Confession

It’s an obsession, I’m telling you.

At first I only did it once in a while, just when I really needed it. I’ve adjusted to it though, become accustomed to the fragmentary nature of the experience. It’s like coffee. First you only need a cup of that dark bitter beverage, then two, then before you know what happened, you’re drinking half a pot in the morning and another one in the afternoon.

I’m addicted.

It’s not coffee or cigarettes. I’m not drinking sudafed.

My personal vice?

I read poetry.

Maybe it’s because I have less time. When I was younger I read high fantasy, space opera, anything based on Joseph Campbell’s journey of the hero was good.

A poem takes a lot less time to read than a trilogy.

Maybe when I’m eighty I’ll read nothing but haikus.

Maybe it just shows the disordered nature of my mind. Modern poems are different than old poems. Like Bach versus the blues.

I could tell you my personal history through the poets I have read. I started young with T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In college it was Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and William Blake when I was in the mood. In adulthood I discovered Wendell Barry, Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski.

I just bought another book of poetry. It was at the used bookstore. With a name like Bonfire how could I really resist?

When I opened it this is what I read:

It’s the wind that drives the sky to one side

and herds the stars along, and pulls

the thread out of the needle.

A lifetime frugally spent

but gone all the same, and the chair,

that has become your tame little horse

tethered beneath the wandering sky-

So yes, well, it needed to be mine. I own these poems written by a woman named Connie Wanek. She lives in Minnesota and was born two years after my own mother. It’s like I have a tiny glowing ember of her, or at least the echo of one. It’s good enough for me.

Art is like that. You give of your self, your inner visions, your dreams, and they go out into the world. You never know who might pick them up and find them beautiful.