Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I will fess up; some days I disregard my feelings of disappointment, and instead go on with my life. I ignore the impact of current affairs. I am not keen on Monday morning quarterbacking; I leave that to the experts.

I find it exhausting at times, theorizing about causes and effects, talking in a way that only makes me feel good about my hot take. It feels empty sometimes, approaching the world’s problems without, in the end, a real plan to act on. I also hold it as a truth that what’s done is done; one must move on.

But, each day is an opportunity to build from the unimaginable. I double down on the values I hold dearest, what I wish to manifest in the world in my everyday interactions: decency, love for neighbors, a sense of justice and hope in our country. I recommit. Doubt and uncertainty about the future is not new. Often my views are challenged — sometimes to a point where I come close to relinquishing what I believe.

During such moments, I reach for poetry. Poetry reorients me, does the work of humanizing, of not letting me devolve to despair. Its insistence on staying present, on paying attention, on speaking to the beauty in nature and the beauty in us, renews my faith.

Today’s poem models for me a necessary absorption and attention to the world — but also, an embrace of paradoxes and the difficulties of speech as pathways to understanding the inscrutable.

Immersive
by Joseph Millar

I meant to be talking of the huge cargo ship
jammed in the throat of the Suez Canal 
which the full moon’s tide 
lifted free this morning
and also the spring’s rare butterflies
jagging along the back fence
and my neighbor’s accordion music
seething under the door
and the ways I can’t pay attention for long
and the value of common sense —

I meant to be talking of Vincent Van Gogh 
and the chipped light of wheatfields 
he carried inside him
breaking apart in the noonday sun
the black wings of crows and the wreckage
of shadows, an old wagon
on fire in the ditch
or the eaves of a barn, its haymow
broken in half by time and the rain
falling on San Francisco
and the blue pigeon standing alone
under the tiny awning
where my love and I also stood 
watching it come down like mercy,
like threads from some astral wardrobe
across from the old Fillmore West
drinking takeout coffee from the little kitchen
and waiting for the movie to start.

"Immersive" by Joseph Millar. Used by permission of the poet.