Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Writing is mining. That’s what I tell students or anyone that aspires to give expression to their lives. It’s probably why the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is credited with inventing language. So much of writing is digging into the past, is going in further to find words that shape our understanding of the irrational before we lose hold.

That diving into the self begins the process of, what one Transcendentalist philosopher, calls “meaning making.” Poets do it, image by image, through powers of recall and memorable language; they create bridges to overcome the inchoate fog of cosmic uncertainty where we constantly dwell.

But poets do more than name their personal histories and private emotions, the raw material, so to speak, that put into play the web and layers of public histories, shared mythologies, songs, and sundry knowledge. Most people know if you stare into the face of Medusa you’ll turn into stone, and only Perseus successfully overcame petrification. Many people might recall that Calliope, the goddess of poetry, is the daughter of Mnemosyne. And those over sixty-five have heard of the poet Kendrick Lamar. Poets take these stories and personages as their sources and present new avenues to understand our seemingly impenetrable world.

I enjoy today’s poem for its quality of total recall, for how it powerfully fills in the gaps to give us the sensation of an ongoing conversation with the past.

Grinning in Sardinia
by Tomás Q. Morín

On dirt-packed roads that thinned and fell apart
like breath in winter, we sputtered along
in our car, a yellow coupe with a memory
for recording groves of myrtle and secular pine
in kilometers. For six days we milled around forts,
bays, and bare, gold dunes stormed and conquered
too often to accurately count 
on the island shaped like a foot, no, the print
of a foot — God’s, in fact.
Or so the locals say.
At the rough southern tip
where the limestone runner’s heel 
would have first struck, we break bread
at the wobbly table we’ve claimed as our own
for the last time and take in every detail:
the sleepy violets on the table,
the handmade menus that smell like fish,
which is to say fresh 
off the boat, and the waiter,
the lanky one missing teeth
whose mouth sounds like a piano
tuned for serenades,
who is flirting with you
while I sit and grin 
as I imagine Odysseus must have grinned
at his wife’s bold suitors
because we are in the birthplace 
of the dropwort, after all, that sweet 
ditch-daisy Carthaginians brewed
for criminals and the elderly,
who, knowing no better, drank it
and danced as their faces twisted 
into a smile Socrates would have known, 
that tender old clown 
who saw the humor in death,
who would have seen the wisdom
of spending the last of our jigsawed days
feasting and raising our glasses
to the most merciful god of glee
until laughter did us part.

“Grinning in Sardinia" by Tomás Q. Morín from PATIENT ZERO © 2017 Tomás Q. Morín. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.