← The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
1243: Waiting for the Annular Eclipse by Rhoni Blankenhorn
00:05:51
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Once upon a time, Amazon Music met audiobooks, and listeners everywhere rejoiced. Oh yeah, because now they could listen to one audiobook title a month from an enormous library of popular audiobook titles, including Romantasy, Autobiographies, True Crime, and more. Suddenly, listeners didn't mind sitting in traffic or even missing their flight. Amazon Music Unlimited now includes Audible Download, the Amazon Music app. Now to start Listening Terms apply What's up? It's major. Today's episode is hosted by poet and Slowdown producer Micah Keelbaun. Don't worry, I'll be back on November 25th.
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I'm Micah Kielbaun, and this is the Slow Rock bottom is a funny place. I'm not sure that it's real yet. It's also a place I've been to. If anyone has been there, then I suppose we all end up in our own rock bottom at some point. The summer I turned 21, I was sleeping in late. Most days I would hear of something my friends had been up to only after it happened and feel left out. I spent a hell of a lot of time talking on the phone with some guy 1400 miles away in Austin whom I poured my ennui into. I went to the campus print shop every day to putz around on the unguided summer research project. I had finagled funding for a letterpress printed pamphlet of poems. I had bitten off way more than I could chew and was stewing in self doubt. It was my last summer before my senior year of college. I had just returned from a semester abroad in Korea and Los Angeles was hot and dry and lonely. The nights were heavy and dark and endless. I felt like I was always in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, doing not enough. I got through it. It took finding purpose. And then I thought that I would never feel that way again. I thought that I knew what purpose was and that I wouldn't lose it. I thought I knew that my brain works better when I get up early and answer all of my text messages, when I do things with my hands and set up scenarios to get all my friends together, when I allow myself melancholy and exploration, when I let fun and love in. But maybe I was giving myself too much credit to control my own experience of the world. Life, as beautiful as it is, is also rather disturbing. It is vivid and grotesque, loud and uncontrollable. Change is literally disturbing. Aside from being inevitable, the one sure thing they say, the truth about nothing ever ending, nothing ever being final, is that things will be the same again too, just not all at the same time. In the same way you'll find a new rock bottom and a new way out. Today's poem sees the darkness and the light in the world, the absurd and the gentle. It sees opening and closing. It learns by waiting, by witnessing, waiting for the annular eclipse. By Ronnie Blankenhorn it does seem as though the quality of light is changing sun like a lidded eye, Astroturf casting shadows on itself. My lover sleeps inside. I hear him breathing in my mind. Down the street someone is building a house with what sounds like a single goddamn hammer. More and more I worry my attention will not hold. One is not supposed to look directly at a cosmic event. Of course I look. We're all drawn to doing what we're not supposed to. Last night we walked the downtown, past an alley stuck with gum, a filthy corridor half lit like the beginning of a music video from the 90s. There's something apocalyptic about how tourists build attractions. Because I'm expected to contribute, I do not. Instead, I touch novelty candy shaped like lunch meat. My lover buys Turkish delights now he sleeps inside. Now dogs bark as the light changes. I wait, and I wait for nothing to come to full conclusion. Wait, I mean. Occlusion. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. Find us on Instagram at slowdownshow.
- [06:22]
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