☀ Today's Poem: "The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong" Jennifer Grotz

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September 27, 2023

The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong

While thinking of Adam's death, she hears about Jon's,
just last week, an old flame, the composer. Their ending
so painful that a decade later, when buying her new home,
she wavered because it was by a street with his last name
and wasn't sure she could stomach walking by
that name every day. Which is what she does now
to take in the news, take a walk, it's what she did
when Adam died, end of last winter. It's what
she did when Josh died, too, that holiday weekend,
everyone out of town, so much ice on the sidewalk
no choice but to walk in the middle of the road,
using her red scarf as a tissue, ice caking her lashes.
It's blinding outside and the snow's a canvas
soaking up pigments mixed by the sun, blues, purples,
yellows, pinks and orange. The sun dazzles
the melting stalactites studding the rooftops.
It was
a nearly perfect affair, they worked in the mornings,
she drank too much coffee and let a cigarette burn so long
its ash would spill onto the page and that was
one happiness. Another was late afternoons
when she'd join him in bed, and then after, it would be
time for an aperitif and they'd cook dinner, eat,
discuss their days. Some nights he'd go back to the piano
and play Scarlatti while she stood behind him with her arms
around his shoulders light enough, she imagined,
not to hinder his playing. Still it ended badly, suddenly,
irrevocably.
It's the same walk she takes each time,
from her house to Brooks Street, Brooks to the Genesee,
then along the river until it meets the Erie Canal, then
under the highway, then into the forest unless
the little alarm of fear sounds in her, it often does,
a woman alone. The day she learned about Adam,
she'd stopped on the bridge crossing the river
to take out her phone for a photo, saw the text.
She could find another walk, but she doesn't want to,
she doesn't want to get in the car to avoid the walk,
avoid the death, avoid the river. This is the walk
by her house, by the street with Jon's name, it's
the walk along the river that's hazel-green in summer,
silver-blue in spring, frozen sometimes in winter.
A walk is a poem. So is a grief.
When she gets home, the snow on her boots smears
like paint on the doormat. She finds the cats asleep
on the table they're supposed to stay off of,
the patch of light they always seek makes their warm fur
gleam. There's a word for it, she just read it today, apricity,
recorded by Cockeram in 1623, "the warmeness
of the Sunne in Winter," now obsolete.

from the book STILL FALLING / Graywolf Press

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

Several of the poems in "Still Falling" are titled after lines borrowed from other beloved poems and poets. "The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong" is a line lifted from a posthumously published Larry Levis poem, "Gossip in the Village."
Jennifer Grotz on "The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong"

Poet's Family Plans to Breach Century-Old Monument
"Neihardt wrote that he placed a time capsule in the 'bosom' of the concrete monument. The capsule, he wrote, includes an 'original manuscript' from him, the author of 'Black Elk Speaks,' a million-selling book about the remembrances of a Lakota medicine man."
via NEBRASKA EXAMINER

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Cindy Juyoung Ok on Other Arts
"'Home Ward (Seoul, Korea, 2012)' approximates the physical layout of a room. My memory of the real room, one of the last where my grandfather stayed, is marked by the concentration of patient beds in a rectangular space that, if empty, I would have considered a wide hallway."

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