[Sometimes I don't know if I'm having a feeling] by Matthew Siegel

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 8, 2015   [Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling]   Matthew Siegel

Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling so I check my phone or squint at the window with a serious look, like someone in a movie or a mother thinking about how time passes. Sometimes I’m not sure how to feel so I think about a lot of things until I get an allergy attack. I take my antihistamine with beer, thank you very much, sleep like a cut under a band aid, wake up on the stairs having missed the entire party. It was a real blast, I can tell, for all the vases are broken, the flowers twisted into crowns for the young, drunk, and beautiful. I put one on and salute the moon, the lone face over me shining through the grates on the front door window. You have seen me like this before, such a strange version of the person you thought you knew. Guess what, I’m strange to us both. It’s like I’m not even me sometimes. Who am I? A question for the Lord only to decide as She looks over my résumé. Everything is different sometimes. Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder but my room, my apartment, my body are containers and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.            Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Siegel. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “For me, this poem is about coming to terms with the difficulty of engaging emotionally with life. We have lots of distractions to keep us from feeling, to keep us numb, if that’s what we choose. But we can allow ourselves to move, eventually, through the distractions and numbness into feeling, if we can only manage to remember some basic things.” —Matthew Siegel   Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). He teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and lives in San Francisco, California.   Photo credit: Kari Orvik Most Recent Book by Siegel   Blood Work (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) "My Proteins" by Jane Hirshfield "Slur" by Jacek Gutorow "Intimacy" by Paisley Rekdal Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038