cool nights

Ruth Forman, “On This Day”
this is a day without chairs
a day where all the rooms melt together
and there are only corners/corners and humming
wishes and slight breeze
brushing you like palms
this is a day of prayers
a day of painful breaking/a day of peace beneath
a day of arms
of hands
eyes and quiet windows
 
i wish you love from your mother backwards
 
i wish you deep tunnels without fear
i wish you children’s laughter
i wish you cactus flowers
i wish you moonlight
i wish you real eyes
i wish you a hand across your back/soft like when you were a child
i wish you tears
i wish you clean
i wish you angels in conference around your bed holding you
so there is no space for me even to touch you/just watch
 
i wish your mother watching
 
i wish you abalone dreams
i wish you peace
i wish you doves in your kitchen
moonlight in your bathroom
candles when your eyes close and dawn when they open
i wish you so many arms across your shoulders
so many lips kissing your ears that you smile from the inconvenience
i wish you all your babies’ love attacking the center of your heart
just so you know they are there
 
i wish you banisters, railings, and arms around your waist
i wish you training wheels, i wish you strong shoes
i wish you water o i wish you water
through your feet flowing like a stream
and i wish you hammocks
and melon on your eyes
strawberries in your mouth
and fingers in your hand
fingers in your hand all day
through this house
on this day with no rooms
only corners
and an uncommon breeze

“On This Day” from Renaissance, copyright © Ruth Forman 1996. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
 
 
Thomas Lux, “Give it to the Wind”

If the wind touches your cheek
in a manner that pleases you,
then to it give something back.
Give some dollars, a good slice
of bread, a phrase from a woman
who loves you; open an ampule
of joy and wave it, out loud.
If you find a dime, then give two
to a beggar, celebrate
 
nerve endings, your soup.
If whole minutes exist
when to your left is a river with ducks
and to your right a cathedral slashed
by light, then carry clean bandages
to a battlefront, swab foreheads
in a contagious ward; if a few
cells bloom, a synapse heals,
then stab a thousand tiny flags
 
into the graves of generals,
then mourn a murderer’s childhood.
And if, after furious sleep,
the room is windy
and cool air slides across the blank
dunes of your sheet, then thank
the night for the day
and the day for what
it is: liable to be.

Thomas Lux, “Give it to the Wind” from New and Selected Poems of Thomas Lux. Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Lux. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
 
Ama Codjoe, “Slow Drag with Branches of Pine” 
Here I am, holding one more
mirror. This time smoke, winding
like a river. I close my eyes,
not because the smoke stings—it
does—but because it’s a way
to examine myself, like looking
at your face in a river certain it is not
your face. The smoke combs
like a mother through my hair
or like searching the shoreline
for shells unbroken. I sing to myself
and the smoke drags my voice on its back
just as the breeze heaves it.
Here, in my half-singing,
I’m reminded how to slow drag.
I watch the pine trees creak
and sway. Here, I am
my own twin. I rest my cheek
against my cheek; I barely move at all. 
From Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Ama Codjoe. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. Milkweed.org.
 
 
Daniel Nester, “Künstlerroman, 1996”

Before I moved to Brooklyn, I hopped
on the L train and, I shit you not,
interviewed the bohemians
of Bedford Avenue, pen and pad
of paper in hand. I asked
if they liked living in Williamsburg.
Most kept walking, ashamed
to be seen with me. Some were nice.
Even the glasses guy from They Might Be Giants
stopped and talked. I lived in a sublet
on Crosby Street, a fifth-floor walk-up frozen in time,
heated from a brick on a stove, rent-controlled
in a building filled with old men.
This was 1995, and Williamsburg
was no SoHo. We had the L Cafe,
Planet (or Planeat?) Thailand, brunch at Oznot’s,
open mics at The Charleston,
Styrofoam cups of beer at Turkey’s Nest.
And Joe’s Busy Corner, where the patriarch
held court outside and cursed through
his artificial larynx. Everyone
in Williamsburg lived on borrowed money.
We walked to the Citibank in Greenpoint
just to use a bank machine. And our landlord
never cashed our rent checks. Like, never.
Months would go by on North Fifth and Havemeyer.
Nothing. I’d watch my checking balance swell
to four digits and start to think, this is my money,
not his. So I’d shop at OMG Jeans
or buy new Doc Martens. Then the landlord
would cash the rent checks. A whole year’s worth.
All at once. The whole building would shudder.
I can still see myself a year later,
on a summer morning by the East River
with a Strathmore sketch pad, not very humble,
wallet-chained, younger-looking, jaded,
waiting for last night’s mushrooms to wear off
and Tops grocery to open. A skinny boy
bums a smoke. I give him a light. I smile.

From Harsh Realm: My 1990’s Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Nester. Reprinted with permission of Indolent Books.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
This week is themed around the astonishing return to cool in autumn. Any seasonal shift sharpens our awareness of what’s around us, but especially so when we’re talking about suddenly perceiving something formerly invisible. September breezes make manifest an omnipresent force. This is not just the perfect metaphor for how the divine plane sometimes appears to us. (It’s no accident that the word spiritual is etymologically linked to breath.) It’s also a practical, straightforward analogy for mindfulness in general: there’s all this life surrounding us, calling us to pay attention.
Being saved from our internal mental churn by awakening to what’s around us is, each time, an experience of being refreshed and renewed. Enter Ruth Forman’s breathtaking, breathmaking list of uncommon wishes. Riding the wind of our roving attention: humming palm-brushing breeze prayers fingers in your hands all day eyes quiet windows clean abalone dreams strong shoes…. “On this Day” pours blessings, and we are filled to overflow. The waterfall of ways we might experience the “uncommon breeze” of early fall just keeps flowing: like baby hands like tears like lips kissing our ears like moonlight like children’s laughter. There are angels in conference around our bed, holding us, and we need only open our eyes to see them.
This feeling of being held safely, wrapped up in the world, reminds me of the final lines to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God:
Now, in her room, the place tasted fresh again. The wind through the open windows had groomed out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness. She closed in and sat down. …Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Catching life in the meshes of our awareness is a form of refreshment and solace. The more we can catch, the more we feel a sense of plenitude, and the more we have to give. This simple mathematics is the premise of “Give it to the Wind,” which offers (besides the wonderful line, “Celebrate nerve endings, your soup”) an equation for life’s give-and-take: if the wind touches your cheek, give something back! Responding to beauty, or luck, or a gift, by giving something back is such an obvious thing. It’s simple symmetry. Often gratitude practices can bring about guilt, inadequacy, or a kind of smug self-satisfaction. In contrast, Lux depicts the effortlessness of our natural inclination to give (bread, joy, succor) when we are full. The needs of the world are made known to us in tandem with and as a simple extension of our blessings.
Or, to banish all preciousness and do-goodery, we could pop out for some air with Ama Codjoe. The seductive scene in “Slow Drag with Branches of Pine” depicts smoking as a form of self-companionship. Like the ragtime jazz and blues dance form referenced in its title, “Slow Drag” is hot—at least it is for anyone who has loved smoking and maybe for many who haven’t. Ada Limón, for example, confesses to having always wanted to be a smoker in her commentary on Codjoe’s poem for The Slowdown. She tells the story of playing Lauren Bacall as a kid with candy cigarettes and later “practicing” at smoking in her twenties, adding that it always made her feel that she needed to go to confession. This naughtydirtysinful vibe is what drags many of us to smoke, but for Limón, the smoke break is enticing as solitary reprieve, a chance to reconnect with self, breath, solitude. All this is currenting through “Slow Drag,” but at the same time, Codjoe refuses to jettison what might be considered profane from the realm of the sacred. As much as it’s a ritual of elemental rapture—smoke is wind is fire is a river is a mother’s touch is shells on the shoreline—it is (or was) also sexy. Cigarettes sting your eyes, which close as you lift your face to the pines, and you sway as the smoke, like a lover, “drags [your] voice on its back / just as the breeze heaves it.” Hot dawg.
I have to pause here and linger with this poem from Daniel Nester’s larger künstlerroman, Harsh Realm. Back in the day, smoking was not only solitary, it was communal. The smile that greets the skinny boy bumming a light at the end of the poem is one of the few smiles in this volume of poetry. Smoking was a tribal observance back then, where rebels and gritty nonconformists could find one another out on the streetcorners of New York. I’m taken back to the seedy bars and coffeehouses where we’d all gather to share poems in not-so-earnest open mics, karaoke sessions, or Mad Libs-style collaborations—Dan, Greg Pardlo, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Kazim Ali. But to approach the poem with less solipsism (and name-dropping), it also captures a truth about smoking that’s nostalgic because it just may no longer be true. The owner of Joe’s Busy Corner cursing through his artificial larynx is from the same tribe as the guy on his way to buy Doc Martens with borrowed money, extending his lighter to a stranger. We were flipping the bird to responsibility, capitalism, ideas of health, and mortality itself. There are a million reasons that this particular subculture is dead, and nearly all of them are admirable, positive cultural shifts. But this sensual blessing of the breath really was a way of giving thanks for “whole minutes” spent near ducks or pine trees or Tops Grocery. We recognized acutely, and observed ritualistically, the lack of guarantee: each morning is only “liable to be”—a bittersweet, conditional non-promise. 
In whatever way you give thanks to the night for the day—whether it’s pulling the horizon from around the waist of the world and wrapping it around you, or watching the breeze rumple the white dunes of your sheets, or lighting up a Marlboro joy ampule, I celebrate your celebration.
 
 
PRACTICE
But really, I’m not inviting you to become a smoker. Those days are over. In this avalanche of metaphors for September’s uncommon breeze, is there one that’s dragging you in? How might you give the bodymind a physical experience of, say, Ruth Forman’s brush of palms or Codjoe’s pine tree sway? In this video, I went with seated cat and cow, set to Zora Neale Hurston's words. Another simple way to embody the mathematics of give and take is to lift and lower your arms, deliberately palpating the air as though pressing on a parachute. If this appeals, you might begin by resting your hands in your lap, palms facing up, as though holding something. As you lift the air up on the inhale, try to feel for its temperature and quality. When your arms are fully extended upward, turn the palms to face down, and as you breathe out, soften the hands back down into your lap. As you explore receiving and pouring back out, perhaps add a retention on the inhale with reaching arms, and at the bottom of the exhale, rest for a moment on empty, surrendering upturned hands into your lap. If one of these metaphors come to mind, like doves or wind over dunes, linger with it, as though feeling it with your palms. As your hands receive these prayers, what do they want to give back?