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- [00:00]
A
Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck and the who's in Whoville were in love with new tech. Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo? They shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted when suddenly a who yelled, walmart's the place to start. And each who added headphones, TVs and games to their carts with Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry. They cried out, who knew? And ordered their gifts in a hurry. Shop the latest tech gifts in the.
- [00:29]
B
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- [01:02]
C
I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. I'm someone who likes to read a book without having read any reviews or think pieces about the book or the author. Sometimes I prefer to engage with art, to listen to a record or see a film without expectations, with a relatively clean slate. I want you to have that experience with today's poem, a longer one, so I'm going to get out of the way, listen, and let its many pleasures find you. Local Mission by Kai Carlson Wie Sometimes I wake up in the middle of a vacant thought or daytime trance brought on by the rain or the peculiar way the leaves have suddenly moved on a nearby tree, or not moved and have only seemed original, severed from the dripping walls, the billboards advertising real estate agents, waterfront seafood restaurants, bleach. And I sense a kind of presence not unlike the hum of electrical wires or the faded reflection of clouds passing over a lake, the way they are shown to themselves without eyes, without mouths to kiss or hands to hold to the wind, and I have been told that this is called leisure or pleasure or something related to the vague abstraction of youth, something I'll slowly grow out of winter by winter silence, by song, whatever repeats and remembers itself in a name. Until one day, standing on a street corner in early July, maybe the exact same street corner, looking at maple leaves catching the rain, I will see only pitty and lichen shades barely there, shadows that fall to the street, and the light will be too far away to remember, and the words will be drizzle and maple and green, and before I know it the language will not let me leave it. The traffic will pass as it always has passed, dependably rumbling west of the bridge, and my heart will be sown to this rhythm and wise. But in the wild reeds and coiled groves that line the ball fields west of Dundas, the scattered trash and dead end parks where red wing blackbirds twitter in the sun and kids hole up in plywood forts and crush a little bead against their rings, a mortar in the grinder box, a wonder at the absent sense of time. The world is still imbued with light and a feeling that each leaf, each particular grain of sand, each invisible current of wheat is lost on the structure of words, and that here on earth the truth goes on sleeping and the orbiting stars go on claiming their horror without us. Where do we go from here? Then stranger skirting the off trail, fingers of scree riding the high line through eastern Montana towns squatting the rooftops of empty construction sites, courtyards of funeral homes, sacristy basements, boxcars with shadow scenes playing on the walls, wheels and vagrancies, turnstiles of ecstasy, burdens of lights in the tumbling cars fashion my brain to those rattlebag versions, those strange combinations of fever and pitch. I'll trade you the rest of my life to believe it. The wheat and the thresher, the deer in the ditch The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram @downdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org Maggie here, host of the Slowdown Listening to and reading poetry helps us find our footing in an uncertain world, especially during challenging times. You can help keep these moments of poetry and reflection going by making a gift today. Visit slowdownshow.org donate.