10 / larkspur, gardenia, feverfew
Tenth bouquet, eleventh hour; on bread and rest and abundance 🌾
Hello. Here we are, to close May out, with a relatively short one.
Earlier this month, eel mag’s first edition went live, with my “Love Poem” nestled inside it. In the time pre- and post- said publication, I have been reading Starling submissions and answering emails and taking up punch needle embroidery, and trying to feel excited about things rather than as though I am already in trouble for them. I baked a loaf of focaccia three Fridays ago, the same day I wore the wrong shoes and wrecked my feet again.
I started putting together a version of this bouquet a while back, so long ago that I only remembered the ghost of it recently.1 It kicked off with a plug—as this one will, now—for Bolu Babalola’s A Meditation on Yearning.
I’m a big fan of Babalola, and of her Twitter account and her taste in television, and I was glad to read this instalment of her newsletter when I did. In many ways, I feel everyone should read it. I think it can be an essential balm to remember that sometimes a lack (here we go again with those damned lacks!) is actually evidence of abundance—abundance just waiting for an avenue. And that’s not just about yearning for romance, which Babalola focuses on and advocates for; I think it’s true of many things beyond that, too. What yearning I have for romantic love, personally, is embroiled as an offshoot of far more potent yearning for other things, the vast majority of them creative. But Babalola’s thoughts, here, articulated a lot for me. As she points out, there is use to yearning beyond “sweetpain” and hopelessness.
As May has progressed, I’ve also been thinking more about Springsteen, and how I wrote last month about “I’m on Fire” and “Dancing in the Dark”. I’ve been trying to put together the poem I said I was sceptical of.
Initially, I was sceptical because I didn’t think I could write something that managed to contain everything I wanted to,2 but now I think I just want to give myself—and you—a break. I watched the “Dancing in the Dark” music video and Springsteen looked so delighted and faintly dorky that I burst out laughing, infected 38 years on by the joy of it:
Shock! Horror! It can be useful to resist the impulse toward melancholy! Sure, reaching for what hurts is easy, and sure, arguably, it’s poetic, but things are fraught enough without agonising over how that manifests in whatever string of words you’re (I’m!) trying to construct to prove it. Like, we are all—without fail—going to die! LOL! And while we should honour our feelings as they come, I think we should also recognise when they needn’t.3 Especially when giddiness (and grinning Bruce) is right there!
Obviously, this doesn’t change the meaning of the song. What it does, though, is create a brighter parallel narrative: a kind of satin inversion. Just as Babalola speaks to the “true clarity of desire” (and therefore strength and direction!) we can find through interrogating what we yearn for, the “Dancing in the Dark” music video, and especially the various live performances I’ve seen since, show us a Springsteen inadvertently saying: There’s a whole world right here, and we’re together in it. And for now, even in spite, we’re going to be well. He’s found the “somewhere” wherein “something’s happening”. He’s showing us we can, too.
Maybe this has been true all along, and I’ve been too focused on the “sad” in “sad banger”. Either way, even a poem I try to write about “I’m on Fire” (easily more “sad” than “banger”, and especially so live in Paris in 1985) will have to get over itself, I think.4 Stick a piece of sherbet liquorice between its teeth and crack a private grin. For the good of us all!
As other through-lines go, Harry’s House is out, and I’m a fan of what he’s done with the place.5 Zane Lowe, New Zealand export and—in spirit—bouquet dot substack dot com devotee, brought up “Dancing on My Own” in relation to “As It Was”, essentially citing both as sad bangers. Great minds, Mr. Lowe! Great lines think a bike!
In the Babalola/Live Springsteen spirit—this concerted effort to celebrate contentedness and abundance—I have been encouraging myself to tumble into things this month: into quiet delights, into non-monetised crafting, into unglamorous Austenian walks. The latter have been the kind of 35-minutes-both-ways expeditions that start off biting cold and ruin any hope of a hairstyle, but I have seen low rolls of mist and brilliant skies, burst oranges searing so coolly. I have come home into almost-darkness, shed my work clothes and prepared a meal. I’ve put the winter duvet on my bed.
I’ve slanted into laughter and frankness and fizzing, unhinged love. Love mostly for television, I should say—sorry, gossip fans.6 (Netflix is on a good run of proving its worth at the moment, more in my corner of the viewership than others.) Though there is also love for the evolution of love; love for the kind of relationships you can have with family members now that you are both older. In particular, I’m thinking of my cousin, J, with whom I bought the far-aforementioned punch needle embroidery kit. We have a history of dissolving into gleeful shrieks when we’re together, but there’s something so wonderful about the continuity of that, of cackling at drive-thrus and sitting in the sun, when you have also watched how someone’s life has expanded in the years you’ve known them—all the years you’ve been alive—and when, now, there are lives in the world brought here by them, by theirs: children with personalities of their own, with their grins and their gumption, their grandmother’s face. And so much has changed, but the way you are hasn’t. I have been buzzing with love for and of that. And television!
I also got my pottery back, those coasters I made when H and I took an evening class. Two are absolutely misshapen and can’t sit flat, but the first one I made—the one meant to spare my desk the stains from my leaky teapot—came out perfectly. So perhaps May has been tactile, bearing some kind of tangible, analog quality, and that has laid the stillness in-and-of it. It’s been a welcome quietude: invited to stay but not bound to last.
June is looking very promising—which is to say I’ll be running around a lot and loving it. Do you ever take stock and think, okay, actually, me-of-my-previous-decade would be really quite happy with [this] and [this] and [this]?7 That’s what I’m anticipating. Junes and Julys always take me by surprise.
I’ve made two more loaves of focaccia since the one I mentioned in the beginning, each for their own evenings of ultimately-cancelled plans. As such, I’ve been eating a lot of fresh bread, experimenting with ratios and proofing time. I tend to wonder if I’ll taste the effect of waiting.
Oh, and I think I’ve cracked the Springsteen poem. Maybe. We’re just figuring out the opener now.
Take care, until next time. Take care of each other.
T
How do we feel about “bouquet”? I’m still not sold, but am also a firm bit-committer, so, y’know, two wolves.
And here I can imagine several poet-colleagues careening through the ether to say arguably no poem ever gets there—
A lot of the wes in this paragraph are secret mes. (Not grammatically.) (What I mean to say is I’m not trying to be didactic.) (Mostly I’m tryna say, “very lovingly: enough!”)
I’m aware of the potential irony of this anguished-poet situation alongside “Dancing in the Dark”’s I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book. I don’t know, really, that anyone is looking into this newsletter that deeply, but hey ho. Extra for experts.
Perhaps if Bruce—old mate Bruce!—had had more syllables, he’d have emphasised the “trying and failing” aspect of the thing. Because book-writing, though at times a slog, feels too much a privilege for me to fall in line with getting sick of it. You are producing work, and presumably have time and means to devote to that, and that’s not to be taken for granted.
What I do understand, however, is the impulse of, like, “god, I really wish I were writing more of this book right now—I wish I had a scrap of affection I could taffy-pull into screeds of devoted poetry, so I could write this book even harder.” I’m always demanding water from a dry well. (For what it’s worth, I am trying to learn to live through what my dear friend H calls “fallow times”.) Nonetheless! May we all find the fuel to write our books even harder. (Unless you’re truly sick of it, in which case, perhaps you ought not to be writing that particular book!)
Love the sensation underfoot! Harry’s carpets; Harry’s hardwood floors; Harry’s tyles—
If I were in the kind of love one is desperate to gossip about, would I tell you? How would I work it in? Whose oblique shadow would hang over some metaphor or other? Would I work in the curve of a nose? (Who knows! Who cares! Who bastank!)
Now, obviously, there are things I’m still desperately wanting, and dreaming of, and wishing for. Of course there are—have you met me?! Have you been reading along?! But even hypothetical fulfilment, by the age of 23, comes with a great many caveats. For my part, I’m glad I can still, theoretically, get away with eating odd food combos in Edinburgh parks.