Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

For nearly two decades, I stacked overflowing bankers boxes in my basement and garage. I rented a self-storage unit for almost as long near an airport to store packed, plastic containers. Then, during the pandemic, I took it as a project to change my… hoarding tendencies.

Two graduate students and I went to work atop a ping-pong table armed with trash bags, a handful of markers, and Post-It notes. We sifted through mountains of paper and sorted twenty-five years’ worth of teaching, writing, and living. Our workstation expanded to a dining room table, then, any large surface, including the floor. We tiptoed between towers of papers: old correspondences, flyers for poetry readings, restaurant receipts, book manuscripts. It was like watching a storm settle.

Repeatedly, I became distracted. I’d muse over drafts of old poems and think them better than published versions. I gasped at a picture of college friends, circled around a campfire. People I no longer have anything in common with: where are they now? A signed card from 5th grade elementary school students in Chicago elicited joy and comfort in our future. A note of rejection from a notoriously grumpy editor made me laugh out loud. But then, I’d wince at the recall of a hurtful memory, like a breakup with a woman I loved, captured in a letter, or the financial struggle of my early days evidenced in bank statements that showed negative balances. I had kept it all.

Those boxes of loosely strewn papers carried multiple versions of me, the lives I lived, the moments when I had to make room and reunite with myself, a continual rebirthing of my spirit: posters, pictures, and poems of Major alone at a bar in Oregon; of Major at a park tossing a frisbee with his children; of Major giving a lecture on the ballad in hip-hop lyrics.

All the sacrifices, all the lost loved ones, all the minute decisions and hours of feeling and studying, the aching passage of time, were all right there, captured in those boxes. At the end of our organizing, looking at them, I was flooded with emotions.

Today’s poem renders visible the change that needs to happen — the vows we make to ourselves in order to grow, to become the person we were meant to be; however painful, however triumphant.

The Messenger
by Brynn Saito

I stood on a rock in the desert
my palms turned out like two doves
my face tilted the way a bell tilts
before it pleases with song.

Wind swept around me
like God’s breath. My wings
of no use to me. My dress
the color of drowning.
I was floating away from myself
so fast I forgot what I loved.

When I was human
I used to climb the green hill
for this same pleasure.
The city of rust and smoke
slithered beneath me.
It’s done: never again in my life
will I be only one thing.

“The Messenger” by Brynn Saito from THE PALACE OF CONTEMPLATING DEPARTURE © 2013 Brynn Saito. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Red Hen Press.