I'm Not Sure if I Like It Like This

A reading of Marie Howe and William Stafford (yes, two poems!)

*I’m moving away from video and toward audio readings. Please know that the audio is always my voice, not the canned Substack voiceover. It is a pleasure to read aloud to you.

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
-Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready”

The Gate by Marie Howe
“You Reading This Be Ready” by William Stafford

There’s Marie Howe’s idea of a gate, and that some or maybe all of us haven’t actually entered the world yet. Where does that put us? On the sidelines? In a waiting room? What do we do while we’re here, alive nonetheless?

William Stafford says start here, where I sit in my bedroom with the outdoor swing and the homeschool table where my children agonize over History, Math. A candle is trite, yet I light one. Over the back of the chair, a torn purple fairy skirt I’ve promised to mend for my ten-year-old but haven’t. Tissues on the floor from being always out of one illness and into another since January 20th.

What does it mean to enter the world? Marie Howe’s way in is a person she lost. I have this sense that I’m not here yet, not in the way I could be. In a different poem, William Stafford sees a shape in the grass. He says “everything in the world is waiting” and that we will make it all the way. He says we will help each other get there. But today, he asks What else do you need than what’s already here, now?

It is always two things true at the same time.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
-Howe, “The Gate”

I am ongoingly grateful to

Joanna Penn Cooper

at Muse with JPC for offering workshops that introduce me to poems like these and guide me into writing like this. Check out her website for current offerings.

Unsplash: Nikola Knezevic

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