Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City by Jennifer Grotz

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 21, 2015   Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City   Jennifer Grotz

The lettering on the shop window in which you catch a glimpse of yourself is in Polish.   Behind you a man quickly walks by, nearly shouting into his cell phone. Then a woman   at a dreamier pace, carrying a just-bought bouquet upside-down. All on a street where pickpockets abound   along with the ubiquitous smell of something baking. It is delicious to be anonymous on a foreign city street.   Who knew this could be a life, having languages instead of relationships, struggling even then,   finding out what it means to be a woman by watching the faces of men passing by.   I went to distant cities, it almost didn’t matter which, so primed was I to be reverent.   All of them have the beautiful bridge crossing a grey, near-sighted river,   one that massages the eyes, focuses the swooping birds that skim the water’s surface.   The usual things I didn’t pine for earlier because I didn’t know I wouldn’t have them.   I spent so much time alone, when I actually turned lonely it was vertigo.   Myself estranged is how I understood the world. My ignorance had saved me, my vices fueled me,   and then I turned forty. I who love to look and look couldn’t see what others did.   Now I think about currencies, linguistic equivalents, how lopsided they      are, while my reflection blurs in the shop windows.   Wanting to be as far away as possible exactly as much as still with you. Shamelessly entering a Starbucks (free wifi) to write this.            Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Grotz. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Ut pictura, poesis: as with painting, so with poetry, the saying goes, and perhaps this is why from time to time poets, like painters, use the exercise of the self-portrait to practice seeing. If either the poet or the painter is lucky, sight leads to insight. In this unabashedly autobiographical poem, I use a shop window on a busy street, not a mirror, to view myself, and though my poem aims for truthful precision, I think it renders what, I’m convinced more and more, poems are meant to achieve, that is: registering what it feels like to pass through time.” —Jennifer Grotz   Jennifer Grotz is the author of Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives in Rochester, New York.   Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger Poetry by Grotz   Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016) "Baudelaire in Airports" by Amy King "The Traveling Onion" by Naomi Shihab Nye "Manifest Destiny" by Cynthia Lowen 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