love makes me feel lonely. yevgeny yevtuschenko explains why:
“When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.”
it’s this. and the beauty of love, the reason we spend so much of ourselves looking for it and trying to create it when we fail to find it, is the “at first”, the gradual illumination of all that we can recognize in ourselves if another person points it out. i’ve mostly gotten there, i think, but there are times when loving another person only highlights the things that i am not and unsurprisingly these times coincide with the times i feel lonely.
IN SHORT today is a bad day and i look forward to tomorrow.
My resolution to post every day got destroyed in a not-very-long time but I didn’t have anything to say anyway.
this poet’s name is Lisa Jarnot. She is new to me and this is the first poem that I ever read by her. At first I thought that I didn’t like it. I read the poem in the morning, over cereal before my first class, but it turns out that genetics is mind-numbing and throughout the class period I just kept coming back to it in my head. I went to the library after class and found that she writes longer things too but for now I am interested in remembering:
Brooklyn Anchorage
and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.
There are five hours and nine minutes left until the new year and I have done almost nothing I had resolved to with this one. I’m happy with it anyway. It was a very good year. I was just thinking the other day about how the littlest things make me smile now, like the word “Thursday”, which seems like the most ordinary, run-of-the-mill weekday to me, but you know, I love my ordinary days now so much that it’s hard not to be excited to wake up and learn about things I love and drink tea and fill in crosswords with Billy and fall asleep on my roommate’s shoulder and watch movies with her. I guess what I’m saying is that I love everyday life enough to be happy that it’s what’s going on. It’s a good feeling. This is what I hope for, all through the new year.
