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Poems that listen
The bird says Everything outside me is everything inside me too, sometimes The bird says, Put the table where the chair is and the chair anywhere else The bird says he she they don’t have dinner plans anyway The bird doesn't have to say anything in the first place The bird says, sand and sky and sand and sky and sand above me too, in fact! The bird says my eyes are almost always looking elsewhere The bird says this emerald tree is a house for many The bird says musical notes but doesn’t name them as such The birds say no, really, this emerald treehouse, I'm not messing around The birds say come live with us why dontcha The bird says, “mother.” But like, mother mother mother mother mother The bird leaves, and all the singing happens elsewhere, the bird will never be what you think it is. That's their medicine. The bird says, “nothing to see here,” which is saying a lot
A brief Agnès Varda interlude:
The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.
What counts?
It’s a question I come back to again and again—as a writer, as an artist, as a sensitive (and sometimes insecure) human being. What counts? The question comes up in conversations with my creative friends, and with my partner, and with my clients, too. What counts? It’s an external validation question, soooorta—it’s a little slimier, a little more slippery than that. Because it gets down to the heart of the thing: Your Actions. Which of them count? Well, which of them are real? That kind of heart. That kind of slippery.
I asked my good friend, the bird, to help me sit with this question.
The bird suggested I go for a walk.