Gary Margolis: The Desire to Write Poetry at Forty
My daughter writes me after her children are asleep, her husband away downstairs in the rec room, she’s been finding herself with a blank screen, a white piece of paper. Things on her mind she hasn’t found another way to say yet. Without worrying what someone might think. Might tell her to keep to herself. She tells me she’s just come across Dickinson and feels released. Although, honestly, she doesn’t understand everything she reads. It’s more the mysterious feeling between her and Emily, the centuries in between two women alone in their rooms. Speaking to each other in invisible words. To write a poem. Leaving it to somebody else to call poetry. To turn a rough night’s sleep into a window’s dream. A phrase, she admits, she doesn’t know where it comes from. Emily whispers for her to trust. To believe she’ll remember it in the morning. At least enough to begin writing from. Her children stirring, her husband climbing the stairs to bed. Leaves brushing the screen and the window.
Copyright 2020 Gary Margolis
Gary Margolis is a poet, teacher, and psychologist who lives in Vermont. His eighth collection Museum of Islands: New and Selected Poems was published by Bauhan Publishing.
And 50 and 60 and 70 …
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Yes, I remember it wsell. Beautiful poem.
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