07 Sep Look and See. Play with Language. Look and See. Play Some More.
In March 2020, seven members of our “family of choice” took the train from NYC to our rented house 3 hours away in Montauk. During the worst of the Covid pandemic, we all lived there together. People began to leave and go back to NYC in June. By October, everyone but Dan Friedman and I were back in the City.
Dan loves to read the obituaries in the NY Times every day (I started to do so too). You read about such interesting people you’ve never heard of! One of them, Lisel Mueller, was a Pulitzer Prize poet. We were taken with her and ordered her book Alive Together (the one that won the Pulitzer Prize.) When the book arrived, we began a month-long tradition in our collective house. Each evening as we sat down to dinner, one of us would choose a poem from the book and read it aloud. We always thanked Lisel, and then we feasted on what was always a delicious meal.
There are well over a hundred poems in the book, and we didn’t read them all that March. Here’s one we overlooked that I’m so glad to have found a few days ago. I hope you enjoy it.
Things
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
Lisel Mueller
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