Ars Poetica
“What is that phrase you’re always using?” David Kern asks Heidi White, and they say in unison: “big beautiful life.” I listen to this book podcast while pedaling my real bike through a virtual world, because January. Because weather. Then piano: writing music. Notes lead the way while I shower, dress, and then make tea. Fill the kettle, turn up the heat, select leaves, poetry book in hand. Today: Scott Cairns. His poems have a bigness and a beauty, so I ready my squat pencil, finally find a blank page. My imagination runneth over, filleth every line left hanging. Plus dreams, conversations, birds, words I want to strap onto my back like those butterfly wings runners wear to celebrate the first day of spring on the trail at Lady Bird Lake. I want to fly or at least look like I want to. Likely this poem will never leave this page, and I shed no tiny tear about that. Lo, the tealight has gone to sleep, so I light a new one and little did I understand until right exactly now the there-ness of it all. Then comes a text I’m needed to sing at noon Mass. There is no more time for poetry. Then lunch with a friend of thirty-three years, and then a heart to heart about the least sexy of all unsexy topics: health insurance. Followed by dinner with a new friend, so a trip to the store because I ate all the salad fixins. And each hour there are bright wings that, if properly positioned, would fly, and I write them on demure index cards the colors of Easter eggs , and pile them atop my undersized desk where I will sit or maybe stand tomorrow (early!) and make art that could launch this weary cardinal.
—Megan Willome
✨ This poem is offered for our April theme: To Poets
Author of Love and Other Mysteries, Resource Publications, Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Timothy Dykes, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.
Thanks so much for featuring this!