I have been writing, I really have. Nothing here, nothing to show publicly, but I have been writing. This is something I have to remind myself. I miss this place, and it weighs on me when I am away.
For the week following my last post I focused almost entirely on poetry here—an experience so wonderful it seems entirely appropriate that I arrived and returned home by soaring through the air, above the clouds. I wrote poems, read poems, talked about poems, analyzed poems, listened to poems—to the point that my spirit was willing but my body was weak. I attended every reading, presentation, and open mic I could, tossed in a few museums and shops, and more deep conversations than I can count. My journal is filled with proof of it all: quotes, fragments of poems, words to remember, books to read, movies to watch, people to find online.
Then I flew through the air once again, not home but to northern Michigan to meet up with the rest of my family and bring Oldest home from Interlochen. (This is a wonderful thing, having him home. And yes he grew, immeasurably.)
Since getting home: more writing, but almost as if I had forgotten the previous week. For the last week and a half I have been crafting and re-crafting my life word by word: emails to parents of students, to parents of prospective students, to administrators, to teachers, to friends, to family. Applications, questionnaires, registration forms. Meetings, conversations, questions. I enjoy this kind of crafting less, but it always presents itself as more urgent. I have to stop sometimes to remind myself that they both serve a life, that both are urgent, and that if for a week I dared to believe I was a poet, I can continue to believe it now.
So I keep trying to pull life together—through emails, through conversations, through notes in my kids’ lunches, through poems and blog posts and other writings. Maybe I will dare to call it all poetry of one sort or another, at least in those moments I remember flying through the air, over the clouds.
