Imagine Living
A little Thursday poem about longing, which doesn't mention Twitter or politics once.
It’s been tough to stay up with the news the past few days because I’m spending the week with my in-laws who are visiting from the east coast. As much as I want to be on my phone constantly checking the hell of Twitter and my emails and writing the opeds I owe editors, that’s an antisocial way to behave on a family trip so I’ve mainly been talking to my 12-year-old niece, who is struggling through a book of poetry she was assigned by her 6th grade teacher. Poetry, she says, is boring and obvious and old and makes no sense. I’ve been trying to convince her otherwise by doing dramatic readings from her poetry book, much to my in-laws’ chagrin. Poetry is a way to capture time before it passes! To memorialize a moment, a bird dunking its head in water as the fate of the nation hangs in the balance! Poetry is acting! Poetry is a puzzle, a code you have to crack! It’s a way to say how you feel in disguise and only the people who REALLY want to know take the time to figure out what the fuck you’re getting at! She is extremely skeptical.
With that in mind, here’s a poem of mine I was reminded of today as I looked out at a beautiful bay and longed to be home in the silence of my garage where I could blast TV news and go down a Twitter rabbithole in peace and pace around and mutter. There are pelicans gobbling fish in front of my face, I realized, and the sounds of a distant foghorn warning past sailors of a fog that might one day no longer exist, and I’m imagining elsewhere. I can’t hear the sound of this moment over the roar in my ears of all the shoulds I should be shoulding and the pasts I can’t stop missing.
This poem is about how that’s dumb. I hope wherever you are you can take a second today to hear the sound of the life you’re living.
Imagine Living
Imagine living near a river
hearing a river
Wouldn’t that be better?
Imagine living in a city hearing the sounds of the friends and the drunks and the garbage trucks and the raindrops on the cobblestone streets filled with puke and rat feces and lost wedding rings
Instead of dreaming of a waterfall
Imagine living near a waterfall hearing a waterfall
Imagine living near the machines hearing the whirring and the grinding of the brakes and spindles that make the lights turn on and the water flow and the buildings rise
Imagine living near the heart hearing the heart pumping, instead of dreaming of some other heart in some other chest
Imagine living near the flesh wound hearing the flesh wound bleeding out
Wouldn’t that be better?
To know that you are dying?
To hear the whispers of the moments just moments before they pass you by
so you can have the joy
of anticipating their feeling
and then feeling them?
Without ever having to miss them?
Imagine living near the end hearing the end
We are
We are
Imagine living
--Emily Dreyfuss