Writing Space
I am perched on the second floor of a small branch library in a suburb of Chicago. I
feel like a bird flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden
tables, scratching notes under my own corner patch of sky. I am 15-years-old.
I am sitting in the back of a tiny coffee shop in west Philadelphia. I feel like I have been walking through Paris with Vallejo, walking through Manhattan with Lorca. I write down what they might have said to me. My deepest desire is to join the world of poets, who mean everything to me. I am 25-years-old.
I am sitting in a fast-food joint on Nine Mile Road in Detroit. I
have been following a bag lady through the streets of the city and
thinking about John Clare’s long walk home from a mental hospital. I feel as if I have been lost in the heart of the country. I am 35-years old.
I am sitting at a heavy wooden desk in my second-floor study in our house in Houston. It’s the middle of the night. How many years, how many decades have I passed at this desk, brooding about poetry? The books surround me. I am 45-years-old.
I am sitting in a corner of the town square and letting the ancient city move through me. I sip a cup of coffee, write a little, and watch an old woman sweeping the stairs. I am sentenced to a lifetime of making lines and sentences. This is my doom and my joy. I am 55-years-old.
Edward Hirsch
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