This is a poem for a poet named Mekeel McBride,
whose wonderful.
She's just had a book published with Carnegie Mellon Press.
It's called "No Ordinary World," and she's
one of my best friends.
The wonderful thing about Mekeel's poems
is that they're full of exotic names of things
and exotic objects.
And whenever you talk to her, you're always very aware
of the things that you say because you
know that she's going to lift them and use them in a poem.
Her poems have kimonos in them.
She has lines like "the bones of the dead shine like hooks
through the transparent Earth."
She has a wonderful imagination.
I love her.
Anyway, we were packing.
I was living in Cambridge-- we were packing.
I was moving to New York, and this is about that.
This is so you know who Mekeel is.
"Cuttings, bruises to the elbows.
No, ink from The Boston Globe smudged our arms.
I handled each dinner plate as though it were a page
of an illuminated manuscript.
While you rolled each spice jar into a newsprint cylinder--
sweet basil, dill, turmeric, saffron,
as though memorizing the vocabulary for your next poem.
You fit the jars into one enormous okra pot,
and taped the cover shut.
"We joked about liberating objects from their places.
How things seem numinous when divorced
from their ordinary lives.
The oak table, oddly out of place.
The chairs, and I, so oddly out of place in them.
I thought of those things at hand
as personalities, intricate societies of color and shape,
in which I could hollow out a nest.
I thought that nest permanent, as unshakable as I was.
But there are Edens we abandoned for new ones.
And transplanted, I still can feel the emotion of that loss.
"Your poem arrived today, with not one word
I guessed you'd use in it.
Instead, you say, 'there are kinds of love
that won't be spoken of directly.
The coleus I'd left for dead, that
hung neglected in my window, now flourishes in yours.
New cuttings root on the sill.
Such gardens feel temporary until we learn
to leave what we most love.
Your poem seemed to say, 'dear friend, you were loved.
You can come home now.'"