Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith
After a reading from my new novel Never Coming Back the other night, I spoke with a woman in the audience about synesthesia, that syndrome whereby senses cross and fuse with each other. “So as someone is talking, you don’t simultaneously see the words they’re saying inside your head?” I asked the woman, and she shook her head.
“Then how do you understand them?” I asked her. “Is it just. . . sound? Sound that makes sense in your ears and translates itself into meaning?” She nodded.
Everything I say, and everything others say to me, transcribes itself instantly into words that run across the bottom of the movie screen in my mind. I can’t imagine how I would ever understand language otherwise, and the woman I was talking with couldn’t imagine how this happens for me. Our conversation reminded me of this poem by Maggie Smith, a poem that stays with me for many reasons: because I love flowers and their names, because I also love my children who can’t ever remember the names of the flowers I’ve grown in our garden their whole lives long, and because, in the end, I guess it’s the sight of them both that matters, and not the names we give them.
Goldenrod, by Maggie Smith
I’m no botanist. If you’re the color of sulfur
and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod.
You don’t care what I call you, whatever
you were born as. You don’t know your own name.
But driving near Peoria, the sky pink-orange,
the sun bobbing at the horizon, I see everything
is what it is, exactly, in spite of the words I use:
black cows, barns falling in on themselves, you.
Dear flowers born with a highway view,
forgive me if I’ve mistaken you. Goldenrod,
whatever your name is, you are with your own kind.
Look—the meadow is a mirror, full of you,
your reflection repeating. Whatever you are,
I see you, wild yellow, and I would let you name me.
For more information on Maggie Smith, please click here.
Yesterday my faithful companion and I were out for his twice-daily walk, and by “walk” I mean amble. Wander. Meander. Pete is fourteen years old now, and the boy who used to tear around the lakes for hours on end, never tiring, with me half-jogging to keep up, and who would then come home to do hot laps with the neighbor dogs in our adjoining back yard, now sways from side to side and every now and then stumbles over sidewalk heaves and steps. He breathes heavily and coughs often (heart failure), his joints are stiff (arthritis), he doesn’t notice the squirrels he used to leap after (eyes/hearing). This has happened gradually, so that I’ve had time to get used to it. Or so I thought.
Sometimes I think cruel things about other people. I don’t want to think these things and sometimes I hate myself for doing so. You say that all matters to you is being kind, I think, and that was so unkind. Sometimes I try to be Buddhist about it: Recognize. Acknowledge. Sit with it. Let it go. Sometimes I turn to one of my lifelong mantras to forestall future cruel thoughts: You don’t know what his story is, Alison, or, You don’t know what his home life is like, Alison, or, She was once somebody’s baby, you know.
Hurricanes and earthquakes and floods and the ongoing human cruelty inflicted by our elected employees against their fellow human beings. Jeez. It’s enough to make me understand (a tiny bit, anyway) why religious people start tossing around terms like “the end times.” Screw that, though. Enough good people determined to make the world better will do just that. Let us be like the whales in this strange and unforgettable poem by Albert Goldbarth, and sing to each other.
People look at me with confusion when I tell them I’m deeply wary of charismatic people, with charisma defined in the broad sense as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).” But wait, isn’t charisma charming, magnetic, powerful? Sometimes. And sometimes it’s a mask for manipulation, a bottomless need for adulation, attention, look at me look at me look at me, take care of me and do as I say because I am more important than you. Charismatic people so often go unchecked, no matter their behavior, because a) people are drawn to them by that magnetic personality and b) charismatic people often snap at anyone who calls them out on their behavior, in a vicious, malevolent and wildly cruel way. 
The other day a new friend walked into my house and stopped to look at some photos perched on a bookcase. “Is that you?” he said, pointing to one of a girl on a windsurfer. “No, that’s my daughter,” I said, admiring her, how the wind was blowing her long hair back. Then time did one of its weird pivots and I startled and sort of laugh/winced, because why had I said the girl on the windsurfer was my daughter? She wasn’t. She was me, long ago, when I was the age that my daughter is now. 
“Hi, this is Alison McGhee, patriotic citizen, calling from 55408.” Ever since the atrocity, which is my term for what went down last November, I make calls or send emails every day. I march if there’s a march. Taking action is the one thing that keeps me from sinking into a kind of paralyzed despair at both the crumbling of democracy I see all around me and the cruelty that is being encouraged and applauded. 
Alison McGhee 