shored against my ruins

Yesterday sitting under a huge tree in a courtyard talking about our favorite poets, as one does, necks tilted back to release puffs of smoke into the blue sky filtering through the green leaves. When I was young I liked the confessional poets and I still will always hold room in my heart for them because I, too, was born doing reference work in sin. We drink iced coffee, the cream thick on the surface, and water with peeled and thinly sliced lemon wedges. Then I guess like everyone I went through a phase of liking the poems stripped bare, down to the picture, the wet black bough, and I like some of them even today. Inside the cafe there were small cakes made of peaches but they were too beautiful to eat and I didn't dare. I like the intellectual poems, the cool footnoted references. I love Millay because she took modern ideas and sliced and stretched until they fit perfectly into conventional molds, she took open relationships and put them into sonnets. I love Frank O'Hara because he looked all the way down into absolute isolation and despair and then skipped across it. Stein for being complex and making me think about language so hard; Hicok for being clever and making me forget about it entirely in the pureness of feeling. Mary Oliver's nature, Bukowski's secret heart. Words that are music. I love the way that when poetry is good, it takes a whole feeling or moment or image and tugs you right into its heart, pulls you into its rhythm until you feel it against you, the lines become words you have always known, the pulse of the poem is the pulse of your veins, and days or weeks later it returns to you, a phrase or a line, and you can't tell entirely if it's yours, because it feels like it is, it's so true. It's not always so good, but sometimes, or rarely, moments of beauty that sting like tears, when the poem is so lovely that no matter how hard the poet worked all you can see is the perfect result, you know what they know, what the poem itself knows: this would be impossible any other way. I love that I can sit in a cafe in the city center, smoking and drinking coffee and talking about what we love, loving poetry and talking about it for the third time this week.