August 23, 2009

If I Stepped out of My Body

We stopped along the road to watch three horses grazing. All week I had worried over my 1-year old who was sick and finicky about everything. We all quieted and turned off the engine to listen. I thought of James Wright’s “A Blessing,” the first poem I was ever asked to write about by a teacher. At the end of the poem, after the speaker watches two ponies from the roadside, he reflects: “Suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom.”

For the moment, my daughter was settling back into herself, and I was sitting there thinking about how there is something in us that resists being contained by the body.

We were on our way to pick blueberries and I thought about Galway Kinnell’s poem about blackberries and Mary Oliver’s August, and wondered why there’s no poem about blueberries…

1 comment:

  1. i see a poem right here. and it's about blueberries.

    ReplyDelete