A Nearly Perfect Morning by Jessica Greenbaum

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 1, 2015   A Nearly Perfect Morning   Jessica Greenbaum

It was a nearly perfect morning—bucolic, pastoral— so I found myself cataloguing my past humiliations. Really, there was no reason for it! I might as well have looked for an ant hill to lie down on in a meadow of goldenrod. I can’t explain it but perhaps I thought that with the rising sun as my witness, with the catbirds crows, and whizzing hummingbirds my soundtrack that I could ameliorate them, neutralize their charges against me by holding them up to the woods now in wait for the light to balance on their individual leaves, on the absorbing vastness of my fortune. The concentric rings of the spider web have the wiry shine of guitar strings there’s been so little wind it seems the trees have not yet shook themselves awake, but we are moving around this light at such a pace that by now the sun is nested in the crook of two thin branches that could not hold anything else. I was barely up to the third count against my integrity when the whole lake turned white but I decided it was not aghast, just trying to erase.            Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Greenbaum. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “It’s funny what good fortune does in the wrong mind! I mean, I try to catch myself when I’m giving my own good luck short shrift. The poem falls in that category of my preoccupation in poems (and not in poems) with the relativity of sorrow, and how to find a place for it. I’m thinking of the stellar, oft-cited poem by Jack Gilbert, ‘A Brief for the Defense,’ in which (to be crassly reductive) he talks about the need to genuinely praise delight so that the depth of real suffering has its own integrity. How does the luxury of serene beauty—a commodity so out of reach for so many—sometimes serve as a backdrop for our self-destructive, fortune-destructive tendencies? And how can we manipulate that? How can we interpret our contextual surroundings in order to best respect the richness of what we have in the world and in ourselves? And then, how to complain?” —Jessica Greenbaum   Jessica Greenbaum is the author of The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012). She teaches inside and outside academia, most recently through Brooklyn Poets and the World Trade Center Health Program for first responders at New York University’s medical center.   Photo credit: Leslie Jean-Bart Poetry by Greenbaum   The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012) "[Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling]" by Matthew Siegel "Ponderable" by Lyn Hejinian "Your Brain Is Yours" by Natalie Lyalin 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