Poetry reading

I had a brainstorm on my way to Margie’s in the rain this morning. We have exhausted talk of the weather and the hummingbird; we have talked about her three children; she has told me how she feels about living and dying. Why not read some short poems together and talk about them? I suggested it, but she countered, “I’ve never been one for poetry. So much of it is pretentious.” 

All I had with me was my phone, but first I called up this one by Carl Sandburg:

The fog comes 
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking 
over harbor and city 
on silent haunches 
and then moves on. 

It was a great hit. Not a bit pretentious. I read it to her, I asked her to read it to me, we talked about it and looked out the window at the heavy fog. She was delighted. So I tried another, Daddy Longlegs, by Ted Kooser. Another delight, but it prompted her to say she doesn’t want to live on, not at the center of herself nor anywhere else. She said again as she says so often, “Enough, already.” 

Right, I agreed, I respect that. But what about that image, legs as springy as steel? “Oh yes,” she agreed, “that’s a marvelous way to think of them, and the ‘small brown pill.’” She chuckled, “I know a lot about pills. That poem might change my mind about spiders.” 

On my way home I thought of collecting some unpretentious short poems for Margie, and also for myself, if cognitive decline comes to me. Maybe we should all do that, compile a resource for later, if we get there and can remember that we compiled it. I remembered my old blog from 2010, to which I’d attached a Commonplace Book, and it’s still there! I look at it with new eyes, filtering out the pretentious. It’s a start.