Thursday, August 12, 2010
WHERE LIGHT
COMES INTO THE BODY
Greg Kosmicki, New Route in the Dream, Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, OH 43213.
You don't want to do it -
you have work to do.
There is always work to do,
more than you can handle,
even in retirement, and poetry
takes time away. You don't want to
take time away, and yet you can't
help yourself - you're still
in your bathrobe, coffee is already
cold, and you're holding the book
like an old man would. You can't
set it down. Every book reads better
back to front, and that's how you're
reading this one, though in the great
scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
"Deodorant" is a poem that will
make your eyes mist up whether
you read it first, or last, or some-
where in the middle. Because his
daughter is fourteen. Because she has
gotten deodorant in her eye. Because
"she can't believe how stupid she is."
Because he can see the two lines
running across her forehead,
lines like his own. Because they are
so much alike in their separate
bodies, their separate trajectories.
Because he puts Visine into that fragile
place where light comes into her body,
where all our thousand sadnessess
fly out, that place which lets us
take in poems like this one, like all
the others in the book, poems about
how much we've lost, like all Greg's
poems, wise and sad and compelling.
Because his voice is refusing to be
stilled. Because his hand demands to
write, to get it right, to get it down,
to go on to the next thing, whatever
it is, whatever is required of us.
Because that's what we do. We can't
do otherwise. In spite of everything,
we have to love ourselves, we have to
laugh, we have to hold on and let go,
find our way to the bedroom, put on
the costume of who we are
for another day, put it on and go
out into the day a little sadder,
a little wiser, a little more weary,
yet also brightened because
the light of these poems has some-
how come into the body.
COMES INTO THE BODY
Greg Kosmicki, New Route in the Dream, Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, OH 43213.
You don't want to do it -
you have work to do.
There is always work to do,
more than you can handle,
even in retirement, and poetry
takes time away. You don't want to
take time away, and yet you can't
help yourself - you're still
in your bathrobe, coffee is already
cold, and you're holding the book
like an old man would. You can't
set it down. Every book reads better
back to front, and that's how you're
reading this one, though in the great
scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
"Deodorant" is a poem that will
make your eyes mist up whether
you read it first, or last, or some-
where in the middle. Because his
daughter is fourteen. Because she has
gotten deodorant in her eye. Because
"she can't believe how stupid she is."
Because he can see the two lines
running across her forehead,
lines like his own. Because they are
so much alike in their separate
bodies, their separate trajectories.
Because he puts Visine into that fragile
place where light comes into her body,
where all our thousand sadnessess
fly out, that place which lets us
take in poems like this one, like all
the others in the book, poems about
how much we've lost, like all Greg's
poems, wise and sad and compelling.
Because his voice is refusing to be
stilled. Because his hand demands to
write, to get it right, to get it down,
to go on to the next thing, whatever
it is, whatever is required of us.
Because that's what we do. We can't
do otherwise. In spite of everything,
we have to love ourselves, we have to
laugh, we have to hold on and let go,
find our way to the bedroom, put on
the costume of who we are
for another day, put it on and go
out into the day a little sadder,
a little wiser, a little more weary,
yet also brightened because
the light of these poems has some-
how come into the body.
