dear you,
This poem by Mary Ruefle killed me dead this morning.
The refrain of “women who lie alone at midnight”, followed by a situation/event/theory has the effect of orienting within disorientation, and how apt and clever is that? When unmoored, we repeat. We compass. We speak out loud to ourselves. We remind. We sit in silence remembering to breathe. We follow our sentences with “… right?”
As children, it’s important to be told that we are real. That the descent from the womb actually happened. A reiteration of transitional objects: the not me but not not me phase of life. But at some point, it is socially or culturally or stubbornly forgotten, or driven out of us, or made it seem as if it should come as naturally as breath itself, the reality of being real, but how? How do we remember?
Typically, in a before-world, we remembered our own reality by the acoustics of our personhood as it bounced against everything around us: buildings in cities, office walls, bodies in subways, reflections in windows, the stability of a coffee order, our friends faces looking at our faces (which makes me think of the Matthew Zapruder poem that goes something like “your eyes are not always brown, sometimes they are green, like the eyes of a frog looking into the eyes of another frog”, and how I’d love to be a frog looking into the eyes of another frog right now, maybe not questioning my own realness. Though, maybe still doing so regardless of being amphibian or human.).
Here I am, staring with my eyes into the eyes of this computer screen, which has known me as intimately as anything, I suppose, in the last year plus. And lying at midnight with a many stanza-ed bouquet of possibilities.
And thus ends the poem:
“What’s more, try it sometime
It works”
I love you.
July
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