Monday's Vibe:

A Poem Near the End

How lucky we are when poems come our way. And as a poet, when poems come in our way. You can’t step around them, they just are.

For Monday, I’d like to extend a poem that came my way to clarify both our luck and our arduous journey into the unknown. A friend from graduate school, Melanie Bishop, reached out as she is promoting the book by her friend, Andi Werblin Reid— who died in 2022. Andi, also a U of AZ MFA graduate, died of ovarian cancer after a long illness. Melanie wrote, “She tried everything--every new kind of chemo, every clinical trial, and nothing worked.” Yet she could not stop writing.

Melanie helped her to organize the poems as she was writing so prolifically. Now, “helping to get this book out has been a way to spend time with her,” Melanie says.

Of the many poems in Andi’s forthcoming book To See Yourself as You Vanish, this one caught my imagination:

COMPACT

agree to live beneath the owl's stony stare
and continue the scant attraction to living.
let it cease to be even scant.
sometimes a chorus of painkillers will save you
and sometimes it will be your own enchantment with the world,
the world as a field of baffled daisies. hold fast to the myth
of the blackbird and the golden cosmic egg, ignoring when possible
sutures, scars, symbols of the body's necessary impoliteness.
trust something as simple as string might tie it all together.
let a handful of wings take hold.

Every day, if we have the tenacity to do so, I hope we can let our enchantments with the world save us. I learned from Andi’s obituary that she loved Gerber daisies and she loved the color orange. And so that “field of baffled daisies” presents us with a question and an answer.

For me, I like looking deeply into the opening peony.

Andi Werblin Reid’s book will be released by Wesleyan University Press in September.