Wind and Water

A cosmic Marfa Public Radio show featuring some of my poems

I was in Marfa Texas recently to promote my book. I met Amanda Holstien, who does a poetry show on Marfa Public Radio called “The Wind and Water Poetry Hour.” Amanda invited me to record a segment with her on Time. You can listen here:

🎧 [Listen to the episode]

Amanda and I talked together from minute 5 until about minute 30.

She called time the fifth element—the one that binds the others (earth, air, fire, water). That’s her centering on the old mystical systems.

I started with a time poem from my book, Early, Early.

That poem does its work with two stanzas—it’s a diptych. One panel is childhood: the luncheonette my dad ran, the smell of bacon and coffee, the hungry men before dawn. The other panel jumps forward—business hotel, cut fruit, layoffs, fluorescent morning. Both are early. Both are me. The diptych form lets both exist at once, like memory itself—not before and after, but side by side.

I thought about something I’d read that says we can have compassion for everything on earth because it’s all suffering from Time. The Stoic concept is that, as a living creature experiencing the negative attributes of our lives like time, it’s best to imagine oneself a dog tied to a wagon—you can pull, but you’re still going where the wagon goes. That led Amanda back to the mystical arts—Saturn, the old god with the sickle. Father Time. To live with time, you need some kind of practice. A discipline.

But productivity—that’s trickier. I think of it as the “third rail.” I’ve lived through layoffs and stack rankings and that corporate kind of time that makes you compete with everyone and live constantly on the edge of failure. There’s always someone assessing how you use your minutes. Poetry time doesn’t work like that. It’s slower, more healing for me. (I had a profound experience of healing this past year after surgery, and then with my Mom’s stroke; I love healing and I need healing. I have poems about it for my next book.)

My poem, Kids Who Are Young Women, YWWAK opens with a smell—decay—and hinges on longing: I want to raise her all over again. That line’s about my daughter, but also about the way time keeps giving and taking the same thing.

Is it inevitable? but we talked about grief. About how when someone’s dying, you keep trying to hold on to who they were before they became sick. A therapist told me once: If you keep doing that, you’ll miss who they are now. (I swiped that line for my poem, Siphon Tube.)

Kong Seems to Be Able to See My Death is about a phone call I overheard. My stepkid’s father had died suddenly. I was watching Kong vs. Godzilla as their mother talked to them about their grief, or really just listened. The stories folded together—grief and monsters, tragedy and comic books. That’s what poems do by making past time present in your mind. They fold everything.

Amanda read in a memoir about someone who’d had a near-death experience and was able to perceive Time as a layer cake. How many people can you talk with about the layer cake of time?

Now I’m thinking about how time keeps showing up in my poems, sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating, always sort of hanging around. Thanks, Amanda. It was good to have some help with that discovery.

The whole show is worth the listen; it’s got eastern and western music, Amanda reading the Bhagavad Gita, reading her own epic poems and letters to herself, and Christopher Dyer from Marfa Public Radio reading W.S. Merwin. Just a cosmos.