“…go home

kiss your doorbell

your thermos from childhood

your fear of the dark

kiss everything

some small percentage of dust

will kiss you back”

Excerpt from “Plans for the Day,” Bob Hicok, as read on Rattlecast

I woke early enough to not miss the sunrise of this new day turning the sky above the meadow hot orange. I went out with Charlie to the river and the ice and the melt and the refreeze of all the layers, and past the brook, and over the tracks and up the hill and I looked out over the river and meadows from the overlook of Rocky Narrows and I stayed out in the fresh air for a long time. There was sun and a blue sky. I listened to the poetry podcast produced by “Rattle,” a literary journal, and to the interview and reading with Bob Hicok and when I was home transcribed some of this wonderful interview and poems. I stayed at my computer for hours. Much of that spent on social media, marketing my upcoming workshops, and this is time I could spend working on poems, but this is my creative life too: working with writers. I cannot choose between these passions, and I don’t have to. Because, then, I moved from the marketing into my writing and spent the rest of my afternoon into the evening working on a poem for my workshop in Concord tomorrow, the first of this workshop meeting since the end of November. I opened my poem about the riptide and felt immediately defeated by it. Could not make it work. Then, I considered shutting it away, maybe for good. Then I thought about an insight I’d had a few days ago, a memory from childhood that might belong to this poem. And I wrote that in and revised and revised and felt, well, maybe this is working. What happened is I got to the point of discovery, the secret reveal, where I found something I didn’t know about this memory, but it seemed true, because the expanse of time and the compression of time all happen in life or death moments. I am happy to be beyond the holiday, back to work, kissing the dust.