Dearest Bleaders,
Weather service says we’re in for a
mini-heat-wave in my neck of the brick – temps in the 90s.
Right now a warm cloud has settled on
the ground and wets us down. I’ve got the proofs of my two new books to correct
at the same time, tricky balance, so I thought I’d set it all down and say hi
to you. Also, there are tiny black flies on my heirloom tomato plants, but none
on the cherries nor the beefsteak. I am
spritzing them with soap and water – the interweb says it will help.
Today I offer you a poem I love by
Major Jackson, from his book Holding Company. He also wrote the wonderful
Hoops.
Designer Kisses
I'm glum about your sportive flesh in
the empire of blab, and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a
tantalizing surge over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is
redundant, but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are inescapably
consigned: tourists keeping the views new. What as yet we desire, our own fonts
of adoration. By morning, we're laid out like liquid timepieces, each other's
exercise in perpetual enchantment, for there is that beach in us that is
untranslatable; footprints abound. I understand: you're at a clothes rack at
Saks lifting a white linen blouse at tear's edge wondering.
By Major Jackson
Nice, right? I’m sure there are many
ways to read the poem, but here is one: Your earnest partaking in the games of
social media and at parties depresses me, as does the pictures you posted of
yourself kissing that hipster (aren’t you the funny one). Love among the online
rubble of your past relationships, and mine, feels less meaningful, but we
better carry on while we are young, before we have an obstacle course of
wrinkles on our faces and have to move to Florida. It’s dull there, but springbreakers and visits
by families coming in to go to Disney keep things interesting. Today we don’t
feel anything, we don’t know what we want, but we do still want people to click
“like” when we post. Some nights we do too much to get this and then, by
morning, a whole time cycle of our mood is recorded and before our eyes: time
melted out into a spill. We are also perpetually enchanted with each other, and
we have inner lives that are such a crowd of memories and interactions that we
can’t actually translate that inner world into words; my mind is full of people,
though right now I can’t think of anyone at all. Of course it is silly and
unfair of me to imagine you always online or at parties, perhaps right now you
are doing the most traditional thing a woman can do: textiles.
I can relate. Aren’t emotions exhausting?
Anyway, great poem. Enjoy the beastly hot week with a cold beverage.
Love,
Jennifer