Ink and shadows share a common ancestry

I think poetry is an act of translation.

I thought about this after choking on my high school French as I engaged with the owner of this tiny sweet crepe and coffee shop I recently discovered in my neighborhood, one of the many businesses that have sprung up in the pandemic like mushrooms after the rain. Something about tasting the nuances of our different native languages as we wove them together strikes me as a particularly naked experience - ripples of pink embarrassment when I run out of knowledge, admittance of dreams deferred by reality, to explore and be explored by an encounter with foreign landscapes. Would I even recognize myself on the streets of Paris? What parts of myself would be revealed to me when removed from my context? Am I attracted to his foreign-ness or his openness in the face of it, the way the angle of the sun makes his brown eyes look like gold or amber, or maybe that he is about to hand me something delicious?

Poetry exists in the aftermath of the exchange, as much as it did in the experience of it. The residue of noticing the fleeting shadows and transitions, minute shifts in our perception that hold their own effervescent gravity, where the words used to mark them become pregnant with meaning before being washed away by the next rhythm of needs and realities asking us to respond.

Time has been expanding lately

Watching the guy across from me on the subway as he watches everyone around us, considering small details and interactions, I can't help but wonder if he isn't some invisible celebrity, like a renowned particle physicist who's face we are unfamiliar with. His innocuous clothing, smart hiking shoes and full, clean backpack with a little bottle of antibacterial soap hanging from its pocket made me think of an adjunct professor, maybe attached to Columbia or something. I notice this idea in my head of how a physicist behaves, constantly observing the world around them, seeing quantum mechanics manifesting in the inane conversations going on around us, in the contents and rustling of grocery bags, the timing of laughter and the ratios of bodies sitting to standing and how they inherently affect each other by the vacuums they create. I imagine my movement teacher as seeing the world in similar all encompassing refractions of information, the sway of someone's hips, small axis' of everyone's movements, forces rippling up through spines from one footfall to the next, information like a flood.

All of a sudden I wonder what I notice. I had a teacher in college who had us draw from memory regularly, to remind us that we think we know what everything looks like, until you actually pause and look at it. What an interesting thing to know about myself, that I've never considered - what do I notice as I move through the world?

The physicist across from me looks to see what I am looking at, I think we both know we are observing each other at this point. Being observed also makes me hyper aware of my physical expression, it's hard for me to know if I am performing a little as I take in the sense of what I am presenting. Dirt marks from work wrap around my legs and my big beat up jacket with the steel shop I used to work for embroidered on it communicate some kind of history, one that I imagine seems unrelated to my pale skin and heart shaped face with sharp librarian glasses and large blue eyes. I love being dirty on the subway, an unintentional dissonance, my desire to break all of the rules and prove everyone's ideas about the shape of the world wrong - I often watch people size me up, or glance at my face, then the steel shop name and my face again, trying to figure a story that makes sense to them.

I watch a red and blue pill roll around on the floor under his foot as he watches me.