Poetry: Serious. Not That Serious.

POETRY REMEDY # 1: FOR THE LDR (LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP) Long distance relationships are the most fun EVER. Highly recommended. That's sarcasm. LDR's test your character, patience, and ability to delay sexual gratification. They leave you feeling deeply lonely one minute, brightly manic the next, and slightly insane altogether. I like to call it the Pendulum Effect—trying to be two places at once and never succeeding at being wholly present anywhere. With this uplifting portrait of the “illness” in mind, I'd like to bring your attention to some poems/excerpts that have helped me cope. I've read a lot of articles and talked to a lot of people, but poetry's magic is that it acknowledges the problem, gives you hope, and also concedes that things might not work out as planned. I've received that kind of layered intelligence nowhere else.1. For When You Don't Think You're Strong Enough And This Probably Won't Work Out For You Because Other Things Haven't Worked Out For You: From What I Believe by Michael BlumenthalI believe that, the older we get,the weaker the bodybut the stronger the soul.I believe that if you roll over at nightin an empty bed,the air consoles you.I believe that no one is sparedthe darkness,and no one gets all of it.2. For When You Recognize That You Just Need To Chill The Eff Out And Not Create Problems In Your Head That Don't Exist In “Reality”: The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell BerryWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.3. For When You Don't Feel Connected To Or Understood By Your Long Distance Lover (i.e. You're Passing Through Alienation Station, Not To Be Confused With Conjunction Junction): From Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue Juniata by Galway Kinnell7.Dear strangerextant in memory by the blue Juniata,these lettersacross space I guesswill be all we will know of one another.So little of what one is threads itself through the eyeof empty space.Never mind.The self is the least of it.Let our scars fall in love.4. For When You Need To Be Brave And/Or Need An Optimism Boost: Marble-Sized Song by Albert GoldbarthDoes she love you? She says yes, but reallyhow do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,undoing its petals and laminae, and going inbelow all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectricalcoffer where self-understanding is storaged away,and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to studyin its nakedness as it spinsin a clinical light?—the waywe all, in our various individual versionsof this common human urge, go in,and in, and in, the physicist downto the string-vibration underlying matter, andthe Appalachia fiddler getting so(as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomesa flesh for her to intimately (“in”-timately)enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.”Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feignsthat he's insulted, but for certaintyyou'll need to delicately strip the bark awayand drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slideof the pith and can augur the chitterlings—the way the philosopher can't accept a surfaceassumption of truth, but needs to peel backthe fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layerinto a blow-away foam, and then with pickand lightbeam helmet, inch by inch beginspelunking through those splayed-out cavernsunder the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried—the way the diver descends for the pearl,the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: downthe snakier roots of us and in, and in, the waythe lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makesa glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,toward a horizon positioned in the center of the centerof his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the borderof our species and consider us objectively, it might seemthat our purpose in existing is to be a living agencythat balances, or maybe even slows, the universe'sirreversible expansion out, and out . . . and eachof us, a contribution to that task.My friend John's wife received the news: a “growth,”a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.And the primary-care physician said: Yes,we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,my sweet-and-shivering-one,my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,someone's-dearest, youwho said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who droveall night from Switzerland with your daughter, youon this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skinin the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,yes we must go in and in.5. For When It's Just Making You Grumpy And/Or You Straight Up Can't Figure Out HOW You Feel: As If by Magic, Context by Rebecca WolfYou said you wanted to sit in a pool of lightthere are some things about you that I don't like. That,not which. In a rabbit warrenthe broad avenuebegins embattled, the Coleridge figment,or the dream with the scrambled thingsin it always being prime.Did you ever think that you didn't love? and the reverse made impossibledemands. The walls insidefeel like they're on firewith the one I love. During the nightthe house cooled.