#reading instructions

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One night in 1797, nine Rroma men trapped the sorcerer Count Petofi in the forest of Ojden and cut off his right hand. With it, the count lost most of his magical powers. Sometime after, Petofi learned that he could live for exactly one hundred years without his hand. If he was reunited with it in that time, he would become immortal; if he was not, he would die. Now, it is 1897, and the hundred…

Episode 71: The place where they cut the heads off the fish

Friday’s episode ended, not with a cliffhanger, but with a visitation from the supernatural, as we saw the ghost of Josette Collins descend from her portrait and pirouette around the columns of the mansion she haunts. Today, Roger and Vicki sit in the diner, where he gives her a lecture about the sardine-packing business. The apparition of Josette was the climax of an episode featuring more…

Reading instructions:  STOP. No, really, don’t scroll. Don’t let your eyes touch this poem unless you are alone, or at least in a place where you feel comfortable reading outloud. 

You must be reading this poem outloud the first time you experience it. Or you must hear it from someone. Perhaps go to my source, the sadly-silent podcast All Up in Your Ears, and listen to episode two and hear it read to you. Please don’t read it before you speak it or hear it. Not this one. 

That’s the proper way to approach most poetry, of course, and you know this, of course. But who hews to best practices at all times? Not me:  I read poems on the bus with headphones in but not on; I read them on the quiet floor of the university library because, unjustly, that is also the poetry floor; I read them in class when the light from outside fails to mix with the overhead fluorescence and I can’t listen or speak because the feeling of it is like the sound of walking through broken glass in a parking lot. I get it. I read new poems silently all the time and it’s fine, of course, and you know this, of course, because the only real rule of reading poetry is that you should need it. 

So disregard my instructions, if you need to. I only give them because I want you to have the experience that I had when I first heard this poem: that sharp physical wrench of beauty when a line or a stanza catches you. By surprise, yes, but also and or: catches your breath, catches you out of the air out of a soar or a fall, catches you like a fish or a cold or a trap. This poem did that for me, several times. 

Maybe it won’t do this for you. There isn’t any universal to this. But I hope it does. “I picked it out just because I find it consoling,” said the voice who read it to me, as introduction. Me too. 

On Falling (Blue Spruce)

Dusk fell every night. Things fall. Why should I have been surprised.

Before it was possible to imagine my life without it, the winds

arrived, shattering air and pulling the tree so far back its roots,

ninety years, ripped and sprung. I think as it fell it became

unknowable. Every day of my life now I cannot understand. The force

of dual winds lifting ninety years of stillness as if it were nothing,

as if it hadn’t held every crow and fog, emptying night from its branches.

The needles fell. The pinecones dropped every hour on my porch, a constant

irritation. It is enough that we crave objects, that we are always

looking for a way out of pain. What is beyond task and future sits right

before us, endlessly worthy. I have planted a linden, with its delicate

clean angles, on a plot one tenth the size. Some change is too great.

Somewhere there is a field, white and quiet, where a tree like this one stands,

made entirely of hovering. Nothing will hold me up like that again.

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all. Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time. Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage, your gaze always fixed on the same point in space, forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers. Truth, please don’t pay me so much attention. Dignity, please be magnanimous. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train. Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then. My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man. I know I won’t be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

-Wyslawa Szymborska

Reading instructions: Before you begin, sit for a minute and summon a place that you love, that you will never see again. Populate it with your dead. Once they are ringed around you, call on everyone else’s. Invite the survivors. Let your mind drift over the horrors of this sick, sad world, and our representations of it: the photographs, the videos, the sentences, the predictable greek chorus that cocoons them all. Spool in the distance that you keep between yourself and this world until it’s no more, until everything feels close enough to touch, to hold. Hold it. Think of the whales, the bees, the gorillas; if they don’t move you, think of your childhood pet, how she looked at you with trust and love, and how she died uncomprehending; think of the shock of a dead bird on the patio, of eggs crushed on sidewalks; think of fish, whitebellied-up in poisoned water, the smell of their bloat. Whatever it takes, think of it, but don’t let the others go. Spool them all in, hold them all in your mind. How does it feel, the simultaneity of it? Do you feel rage, grief? Grasp that sensation and braid it together with self-pity and self-excoriation and a bright sharp wire of self-mocking humor. 

Begin. Don’t stop and correct if you find yourself shifting into sarcasm. Be sarcastic--if you are too earnest, you must start over. Ask for pardon snidely, absurdly, laughingly, helplessly. Question your need to apologize at all. 

“Thanks,” W. S. Merwin

"Breath," Mark Strand (~)