Sort of Coping
Why is anyone in the world so terrible. Real catastrophe
and catastrophizing. If we only knew when it was going to
happen.
I saw you put your hands on the floor. Intimacy without
disturbances.
The scope here of memorization, planets. The history of children
sitting still. You are so cute in all your facebook photos.
When you moved to Portland I forgot we used to call you
Tumbleweed Tex. All those barking dogs, feathered hair.
We have something in common I never mention. I wish
I’d written it down and folded it into one of your piles
saying I want to read every one of these books! Do you think
you’ll have read them all before the end of time. Did you go in
to see her when she was dead. Maybe you already knew.
Copyright © 2015 by Farrah Field. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 5, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Sort of Coping’ came out of a writing assignment Kate Schapira, poet and author of The Soft Place, assigned to our audience at Berl’s, a poetry-only bookstore in Brooklyn that I co-run with my partner, poet Jared White. I was trying to compose a letter to Uriah Heep, David Copperfield’s antagonist, perhaps trying to address his terribleness, yet realizing what we have in common is loss.”
—Farrah Field
Farrah Field
Farrah Field is the author of Wolf and Pilot (Four Way Books, 2011). She lives in Brooklyn where she is also the coowner of Berl’s Poetry Shop.