How to Live #14: The Bloom's Beauty Is Insistence | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

How to Live #14: The Bloom's Beauty Is Insistence

When I was thirteen, I had a friend named Carly

who was obsessed with pills—she took supplements, like echinacea,

obsessively, counting them out, holding them in her hand.

She liked the way the light cascaded off their slippery backs,

something like that. Carly was a beauty and smart, but one of those

who vanishes after high school, like wind over a rocky ledge.

When my niece first went into the hospital at 12, it was ideation,

a word strange to the ear. It sounds too much like possession,

or cultish reprogramming, or something you do to crops.

She sounded like herself on the phone—even sounded strong.

We had a witty chat about the merits of the gayer therapist.

But then, came the pills: 28 of them. Attempt is no better.

Worse, if I’m honest. It strangely underscores the outcome

as failure. She lives and has to go on attempting to live. Why do it,

live? The wind whistles its terror outside the window at night.

Who can’t relate to that? I answer her with this: the blooms

come back again, I’ve never seen them not do it, and they pulse

with future-hunger, same as us. Whole fences, whole hillsides,

lit with that desire to extend, that single intention. My advice

is to find an idea that distracts you beyond comprehension, one

that has no apparent outcome, and attempt it, over and over

again, like breath, like hunger. You know you can do it. Listen

to every iteration for a better answer than the last. You can make

a life of this, hold it in your hand. See how it wants to be remade again?


"The Bloom's Beauty Is Insistence" is published here with kind permission of the author. 

The ALL Review is pleased to present our How to Live series, poems chosen to help readers navigate these difficult and rapidly changing times. 

 

About the Author

Tobias Wray Wisconsin poet

An editor, reading series and festival organizer, and critic, Tobias Wray’s poems have found homes in Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Some are forthcoming in anthologies such as The Queer Nature Anthology (Autumn House Press) and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures (Seagull Books). He directs the University of Idaho's Creative Writing Programs.


April 2020

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