Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

For weeks, my days have followed a form: wake to the radio alarm; eat a toasted bagel, with Philadelphia Cream Cheese; ride to work on my bike, careful to dodge cars; advise graduate writers during office hours; lecture for nearly two hours to a room of undergrads; sit through a department meeting; sweat it out at the gym on the elliptical machine; cook a New York Times-inspired meal at home with my wife; watch the new drama series everyone’s talking about; read an online newspaper, bedside; laugh at the memes my wife has shared on social media; turn out the lights — time for ZZ’s. Wake up the next morning and hit repeat.

My daily routines present no surprises; they keep the beat of my life. The foreseeable brings me comfort. I typically stick to the script of the previous day. But writing poetry is something that disrupts my set pattern. Composing language into a meaningful act of artful feeling provides necessary pause to meditate on the purpose of my life and its possibilities.

Writing is my form of improvisation. It is my dialectic of living, how I enact rhythms of seeing and expressing amidst the fatigue and predictability of daily tasks that I can’t do without.

Today’s poem comments on that fleeting quality, the monotony of daily existence. Yet, the poem finds potential for renewal when we embrace life’s unpredictability and seek to create new forms, new beginnings, new associations.

Each Morning Again
by Rose McLarney

As the sky darkens and window displays
are taken down—that is when she walks home, 
tired. To take off her good shoes.

To her husband. What to express about
another such day? The given hand 
composes shopping lists. As if reminders

were wanted, of the staples, every week the same.
(Though is it any better how produce changes, 
so seasonal and fickle and wilt-prone?)

She goes home to the cat, to pet him
where he poses, always on the edge 
of the room, as if considering exiting.

				—

But the jeweled necklaces, kept safe overnight, 
are lifted back into view, onto mannequins’ 
velvet throats, each morning again.

Bodies rise everywhere. To possibility 
and could be. Poets return to making metaphors’
pairs, which must be unexpected. And the cat,

it turns out, loves this life, surprisingly much.
When he becomes ill, he struggles to, once more, 
map the neighborhood by familiar odors.

Now, in the remains of earlier prey, strands
of worms shine and curl. Their time
just beginning. The eggs like pearls.

“Each Morning Again” by Rose McLarney from COLORFAST © 2024 by Rose McLarney. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.