Poem

Below is a bit from the new book I picked up, To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets From Pre-Territorial Days to the Present.

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch...
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation betyween yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

-Louise Erdrich