3.12.22

Sweeping the bathroom just now I stopped to appreciate the late afternoon light Sitting in the parking lot yesterday evening I fell asleep with a strange ache in my body Walking through the grocery store behind families last week I realized the world was full of children including myself; 

There was one child in particular who I passed on the way to the peanut butter and jelly aisle. We looked each other in the eyes as I reached for the organic raspberry jam and I was struck with the sensation that all of us pass this way and then on to somewhere else. I am talking about the jam aisle, but also about something else. I'll tell you what I typed in my phone, next to the jams and figs and nut butters: Sometimes looking at my own words, I want to cry. What is all this wisdom for? Is there a message I am supposed to receive? Why doesn't it make the living any easier?

I was reading the Dionne Brand book you told me about. Reading it, I have to keep putting it down to write and then sometimes to run through the house to find someone to tell about it. Sometimes reading is exhausting. It takes an entire body in motion to read and then another body to write. 

Dionne Brand writes:"Poetry has that ability to reconstitute language; it uses time. It can make you see the xylem between the then and the after, or the now and the after. It has no obligation to the present. It is time." 

Yesterday, sitting in my small office I spoke to an old woman who broke her two front teeth due to a dispute with her landlord. Now she is being evicted because her rent money was used to pay to have her teeth pulled. She pulled down her face mask to show me her missing teeth. She told me at first she tried to use floss to tie the teeth back in place. I thought to myself that the rich could never understand how humiliating it is to be poor. She spoke to me in Chinese and said she was so grateful there was someone here who could understand her. 

I'm not sure what the use of poetry is sometimes. I am not sure where I am writing to most days. After work I walked through the grocery store and I thought to myself:
Everybody was a child once. We will all pass this way and then onto somewhere else. 

I am writing so you can also know about her. Maybe you might also try to understand.