In On Poetry, poet Glyn Maxwell directs me to consider the shape of the white space surrounding, preceding, and following a poem, the nature of the emptiness that calls forth lines. Today I consider the blank spaces in my week: the void at the end of my driveway where the cow stood staring, the shape of the air that keeps my canoe afloat, the birding excursion that vanished into nothingness when my car broke down, the blank Word document begging to be filled with grant-application verbiage, the hole opening up beneath an old filling in a tooth I don't remember cracking--and now the loss of yet another valued colleague, who just announced she's taken a job elsewhere starting immediately so we won't soon be sitting around the department office comparing our dental woes, as women of a certain age tend to do.
I may not be a poet, but lately I feel like an expert on emptiness:
Empty chair
holey tooth
buoyant air
fading youth
docs to write
cows to shoo
birds to sight
pills to chew
(bitter pills--
better start!)
voids to fill
open heart
So that's the poem of my week. How about yours?
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