8 Beautiful Things (About this Last Year) | Matt Mason
The way you used your car so little, the battery became a stone
that couldn’t spark even a speck in the overhead when
you opened the door, couldn’t make so much as a click
when you went to unlock the other doors with the switch.
The way you woke up
at 5am most mornings,
fully awake,
hoping there was good news.
The way, when the tree fell,
you cut a picnic
area from the emptiness
it cleared in your yard,
placed trunks and the widest
logs as stools, set yourself
there on summer afternoons
with a notebook and a cup of tea.
The way
cauliflower
is so surprising.
The way the dog smiles. The way he moves, room to room in the day:
to Sophia in Algebra class, to Lucia in Social Studies, you
in a flurry of emails and spreadsheets at the kitchen table,
your wife wrapping up teaching Composition to seventeen black squares on a computer screen; you, ma’am, he says knowingly, need to get outside,
take a walk.
The way of these cookies,
the recipe Lucia has been working
to get perfect.
The way there is at last a truce between days:
where Monday is essentially just one more Thursday,
Sunday another sort of Wednesday, the autonomy
of Tuesday’s declaration that it
is whatever it wishes to be.
The way of everything
you never imagined
you could miss
so much.
about the author:
Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found in Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and in hundreds of other publications. Mason’s 5th book, Rock Stars, was published by Button Poetry in 2023. Find more at: https://matt.midverse.com/