I have been reading novels, which affects my state of mind, makes me dreamy and distracted, foggy-headed, and full of the conflicts in their plots. Or maybe the weather is what does it–too much lovely late autumn sun and not enough rain, which feels “off” for our region; and once the rain finally arrives, it is a dour and chilly dousing I have to convince myself to feel grateful for. Likely the news cycle has not helped my mood. My nine-year-old self emerges from a distant past, crying, “People are so mean!” My parents can no longer sit down beside me and offer comfort.

Time to switch to the poets. I’m finally getting around to reading Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, a collection that’s been on my to-read list for far too long. The very first poem, “The Bull,” startled me into reading it twice. “I reached–not the bull–/but the depths. Not an answer but/an entrance the shape of/an animal. Like me.” Enough to jolt me out of my fiction-induced haze, especially on a day like this one when I feel the anxious dreamy child in me more than I wish. The prose poems later in the book intrigue me, as well: a very different prose than is found in most novels.

~

“People are so mean!” –I said that often when I was a child. People were mean to me and mean to each other. The news was full of warfare and protest. Grownups were mean, kids were mean, teachers were mean. I had a few complaints, but I also possessed the clueless narcissism of a child. Needless to say, I was not one of those precocious, old-soul children I sometimes read about in books. My siblings could have pointed out a few examples of my own meanness. And I was too much of a coward to stand up for others who bore even more teasing than I did, or to advocate forcefully to right wrongs. As a result, I always feared that my life has been rife with sins of omission.

I wrote the following poem two years ago. I must have been in a similar frame of mind.

~

In Which I Give Myself a Scolding Concerning Compassion

While pruning the quince with its
	twisted thorny syntax of greenwood
	I reflect on errors, mine,
	in the arena of compassion—
the quality and behavior I value most
	and in which I am deficient.

Empathy I’ve got, but compassion requires
	motivating force toward good
	and needs, in my case, practice.
I haven’t practiced enough. I feel the prick
	of quince or conscience through
	my gloves damp from autumn drizzle, 
disentangle stems’ inventive turns, toss cuttings
	on the ground. I disappoint myself.

Perhaps meditation would avail, yet
	I’m incompetent at meditation
	though my friend in her monastery
	by the frigid bay once told me
everyone is bad at meditation for the first
	ten years or so.

Lopping off twigs and branches I imagine
	her sitting on her cushion while
	icebergs converge in saltwater cove
	a wash of pale gray during the short-day
months while she practices one kind of compassion.

My friend who always stops to help a stranger
	change a tire or rescues a loose dog
	from the side of a highway practices 
another form of compassion.

I lack it—that immediate impulse of outreaching,
	kindness. It strikes me as a flaw, the log
	in my own eye it took me years to see.
	So when the late-season mosquito
lands on my forearm to sup perhaps its last
	nourishment, I refrain from flattening it—

a microscopic act of compassion in a world so needy,
	but perhaps a start.
~