…to read two poems from Jorie Graham’s stunning collection, Place (Ecco, 2012), while I drank my coffee in bed. They are dense poems, scary in their intensity, and this morning a phrase entered my heart, made me shake while I continued reading. It was from the poem “The Bird That Begins It”:
What is the job today my being
asks of
light. Please
tell me my job.
I thought of all the mornings when I woke, never asking. And I thought of what I loved — the moments in light, winter or summer, firelight, sunlight, the soft light of an oil-lamp when the power went out and we read anyway, our books held close to the flame. I remembered our small fires on White Pine Island, cooking over them, our boat bumping against the rocks, and look, there’s Lily (dead nearly 20 years) heading down to the water.
...Theresa Kishkan 