Walking Is Transportation

SHOULD-READING, or, OH, ALL RIGHT, I'LL READ THE DAMN POEM

EXFOLIATING MY RESISTANCE

When I encounter those familiar flush-left stacks of lines occupying, on average, about half the width of the page or column in a magazine, I feel a momentary unease. I should be reading those lines, I tell myself, hesitating to turn the page. I once, after all, called myself a poet (but always checked the surrounding area for naysayers, expecting at least one).

No, I'm not about to explore the reasons for the unease. I know they're principally an unwillingness to focus, to settle down, to engage. But when I can let go of my own impatience, when I can meet those lines on their own terms, which to me are the only terms, I may come away moved or amused or dazzled, but also speechless. The language and experience of poems is so private, beyond thumbs up or down, beyond technique or form or topic, there's really nothing to say.

Sometimes there is such stillness inside a poem, trying to downshift into its sensibility isn't enough. It feels as though you have to take a hot bath, exfoliating layers, opening pores, before you can enter it. As here, in a poem from Sleeping and Waking, Michael O'Brien's latest collection:

UPSTATE

First raindrops, a
cat's footprints, the
wiper
opens its fan.

•

In a broken
dream I have
just met Lord
Byron, '30s suit,
cocktail lounge, Graham
Greene's opaque, intelligent
face, eyes that have
seen everything, a
spider's eyes, a
kind of banked
fury. What is
dark mops up
the light. I
reach for my
watch to see
where we are
in night's program.

•

In the night
bear climbs onto
the porch, a
clumsy sound, later
I hear him
come back but
it was thunder.

•

Stirred by the
least wind the
wintry, carrot-
colored willow.

•

A pickup
full of snow,
a crow's rau-
cous laugh, the
rapids comb-
ing its hair.

The satisfactions in this and poems like it are wisps of shared experience, rendered in a novel language we pick up as we read it, nodding in places and not in others, getting it and not. Sometimes--as in, "the rapids coming its hair"--getting only five words is enough.

I usually don't allow myself the time to remember that.

Everybody Wants My Eyes

The empty chair. The growing pile.

WHEN A PLEASURE BECOMES A DUTY

Reading is my refuge. Always has been. But recently, reading has come to seem less a pleasure and more a duty. I first noticed it when the cooler, then colder weather sent me indoors.

Before the temperatures sort-of plunged, I'd had a mental picture of my over-wintering self. Attired in double-cotton long johns, an ankle-length Navy Blue fleece bathrobe and even fleece socks. Engrossed in something printed, sitting by the window in my mother's 1920s wing chair. Next to the chair on a rickety folding table, a periodical or two, a book or two or three.

A bibliophile's fondest image. But that's not how it's turned out.

Because when I'm in my office, I'm generally where I am now, seated in front of a flat-screen monitor, writing, or more to the point of this entry, reading. Meanwhile, the unread stack of words impressed onto sheets of paper piles higher. In my studio. In the kitchen. In the living room.

RECLAIMING TIME TO READ

The tactile-ness of paper pages, the heft of a hardbound volume can disappear with the lick of a flame, almost as fast as when I click the 'Delete' key to dispose of an unwanted page. And yet the unread book or article has a nagging importance to me that unopened e-mail messages and online so-called subscriptions just don't.

Lured by intriguing subject lines or cleverly titled links, though, I can spend hours chasing text online and, guilty though I am about it, do my best to ignore the stacks of words on paper piling up elsewhere around the house.

But I'm fighting back by reclaiming time to read.

--By writing "Refused," for example, on unsolicited mail and placing it in the mailbox or bringing it to the p.o. [It works! My unsolicited mail, formerly a flood, is now barely a trickle.]

--By discontinuing subscriptions I consider optional, like The New Yorker, most of which I skim. Sure I like the cartoons, but not at these prices.

In 30 days or so the crocuses will be up and I'll be kvetching about crosswalks and catch-basins. Can't wait.