A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry:
I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In between, I found Swithering by Robin Robertson and through ‘Trysts’ met him on the riverbed. Ada Limón’s ‘Crush’ cut ‘the right branch / and a sort of light / woke up underneath.’ I ached for the current between Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and the ancient liberties taken by Cavafy and Catullus. I luxuriated in the ecstatic poetry of Mirabai and mused on the grand time Jane Hirshfield and Robert Bly must have shared while making their translations. I grabbed onto Kevin Young’s shirttails for a wild ride, and I was no less than razed and rebuilt by Richard Siken’s ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’: ‘The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. / Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.’ Mary Oliver’s West Wind dazzled me with its investigation into longing, and in American Primitive I cherished Oliver’s ‘The Plum Trees,’ with its advice that ‘the only way / to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it / into the body first, like small / wild plums.’
“Finding Poetry in Illness.” — Jennifer Nix, Poetry Foundation
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