Status Updates From I Went Looking For You

"I'm afraid of so much desire—
desire makes distinctions—
gold's in everything,
I'm in love with just you.

At the moment of death
is there a letting go
or is the desire so great
for everything."

What a closing for the poem titled, "An Edge of Gold." Wow.

“Decades before my father’s blindness
you wrote about looking
at the blind man on the subway: He knows
where he is going, it is nowhere, it is filled
with presences. He says “I am.’” (41)

Pleasantly surprised at how so many of Ruth Lepson’s poems are like pebbles rippling a serene lake surface. I feel a difference after reading her words like there’s some new part of my vision becoming unlocked…

“it turns out these feelings
really had nothing to do with you
they go and come
I miss you only in the way
I miss a stain —

it’s about the same amount of pain
still there are variations on the theme
I’ve grown but my heart and brain
have fixtures that remain the same
I make my life with the things I can name” (25).