It has been a year
I mean that in two ways. On the one hand, it has been quite a year since April of 2024—for me, one that has involved highs and lows in the extreme. There’s a reason I haven’t published here lately: there hasn’t been time to write.
Last summer, we packed up our earthly belongings, and the three of us moved from New York City to Shreveport, Louisiana. The summer was for settling, and the fall and winter have been for feeling unsettled—first by a new and often overwhelming workload, and then by politics, a politics of resentment, paranoia, and reckless destruction that proved more pervasive in this country than I had previously realized.
We are grateful for at least my current employment security, even as expenses are difficult to manage at times and healthcare seems to us criminally expensive. We are grateful for the neighborhood of Highland, where the houses have front porches and the commute to my office is less than five minutes by foot. We are so incredibly grateful for each other—for after-dinner walks around the block, for movie nights with thrift-store DVDs, for pancake mornings with dance breaks between the spatula flips.
It will also have been one year this Saturday since my poetry book was published in April of 2024. To Leave for Our Own Country concludes with a poem, titled “Day of Epiphany, 2021,” that recounts the attempted coup of that day and the violent assault on the capital, as I described in my last post back in November. One of the tensions throughout the book is between the sensation of national/global urgency, on the one hand, and the stunning beauty of the lived, everyday fecund world on the other. I believe that the future habitability of our planet is tied to the future of democratic structures (hopefully including their radical reimagining, but not their wholesale demolition), and the need to protect and secure both could not now be more urgent. But I am also in good company if I maintain that “hate will not drive out hate.” Only love and light can do that, as the world reminds us again and again if we are quiet and careful enough to listen. There is something radical, in an atmosphere charged with hate, suspicion, and anger, to find ways to let those very emotions go (not always! but sometimes), “touch grass” as the kids say well, and do our urgent work from a position of groundedness, community, and joy. We can’t respond to urgency if we lose that sense of who we are.
Happy Earth Day, by the way. Let’s fight even harder for it, but let’s also remember to revel in its beauty.
To mark the book’s one-year mark, and to take advantage of a small stack of overstocked books I recently purchased from the publisher at a nice discount, I’d like to offer to send signed copies to whoever wants them for just $15 including shipping—a pretty good bargain—or just $85 for the deluxe edition (which includes a limited-run impression of Ladislav Hanka’s cover art, nicely tipped in following the table of contents and signed by the artist), while supplies last. Please let me know if you’d like one. The easiest way would be to send the money by Venmo here and include your mailing address and whether you’d like me to sign it “to” anyone, including yourself. (I’ve always maintained that poetry makes a good gift.)
Sometimes on our evening walks, Chloe just wants to run and play. Other days, she prefers to walk slowly, holding my hand, and talk. The other day, we were having a good talking session. She informed me, once again, that she was going to grow up one day. I assured her that she had lots of time before then, and that it’s nice to be a little girl for a while. She changed tacks and said, “I’m really lucky to look for fireworks”—by which she meant, she was lucky to see two of them set off a block or two away when we were sitting on the front stoop one evening a few months ago. I said yes, you’re a very lucky girl. You know why else you’re lucky? She didn’t respond at first, so I said, because you have a momma and a poppa who love you very much. “Yeah,” she said. Why else are you lucky? I asked. “Umm”—she tapped her cheek, while walking, in practiced reflection, and after a moment she blurted out with a happy shriek, “Trees!” Yes, I said, yes! We’re so lucky for trees! “Yeah, and so many grown-up trees—look!” pointing at the row of stately trees along the street, cracking the sidewalks with their girthy roots. Why else are you lucky? I asked, now really wanting to know. “Hmmm… flowers!” she said, smiling and pointing to a blossom-clad shrub in a neighbors yard. She looked at me, smiling. “I love flowers.”
It has been a year. My daughter is three and her wisdom abounds. My wife has traveled with us over hill, valley, and bayou to a new land, eminently game for this journey that is our life together. And, strangely, this little book, with my name on it and my poems inside, has made a full circuit around a star—a common star and magnificent.
Let us remember who and what we are as we continue with the urgent work of the world, even in trying and frightening times.
