I was listening to a book on tape while driving<\/p>\n
and when the author said, \u201cThose days I delighted in everything,\u201d<\/p>\n
I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub<\/p>\n
because surely there was a passage of life where I thought<\/p>\n
\u201cThese days I delight in everything,\u201d right there in the<\/p>\n
present, because they almost all feel like that now,<\/p>\n
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating<\/p>\n
the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage<\/p>\n
my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast<\/p>\n
that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian?<\/p>\n
And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self<\/p>\n
might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator<\/p>\n
in hindsight, had only been an overboard character\u2009\u2014<\/p>\n
but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden<\/p>\n
dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm<\/p>\n
in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live<\/p>\n
only with the sunlight through the blinds, just prey<\/p>\n
caught betwixt and between, and also heartbreak, and<\/p>\n
again, heartbreak. I didn\u2019t have whatever that time of life<\/p>\n
then demanded\u2009\u2014\u2009a book, a wedding band, a baby\u2009\u2014<\/p>\n
but the present, like the lie of \u201cfair and balanced\u201d news reporting<\/p>\n
where creationists are granted air time with the scientists,<\/p>\n
the present might have me believe that \u201cin those days<\/p>\n
I delighted in everything.\u201d But to be … fair and balanced …<\/p>\n
I do trust the strict part of memory, the only archivist<\/p>\n
to have savored a passage of time and have preserved it<\/p>\n
with the translucent green hinges licked by stamp collectors,<\/p>\n
attaching it without hurting it, so I wanted the quote<\/p>\n
exactly, and go back to hunt and tag those months where I<\/p>\n
delighted in everything\u2009\u2014\u2009then I couldn\u2019t find the ticket stub.<\/p>\n
I rummaged through the recycling but no luck, and I<\/p>\n
couldn\u2019t go back to find the passage on tape, and then I realized<\/p>\n
I had bought the book for my husband, so I started leafing through it,<\/p>\n
not wanting to start too far back, and not wanting<\/p>\n
my eyes to fall on a passage in the future, the one where<\/p>\n
she realizes that \u201cThose days I delighted in everything,\u201d<\/p>\n
but it was never to happen again, just the present, from here on in.<\/p>\n
Jessica Greenbaum (USA, 1957 -), the cover image is a found composition by Valentino Russo<\/a> (ph. Diana Marrone)<\/p>\n Source: Poetry (October 2016): https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poetrymagazine\/poems\/detail\/90647<\/a><\/p>\n To read more poems of the same author:<\/p>\n