Even people who hate poetry should read this one.

Particularly if you are middle-aged (or that age that we call middle age but it really more like 65% age.)

On Wednesdays I do one of two things (I’m pro-choice,) I write about writing or I share writing that I have written that is “real writing.” Write on. (x6)

I don’t know how many people poke their fingers to the bruise of their minds. First tenderly then harder and harder until they know whether today is a day where they will rebound and proceed ably or will walk through the next handful of hours with skin inside out.

I have a few tests. If I wake up to chirping birds I listen for a minute. Are the birds greeting the day? Or are they babies abandoned in a nest? When the cat steps on my bladder do I want to pet her squished head or push her off of the bed? (I said want to…I can’t push her she is too clumsy, she will hit the floor with a thud rather than the compression of spring-y feet.)

I tune into neutral people to judge my mood. Is the person behind me inline invading your space or offering the opportunity for a shared an experience. (credit to a friend’s therapist for adding this particular temperature check)

I stop and feel my breathe not to meditate but to see if it is shallow and quick or deep and steady. Usually by the time I am downstairs I know what I am in for. When I was sobbing and

I am a lazy reader of poetry. I read poetry that is prose with added line breaks. I don’t like couplets or words that are threads that can only be teased apart with a needle. This one is different though. Perhaps because it is short. Here is is (I think if I give the poet credit I can type it in here. If not I offer apologies and will remove if asked.)

Today I didn’t know it was a no-skin sort of day. I hadn’t imagined abandoned baby birds. I thought the chihuahua looked cute. But when a friend sent me the following poem, “I call them back to me” by Maggie Smith published in The Bitter Southerner. I fucking lost it. Sobbing and choking.

I call them back to me —

flimsy selves of the past,
some vellum-thin, clearly

unfinished. Not fleshed out,
not fully — only children

really, stopped in time, still
tottering about in their

mother’s high heels,
meaning mine?

I didn’t know them,
their little plots forgotten

just as they began
to rise. I didn’t know

what any of them,
any of us, would become

in the end, which is not yet
where we are.

I call them back.
I’m ready, I tell them.

I think I know now
where we’re going, all of us,

together. I think I know
where the story is going.

Come back, come back,
I can finish it.

I have read the line “tottering about in their mother’s heels, meaning mine?” as the writer being the mother of the unfinished selves. “Not fleshed out, not fully — only children” I have taken to mean that the subject of the poem is children that a mother is calling back. I am at the age when children leave. With their stories. The ones I began with them but are now theirs alone. If I hold on to their vellum too tightly they will tear.

Part of a model of the cover for “You Could Make Yourself Beautiful” Maggie Smith

If you are like me you have people with unfinished plots, that were never yours to write even if you thought they were. Even if you hoped they were.

My friend who shared the poem reads it as a call to “embrace our own flimsy selves.” I believe Maggie Smith might have written it that way. Sometimes IG comments are as difficult to parse as the poems themselves but see what you think:

@maggiesmithpoet on Instagram

This friend writes close fiction and has the capacity to offer her fictionalized younger self grace and understanding. Her challenge, of course, is to exercise that capacity.

On a day that isn’t today I might have experienced the poem as an invitation to gather these “flimsy selves of the past” offering the possibility to integrate versions of me, to forgive them, to set aside regret, to “finish it.” In my today I am crying about children who will leave, who in some ways were “stopped in time tottering” I experience it as future loss, pre-nostalgia, beauty with a shadow of pain.

I think about the children who will never leave, pain with a shadow of beauty, for parents they can never say “I think I know where this story is going.” And how, like everything everything it can be any of us.

In writing class yesterday the instructor shared a piece by Leslie Jamison a portion of which follows:

I’d spent most of my life writing fiction, and it took me a while to accept that even in nonfiction I was still constructing characters — myself included. I began to see how I might owe myself the same things I owed my fictive characters: complexity, interior conflict, strengths and flaws caught in tense tandem. I couldn’t simply dump my worst parts into the narrative and call it due diligence. I couldn’t be all guilt, all selfishness, all disdain — even if these were the parts of myself I wrote most naturally. I was gravitating toward a certain disburdenment, but in this unloading I was also making myself too simple. I realized I’d been conducting a kind of test: Could I still engage and charm, even if I was nothing but an assemblage of my own worst parts?

It felt, like a classmate said, just like the problem I have with writing memoir. I take my damaged dangling plots, my regrets, my endless insecurities and stir them without adding in my insights, and strengths and victories. In memoir or in life I need to call them all back, the villains, the guilt-ridden, the coward, and recall them then.

My Wednesday posts are about writing but it isn’t just writers who can do this. Gather pieces of themselves flimsy from the past or strong in the possible future. Or, as today’s tears tell me, silently say to the children who are leaving or have left or will never leave “I think I know where this story is going.”

Even if it ends with a memoir in a drawer.

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How do you read it? Self? Children? Something else entirely?