I need to get going and begin reading tonight. After leaving the residency, I feel as though I have taken on the form of a roadrunner. Since Sunday I have read selected poems by Lorca, Jimenez and Araceli Girmay. Poetry of light meets that of desire.Tonight I sniffed out three translations of two Borges poems to tackle and see how the translators negotiate the prose poetics with meanings and words. My mentor this semester is none other than Ilya Kaminsky. He is the right person for me to be shaped after this semester. One reason resides in his poetry that is so full of a humanity that sees all and yet finds something beautiful even in the hardest circumstance. His poems touch me profoundly as does his zest for life and the way he gets me to re-evaluate a situation. I can’t tell him how “Author’s Prayer” makes me cry every time I read it. His humility wraps around this amazing thirst for poetry and reading. He is a great teacher already and I am ready to learn and dive down.
The roadrunner in me recognizes these roads as familiar and yet there is something inside of me different. I am seeing them differently and craning my head deeper into life’s poetry. My thesis awaits and the phone may awfully quiet the next few months. I want to write an incredible paper, but this takes time, brain space, solitude. What a hell of a ride is in store. Really. Can anyone be this well off?
One scene, just one. My office is surrounded by windows. Light sneaks past the slats of the blinds that seek to cut its potency. Big leafy treetops are my view from my desk. I make sales pitches, PR calls and answer questions, all while looking out at the trees. Every year for the stretch of only a few days, they come. Birds of an iridescent red hue, small brown ones with blue feathers on the side, robins with their red breasts and brown circled eyes. They crowd the trees and suck down the berries weighing down the boughs. Often I can see them watching me as much as I watch them. They are intrigued and hop down to a lower branch and a closer view. I am enraptured and think this is as close to Eden as I may come. Their joy and playfulness combined with the abundance of berries transcribes itself into my joy, my nourishment. Can it get better than this?