Mental health day

Poetry makes nothing happen—W.H. Auden

Mid-morning in a coffeeshop

full of its weekday emptiness.

It’s March and bitter cold. I wear layers,

and I have draped my coat over my

shoulders anyway. My boots are intended to be

good to minus 20, but my feet are so cold

they have probably turned purple.

Only my hands are warm, exercised by

the weekday assumption of a normally

weekend-only occupation—the writing

and rewriting of poems by hand. And

my mind is warm, steeped in memory,

poetry, and memory turning into poetry.

And all of this is carefully steered away from

the immediate prickly memory of what

pushed me to take this mental health day.

This is not upchuck poetry, not the purging

of workaday frustration. This is a detour,

a tangent, a road that takes me to an entirely

other place. It compels attention to itself,

removes me from the unpeaceful pressures

of a job that defeats commitment

and is therefore just a job.

So that when I emerge into consciousness

of time and place, I am lifted, the ragged

places smoothed to calm, and a glow

within me to defeat the bitterest chill.

If poetry makes nothing happen in the larger

world, it does make this happen, this small

individual thing, this healing.