You know that feeling when something amazing happens and you think, “I can die now?” Poetry makes me want to die. Sometimes a line brings me to such a level of satisfaction that an aneurysm seems the only ensuing viable option. Poets are geniuses. Their ability to pack the mush of our everyday experience into a line of text is just one hairbreadth short of miraculous.
For example, the opening lines of W.S. Di Piero’s Tombo
“Life, as you say, my friend,
is lived in its transitions.”
Even now I am filled with the desire to kick back and savor the chiseled edges of this thought, close my eyes and keel over. Just be done. Because, who can keep living after such a thing has been said?
Tombo is my favorite poetry collection out by a local publisher this year. The syntax is languid, and one gets the feeling of being taken by the hand on a jazzy tour of the Bay, looking into windows, hearing the late night fog horns, watching the oystercatchers, staring at young lovers in the Mission. Stay with me awhile and see how majestically Di Piero unfolds the poem I quoted above (titled “The Running Dog”):
“A breakfast of poached eggs,
spiked coffee, newsy talk,
crushed sun behind the clouds,
marine layer vapors phasing
blue to green, and the body
quivers through its days
unawares but sensate,
like a dreaming dog
in the still, marbled air
of its own running …”
Even if you’re not in the mood for this most excellent book (I mean…), the opportunities to brush up on poetry are everywhere this month. One wishes that all months were like this, with poets gracing all the pages of everything all the time in perpetuity and forever, but alas.
