Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In my mere five decades on earth, I’ve faced many challenges — thwarted dreams, failed friendships, career disappointments — that often left me feeling alone, stranded in the dry badlands, searing heat bearing down. And yet, of course, I wasn’t. A three-hour telephone conversation with a friend, an unexpected consoling note from a colleague, even a passing smile from that stranger who read signs of stress in my gait, all these could break down my self-involved isolation. Through a rich panoply of difficult moments, today’s poem names and confronts life’s consuming dramas.

This Living
by Amber Tamblyn

It’s going to be a lunar eclipse.
 
It’s going to be critically acclaimed and win
none of the awards.
 
It’s going to start as an argument
over what’s buried inside the tomb
but end in silence
over what’s discovered
beneath it.
 
It’s going to happen on your birthday
in front of the mailman,
while you’re receiving the letter
for your sister
sent by her murderer.
 
It’s going to appear once a week
in your back yard
for decades
without ever speaking.
 
It’s going to ruin the cake
when you throw an urn full of cat ashes
in your ex-best friend’s face
at her baby shower.
 
It’s going to make you get under
the table
and drink there.
 
It’s going to explode
right there
in the dairy aisle.
 
It’s going to make you laugh.
 
It’s going to remind you
why you can’t go in mosh pits anymore.
 
It’s going to freeze to death,
right there in your arms.
 
It’s going to make all the kids
stare out the school bus window
and sing to you.
 
It’s going to rain where he is.
 
It’s going to be impossible for you
not to flood.
 
It’s going to hurt for a while.
It’s going to have to.
 
It’s going to make you
buy all the scarves
in his girlfriend’s favorite patterns.
 
It’s going to happen in the wind,
during the middle of fire season,
while he’s telling you
it’s going to have to end soon.
 
It’s going to be hard
to end soon.
 
It’s going to outlast television.
 
It’s going to wipe out
your entire wild life.
 
It’s going to be remembered fondly; your heart
unable to keep its hands to itself.
 
It’s going to be a lot, but never enough.
 
It’s going to be a strong love,
but only parallel his lover,
never perpendicular her.
 
It’s going to affect the whole neighborhood
inside you.
 
It’s going to make you unable to quell
the bad thoughts
of his dainty gull
and her inkless quill.
 
It’s going to bring out the best
of the worst in you.
 
It’s going to hurt him,
what you can write about her.
 
It’s going to hurt what you write,
what you’ll leave out about her for him.
 
It’s going to take the shape of poems
left under the doormats
of retired generals.
 
It’s going to happen any day now.
 
It’s going to be so good,
if it doesn’t kill us first.
 
With the way things are going,
it’s probably going
to kill us first.
 
It’s going to be a nightmare
when the Pope gets here.
 
It’s going to change everything.
 
It’s going to make your metaphors make you,
even if you don’t want to.
 
It’s going to sound like coyotes
killing behind your back.
 
It’s going to ride like a horse’s ghost.
 
It’s going to cost you.
 
It’s going to sound familiar-
a truck driver,
humming Schubert.
 
It’s going to have to be removed
by a doctor.
 
It’s going to go in the wrong direction.
 
It’s going to go into too much detail.
It’s going to use your daughter against you.
 
It’s going to make you eat everything
on all the plates
at all the hours.
 
It’s going to fill you with sorrow.
It’s going to fill you with relief.
 
It’s going to show you
how you got here.
 
It’s going to say
something cliché like,
It’s going to be okay.
 
It is going to be okay.
 
It’s going to hit any minute now.
 
It’s going to leave you speechless.
 
It’s something you’re going
to have to carry
for the rest of your life.
 
It’s going to get dark soon.
 
It’s going to feel
like it just happened yesterday.
 
It’s going to sit well
with no one.
It’s going to be worth it.
 
It’s going to build you back up.
 
It’s going to get better every day.
 
It’s never going to give up.
 
It’s going to have your name on it.
 
It’s going to belong to you.

“This Living” by Amber Tamblyn. Used by permission of the poet.