Morning! I’m back in Tennessee visiting with my mom. Out my window, a hill and on the hill, some cows. That reminds of me of the lines, “And I passed a cow and the cow was brown / And my pajamas clung to me like a shroud” in Nick Cave’s “Hallelujah,” except my cows are black, not brown.
The poem I’m reading today, by Mary Szibist, is about seeing a spider capture a firefly in the grass in Tennessee. I think the real energy of this poem is these lines:
When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. There’s a meditative quality to watching this sort of violent, but fully natural and fully in-the-moment scene.
But my favorite line is, “I suppose / there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.”
We can’t escape what we are.
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