Poem-A-Day: Demeter in Paris by Meghan O'Rourke

Demeter in Paris by Meghan O'Rourke     You can only miss someone when they are present to you.   The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light.   Henry Miller told Anaïs Nin that the only real death is being dead    while alive.   The absent will only be absent when they are forgotten.   Until then, absence is a lie, an oxymoron.   Therefore it is entirely unclear what absence means, or consists of.   Sometimes I want to be famous once more, and then I think about    the paparazzi.   I value my solitude. But I fear I am dead while alive.   Forgetting is a kind of blessing: It would [           ].   To avoid living, worry about all you've forgotten.   Then worry about what you will forget.   I have lived long enough to want to do it over.   When I miss my daughter, it's as a kind of idea. Then she comes to    me unexpectedly:             in her corduroy red parka, hair sticking out,             smiling at the geese, eating her shoelaces,             pointing, crying, More!   When I saw the movie, in the dark center of winter, I thought:   The son wasn't trying to say goodbye to his dying father. He was    trying to say forever.   Alone so much, I think about the people whose stories I learn in    books.   Often I think of the grandmother of one of Picasso's lovers. Her     granddaughter   did not understand why she went so often to the graves of her     children and husband.   Just wait, her grandmother said. You will see.   No, what she said is there comes a time when, past your moment,   you live for external things: the sky, a piece of grass, a smell.   A painting, I would say. A painting where the colors are       everything.      Copyright © 2013 by Meghan O'Rourke. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem "'Demeter in Paris' began, as many poems do, while I was avoiding writing something else. (In this case, it was an essay on the idea of '40' for my British publisher.)  Some of the lines started as a meditation on being in the middle of one's life, but then something else took over. I began to think about an archetypal mother, who is at the mythical heart of our seasons, our ideas about how time passes, who also spends a lot of time alone. What does that solitude do to her sense of self? I wanted us to see her as more than a mother, or other than one. And lately I have been interested in poems that reflect a mind thinking and experiencing the world through representation, as this one does."   --Meghan O'Rourke July 30, 2013 Meghan O'Rourke's second and most recent book of poems is Once (W. W. Norton, 2013). She is also the author of a memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011). O'Rourke lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit: Sarah Shatz Most Recent Book by O'Rourke Once  (W. W. Norton, 2013)   Related Poems Looking Back in My Eighty-First Year by Maxine Kumin Day of Grief by Gerald Stern Almost Sixty by Jim Moore 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. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.         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.

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