Sun Chair

Things besides
Aladdin's and
the golden cave
fish's lamps
grant wishes.
In fact,
most lamps
aren't lamp-
shaped and
happen by
accident: an
ordinary knob
goes lambent
as you twist
or a cloth turns
to silver mesh
against a dish --
something 
so odd and
filled with promise
for a minute
that you spend
your only wish
wishing someone else
could see it.


Rubbing Lamps, by Kay Ryan


Not doing much besides sitting in this small room over the last five days has been reminiscent of March 2020 when everything first shut down. Time expanded in a curious way I could only compare to childhood. I read many, many books when young and could lose myself in them so completely it was as if the world they created only faded away gradually, sometimes long after I had closed the cover and gone on with my day. It’s a feeling I have probably chased to some extent for the rest of my life, partially explaining why I didn’t “buckle down” in college or even long afterwards, and still struggle with even now as an “adult.” Probably I work with children just so I can get a peek into that warped sense of time and space where imagination and the “real world” are still wrestling with each other. Staring out this window across the marsh, watching a light snow begin to blow all around the air, having just finished an excellent audio recording of Watership Down (one of my favorite stories of all time), I’m having that same sluggish feeling I used to get as child; not just a sadness that Hazel has gone off with El-ahrairah, or that the story is over, but that perhaps it was never real to begin with. Perhaps the story where I am waking up early in the morning and heading off to navigate a host of responsibilities in order to earn money so I can afford to keep eating is more real, even though it doesn’t feel that way at the moment. For me, having the time and mental space to sit quietly and feel these two truths wrestle with each other illuminates how much we ask children to let go of as they grow up. I certainly don’t blame them for kicking and screaming about it sometimes. I admire them for it.