Yearning and Learning, Slowly but Surely
I’ve been revising some poems I wrote this spring, which was cold and blustery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I live. The winter-like spring held on until it suddenly didn’t, and then a warm, dry summer settled in (I think this change literally happened one weekend in mid-May, when it snowed on Saturday and then was sunny and warm on Sunday). In those early days of the pandemic I was impatient with the weather, since the cold kept me, my friends, and neighbors alone inside. The summer promised weekends at the beach and socializing outside.
The weather often shows up in the pieces I wrote during that time, largely as a reflection of my impatience with nature (a futile fight).
Zero Point
You are the light on the marsh
at the exact second of the day
that’s between sun up and down.
I can’t tell
if time moves
forward or backward
as I stand at the water’s edge;
so I bike to town to forage for yeast,
for someone who is not you.
But in my mind
I wait with you — always
you — for the slow rain
that is washing the western hills.
The “you” in this piece is a composite of several people — some alive and some dead. Those who are alive aren’t very present in my current life — or at least not very physically accessible (for the obvious pandemic-y reasons). In some ways this poem is about the power of memories and how for me nature often surfaces them. Sometimes I’m startled by what Provincetown’s trails, dunes, lakes, and beaches bring up, but I’m grateful to have this space and setting to process and examine. The piece is also about times when we face choices in our lives — what we do with them, who we let into them — and how time can get distorted if we think too hard about what we want and when we want it.
The photo above is from April 29, 2020, as a storm came toward town in the evening, which gave me the poem’s last 10 words. They’re the only thing I kept verbatim from the first draft. I had a yeast reference in the first version, too; everyone was baking quarantine bread then, and yeast was sold out everywhere. I was also playing with the idea that yeast makes things grow, which relates to the narrator’s desire to find a new (or different) relationship. It’s kinda biblical, too (I’ll try to avoid the lightning).
