about finding old poems

I was looking through old documents tonight and found this poem that I wrote after my grandmother's death when I was in high school.  Funny how things can bring you right back to a memory -- words, and smells, and old lines you wrote awhile ago that you still really feel.

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Golden & bearing some French name,

they’re sitting on the shelves

in the bathroom, unused. Waiting.

We pack your room into foul brown boxes.

I want to burn your sweaters.

I want to pull them down over my shoulders.

All of it feels so ordinary- death. My pain.

Even those manufactured scents, your fear of their

discontinuation rather than what ended first.   

This morning, a woman in the grocery store

walked pass & it was you.  You with the smell

of imagined Parisian parlors & afternoon rose gardens.

I wanted her skin to fall

from her bones.

I wanted to curl inside her arms. 

When I was young, you’d visit

& I’d cry as soon as you left.

Now I’m seven again.

I’m sitting in the guest closet, my head against

forgotten coats. Arm in arm, we’re exploring Arc de Triomphe

& I don’t have to miss you so much.  

about the given life, and not the planned

You may not be as air-headed as I am, but you've probably experienced this type of morning: 

You’re flying out the door, you grab your bag and your coffee, you do a quick scan of the house and think you’ve packed up all you need for the day, jump in the car, and realize that you left your wallet on the table.  And then you go grab that and ten minutes down the road you remember the turkey sandwich sitting on the shelf of your fridge that you’d made for lunch.  

All of that to say – this has been my experience with gratitude this year. 

I’ve written to you about it a thousand times.  I’ve thought about it in a thousand different ways.  It is my anthem that plays on the radio over and over again and just won’t quiet.  Sometimes I think I’ve packed away every inch of it in my bag, and then in a split second I realize that there is more and more of it I’m forgetting and haven’t captured yet.   

So, if you’ll humor me, today we’re walking back inside and we’re going to grab more of this gratitude stuff we’ve left behind.   

One of the most beautifully written stories I’ve ever read is “Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry.  There are so many profound lines in it, and often I revisit them or they come to me randomly and I am entranced by how eloquent and truthful they are.  

As I was thinking of gratitude today, this part came to me: 

“The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

I read this over a thousand times in a coffee shop today and it came to me, the thing that I'd been forgetting on the kitchen table when it comes to gratitude -- to be grateful not only for what is given to me, but for my specific life. 

I've gotten into a good habit of being thankful for the small gifts that enter my day - for sunrises, for good conversations, for surprise pizza parties at work.  But what I don't do too well is give thanks that I am Emily Thompson. 

I am a daughter.  I am a sister.  I am a coworker. I am a friend. 

I am a lover of words, a loather of cabbage, a loud laugher, a frequent faller-down of stairs.  

I am specifically me in specific places to specific people, and all of that is total gift. 

I think what Hannah is talking about is living a life of gratitude that reflects our purpose in the world.  It is devastatingly easy to compare your life to others, or to wish you were made differently or dealt a different hand.  But when we compare and complain, we forget the intentionality behind who we are and where we are, and what we will do and who we will become. 

Berry once closed one of his poems with the line "we live the given life, and not the planned."  I find this to be such a beautiful sentiment and truth.  

There is so much thanks to be given simply for the fact that we are not haphazard.  

Hallelujah for that. 

about first loves

I had this amazing English teacher in high school.  Many people didn't like her, because she was strict and strange and seemed to pick favorites.  She wasn't perfect, but she was one of those teachers who did for me what teachers should do -- she brought me face to face with my passion.

Sitting in her class, I unwrapped language the way a child may unwrap a present on Christmas morning, with an eagerness she spurred on and coached.  In her classroom, I read some of the books that are still my favorites today, and I sat with her and talked about their meaning and significance to my life, and about the power of writing - not just the goodness of it for my soul, but the power of it in the world.

For some reason, I was thinking of her today.  I thought about one of the first poems I read in her class - "Song of Myself" by Whitman.  Reading that poem felt like falling in love.  Its lines sometimes come to me when I'm walking down the street with my grocery bags.  It awakened a love in my that has stayed.

And so, I wrote a poem.  It's a poem about that poem and also a poem, I think, about first loves, how they awaken in you a vastness so present and beautiful and lasting that they deserve to be celebrated.

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Every Atom

“…Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” – Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I wielded large, airless anthologies

over to her table in the library,

like a little doe pointing to lines

have you read these words?

because I could not believe them to exist

in a room in my high school, or in any

room in any small part

of this world.

She smiled silently, leaving

me alone to uncover

what those words undid

inside of me.

With first love I was

champagne bubbles and butterflies

on orange carpet, in a stale

corridor down from the art

wing, where I read for millenniums:

            “And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

over and over, amazed at language,

amazed at feeling, not noticing

how that line put my fingertips

at the cusp of the cliff of the meaning

of those words:

            before the feeling of falling,

            of disparity with my bones,

            of wanting to weld and give them

            to someone else,

            my fingers

            not yet surrendered to the truth

            of being loved as much now as ever.