I Call, You Respond

 

A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

 

Call and Response: “The Days”

The late, great Jon Anderson used poetry as a vehicle for stark (and possibly uncomfortable) self-reckoning: “My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation, and I find poems the best way to employ language to do this. My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves. I think of my poems as intimate conversations with close friends, to whom I’m not afraid to reveal my vulnerabilities and loneliness.” The poem, “The Days” comes from In Sepia, which was Anderson’s third book of poems. His poetry is spare and controlled – but movingly precise in emotion and observation.

 

The Days

All day I bear myself to such reward:
I close my eyes, I can’t sleep,
The trees are whispering flat as water.

My friends’ grayed faces
Do not alter with the weather anymore.
We sit by a stove & talk.
We suffer the terrible news.

Into a world made over & over
You rise each day,
You remember,
& something goes wrong.

God, if I had a wish, I swear
I wouldn’t know what to spend it on.

 

RESPONSE #1: by Chloe Yelena Miller

When I first read Jon Anderson’s poem, “The Days,” I thought of my poem Magari. It comes from a series, Italian Vocabulary Poems. Each poem defines an Italian vocabulary word through a scene or image. Here, a memory becomes a wish through the title. Magari is a word that doesn’t succinctly translate into English. This wish, about a beloved aunt who has died, is one that can only be partially fulfilled through memory or poetry.

 

Magari

if only: (magari) fosse vero!, if only it were true!; (magari) tornasse indietro!, if only he’d come back; even if: lo aspetterò, (magari) dovessi rimanere qui un’intera giornata, I’ll wait for him even if I have to stay here all day
– Garzanti Linguistica

 

You

by the picture window
in the worn, blue chair.

Me

on the other side of the card table,
the one with butterflies.

 

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Chloe Yelena Miller writes and teaches in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and their toddling son.