is why she knows so little that she continues to expand.
There is so much poetry in this universe, and it is in the motion.
It is the universe. It is motion.
It is life.
You are life:
an exploding star,
a black hole,
a swimming
floating,
poem.
If I have not read you
yet,
I will,
I read a lot of poetry.
________________________________________
Inspired by my friend Robert who wrote the poem that starts this post.❤
