Today I am late waking and off-deadline. I make two stops instead of one, searching for eggs. I read aloud from one book because another didn't arrive – will never arrive, in fact. (I read aloud because this novel was written by a poet. Because this novel is poetry.)
I give myself grace, the kind I used to pray for on Sundays like this one: My sister and I would creep around the house, preserving the silence that kept our mother in bed, and us home from church.
A different poet speaks to me through the radio as I idle in my parked car, a dozen eggs now warming in the passenger's seat. He describes the great harvest he's enjoying after decades of planting and nurturing (decades of writing, of reading aloud).
Lately I find myself tilting towards winter, the trees that once shaded me pruning themselves. I find myself listening to the space that withering abundance leaves behind, like a poem: embracing little deaths that will remake me.
The radio segment ends and I return to my house, eggs in hand. As I walk through the door, my alarm goes off: an alert I set out of fear that I would forget – but I haven't. The thought was already fresh in my head, and the task on my fingertips; delayed by an extra stop, I was just in time to hear the poet tell me to take life as I find it, and this became my task.
The poets are Ocean Vuong and David Whyte.
