Threads
Meditation pisses me off. All that non-striving
time on the floor, therapist-prescribed, noticing
the rope of my breath swinging up and down,
ringing me like a shivered bell, adds up to another
chore I must perform and I have a lot of them—
twisted muscles to lengthen, children who need
the brushed-hand of a long-distance text or a note
for school, packed with the peanut-butter sandwich.
And after I unwind the trail with my spouse and find
clean trousers and deliver the visiting poet to campus—
why is every poem I write a list?—my students face me
with skeptical looks and I know I must hand over every
spool in my basket, every kindness and needle and tangle
of literary lore. I unwind sentences with them
and we watch them catch light, catch shadow, too.
Later, caught in the net of a computer screen, an email
reminds me to be mindful, to mind the mindfulness
competition beginning now: log-in to record for my employer
the minutes I turned off the phone to follow my breath.
Complete two weeks and earn an emotional wellness token.
Turns out meditation capitalized also pisses me off.
Instead I resolve to scatter any mystical currency my clean
trousers pick up accidentally. Spirit-lint. This is my log-in.
Breathe. What is the thread-count of anger? How soft,
how durable? Can I knot rages into a ladder and escape
myself? A chime sounds. List and day unravel but the bright
skein of breathing keeps slipping along, connecting me
to feeling, to tomorrow, to you, whether or not I mind it.
That was Day 24 of National Poetry Writing Month. I haven’t drafted a poem every single day, but I’ve still done a fair amount of work, some of which might last, all of which did me good anyway. Meditation isn’t going as well–a kind friend sent me the mala pictured above, but I tried so hard to race through the beads and get on with my day that I kept hyperventilating. I notice I like writing poems about failed meditation better than I like meditating about failed poems…
