August 28th, 2024 - Jesse Millner
I found this little letter from ten years ago, August 28th, 2014. Then as now I was getting ready for a new semester, putting syllabi together, mapping out course schedules, but also thinking of ways I might really reach students in the early days of the course, when first impressions are so important, when the right words might make a difference in how someone comes to apprehend poems and poetry. The right words might make her spirit sizzle a little, that little burning that comes before she can’t stop writing poems in her notebook, on napkins in Starbucks—a spark that becomes a conflagration that burns away all the bullshit, clears the mind from the everyday worries about love, money, gods or goddesses, whether the earth is five billion years old or only 6, 000. She stops worrying about what happens when we die and for a few precious minutes sees what might happen if she lives in the now and here, if she notices the living world, the way the sun shimmers on the lake this morning, how pine and palm and mangrove flicker with speckles of light. And so, poetry becomes the path that leads to paying attention to the world in all its beauty and sorrow and cruelty. Sometimes the spirit awakes and what was can never be the same.
Life Advice to My Students:
Be nice to other creatures (including humans), don’t brag, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t speak ill of others, read Whitman every single day of your life, eat lots of greens, read Rilke every other day of your life, get lots of exercise, write down your dreams every morning, take a walk outside often, visit Yellowstone, descend the Grand Canyon, spend at least a weekend in Granada, read Garcia Lorca whenever logic overwhelms you, learn the names of all the flowers, always notice the birds, always listen to Marty Robbins while traveling through Texas, play baseball, make your dad pay you to cut the grass, believe that Elvis lives, visit South of the Border and buy some fireworks, listen to Tom Waits sparingly but intensely, get a library card as soon as you are old enough, drink tap water, eat mangoes, learn to play the violin, read Gary Snyder at daybreak, wear sandals, grow your hair long, love whales, body surf in the Pacific, ride the ferry from Victoria Island to Port Angeles, ride Space Mountain at Disney, do your homework, read Mary Oliver whenever you forget how pretty the world is-- and always, always, travel light.
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These days I am ten years older. My bones creak when I get up from my desk and I am often filled with sadness. Ten years ago, I lived with my wife in a house with a yard that featured a huge mango tree. In August, I would have been getting up early to beat the squirrels to the freshly fallen fruit. Ten years ago, pineapples grew profusely on the eastern edge of the house. There were banana trees that I’d bought the previous winter at Lowes because they were almost dead and on sale for a dollar each. Ten years ago they leaned down with green fruit. Ten years ago, the two dogs I loved were still alive. Ten years ago, I’d fall asleep each night with the woman I loved and believed I would always be with. Ten years ago, I wrote poems every morning. Ten years ago I was happy—not completely, because that’s impossible and I knew then as I know now that sorrow adds sweetness to each moment of pleasure, of delight, of recognition that we are all little flashes of light in a darkness so complete, the only way we can push back against it is to write, and to read poems by others who are also asking questions, chasing whatever meaning lives in light, in blue sky, in all phases of the moon, in the sudden alighting of an osprey from a tree branch, in the way sometimes we see the beautiful in the world around us, in the people we love, in the kindness of strangers who hand us a cup of hot coffee in the morning, or others who thank us for picking up the apples that fell from their shopping cart, or the person who simply smiled at us in the parking lot as we returned our cart to that special place carved out for the empty ones. In spite of this, sometimes I’m so lonesome I could cry as Hank Williams sang in those long ago hollows of my childhood when my whole future stretched before me with its unimaginable joys and disappointments—all of them thankfully unknowable then, but I would come to know it, to experience it all, to cry on cold nights when the snow fell hard on city streets and yards until they disappeared in a dream of white. But I have known love. I have eaten a freshly baked croissant at a café in Paris, I have kissed someone in the pouring rain, I have slept on a mountain meadow and looked up at the uncountable stars—and every day I have read poems. Each is like a distilled moment, so rich with image—the way her hand felt in mine, the way her blonde hair spilled off her pillow each morning, the way the dogs softly snored, the way the light, the beautiful fucking light—brightened the bedroom window each morning. The way, for a while, I felt beloved on this earth.
Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in Grist and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia. His work was included in The Best American Poetry 2013 and Best Small Fictions 2020. His latest poetry book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, was released in March 2020 by Hysterical Books of Tallahassee, Florida. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Estero, Florida.
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