Tonight I'll be taking part in my first indoor poetry reading since the pandemic began. I'm feeling pretty calm about it: this will be a vaxxed crowd, and I've got my booster, and I did recently manage to fly to Chicago and back without incident. Still, the moment feels noteworthy.
I'll be reading with good poet friends Betsy Sholl and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, at the gallery Zero Station here in Portland. Currently the gallery is featuring a show titled "Want/Need," so our poems will fit into that theme. We're going to read in three acts, "Grief," "Desire," and "Giving," each of us sharing two or three poems on that topic. I'm looking forward to hearing our multiple voices intertwining. Betsy and Gibson are such good poets, with such huge hearts.
In the meantime, I see another quiet day ahead. We got an inch or so of snow yesterday: not enough to shovel but enough to make things slick and ghostly. I'll prep for the reading, and mess around with my Dante and Sappho prompts, and fetch my neighbor back from her car mechanic, and do some housework. This week has been so interior: hour after hour with myself and my thoughts. That kind of inner attention is surprisingly tiring; I ended up taking a huge nap yesterday afternoon because I was so exhausted from what looks, on the outside, like nothing much. But it is work.
2 comments:
So interesting to compare your blog posts now to those of a year ago. So much has
returned to "normal" for you. Here in my world of public education, we are dealing with daily Covid cases and unvaccinated student quarantines, even as we no longer sanitize or enforce social distancing. We are allowing fans in the basketball stands, even as our state numbers are the highest they've ever been and the hospitals are full. Humans seem to have an uncanny capacity for balancing opposing desires. We desire to keep children safe yet allow them to own semi-automatic guns? We desire to have a world to live in yet allow it to burn up? Etc.
Because I mostly work from home, and don't have regular interaction with young children, and live in a progressive city where most of the people I see are fully vaxxed, I'm able to to navigate publicly in ways that you, for instance, can't. Maine's Covid cases are also spiking, but primarily in the counties where people aren't vaxxed. If I were still in Harmony, my life would be much more like yours. I still wear masks in stores, etc., but I am now able to comfortably gather with friends and colleagues. In Harmony, I wouldn't be able to trust very many people at all.
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