I’m struggling this week friends. No, we didn’t get lost on the trail (which would have required ignoring a well-marked route in favor of bushwhacking deep thickets of poison oak), but I got a little lost mentally. We’ve spent the summer at home, avoiding the pains of travel to develop our rhythm as parents and recover from the tough early months. Even a few days away has disoriented me. Waking at 3am all week doesn’t help either.
I’ve started this post several times, read some good poetry in the meantime, but haven’t been moved to write. I’m avoiding something. The poems I pick up are about grief, but I don’t want to write about grief.
Perhaps I simply want to talk about our trip. It was lovely, though not as relaxing as backpacking pre-baby of course. A new kind of fun, watching Maya play in the waves, and in the bear bin. Two jays, gatekeepers to the endless scrub, quickly caught on that the little one was a good food source and had no problem joining us at the breakfast table. A large family of quail flitted in and out of the campsite, and bunnies grazed boldly in the grass.
Last night I read an article on LitHub punctuated by a quote by Hanif Abdurraqib, “Not everything is Sisyphean. No one ever wants to imagine themselves as the boulder.” I spend the next bursts of computer time checking up on this sage. I find that he is proudly from Ohio, that I don’t love all of his freely accessible poetry, and that he hosts an awesome podcast called Object of Sound.
I do appreciate the poem that holds the boulder line: “IT IS ONCE AGAIN THE SUMMER OF MY DISCONTENT & THIS IS HOW WE DO IT”, an homage to the intense emotions of adolescence, love and hate, lust and enmity.
& i tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival & it’s because the heart & tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories & i’m
I love visceral poetry, and dig how he uses music as a container to hold these remembered feelings. My favorite cafe has a playlist going that could have been made when I was a sophomore in high school late 90s. It’s been long enough now that it’s fun to hear songs I heard too many times on the radio or fuzzily recorded on a cassette. (The effort that went into those tapes! I had a boombox in my bathroom and would jump out of the shower to hit record when a favorite song came on the radio.)
So when I’m trying to work and find myself singing a song I haven’t heard in 20 years, I can’t be upset. The music is calling to some part of my body where it’s been embedded alongside a thousand significant moments from those impressionable years.
Thank you Hanif for taking me down that road. I’m buying your latest book of poems so I can get a better taste of your work.
Grief won’t stop banging on your door until you take a look and see what it wants.