I would rather be

10-minute free write with the Soul Writing group

I would rather be a poet. Oh yes. Or a painter. Gathering the world into the basket of my heart, my vision, preparing the ingredients in a thousand tasty ways.

I’m reading a book whose current narrator is a well known 19th-century painter. I’m taken with how taken he is with wherever he stands, or sits, or lies, or drives a wagon through. How he’s formed relationships with dragonflies that he fears his wife may see as infidelity. How he gets pulled away from the topics of letters he’s writing by mounds of white snow that remind him of the Venus he once saw hanging in an Italian gallery.

Would that I were so enchanted.

I am, actually - that much is true. It’s just that I haven’t quite figured out - in words, images, or any other way - how to render it to my own satisfaction, to a measure equal to this heart’s longing.

I don’t know whose voice this is. It feels like almost mine. Hovering just above it, just at its edges, like a dragonfly temptress.

I am working on a poem actually: one that describes the events contained in a single moment of surprise and delight, as well as those leading up to it. It feels important to get it just right: this stack of words that doesn’t matter at all. I’m taken with how much time I’m spending with it, how often I revisit it. How unrushed I feel, unspooling time this way, cataloging how each of the senses occupied each micro-moment of an otherwise forgettable scene.

I don’t know whose voice this is.

Pan out to the rest of life: the larger longings, the boulders and fences and hurdles thrown and erected across the threshold of yesterday’s solstice. How today I feel bruised and dazed and I hear the kind applause celebrating the fact that I have survived, even if it seems I’ve gotten nowhere.

Whose voice?

I’d rather be a poet. To speak, like now, from deep inside.