305. We Walk By the River

Poet Joy Sullivan shares a poem from her new book, Instructions For Traveling West.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Joy Sullivan: My name is Joy Sullivan and it’s going to be okay.  This is, uh, a poem from my book, Instructions for Traveling West. And the poem is, When my friend is low, we walk by the river.  It’s somehow still a pandemic and we have nowhere to put our rage. My friend tells me how he has begun to imagine the finishing touches of his life.

He counts the things he’s lost. As he talks, I imagine tethering a silver thread from his body to mine. It’s dusk.  The geese are all headed home. Our two bright shadows grow longer. Grief is a clump of dark feathers in the grass.  The sky runs purple and petals out. We look around.  It’s almost cruel, he laughs, after everything, how the world still insists.

on being beautiful.

Yeah, I was walking with my friend and like I wrote that poem like three years ago and you know, it’s still somehow we’re dealing with uh, a pandemic and that, you know, that kind of break never happened. You know, it is something we learned to live with and um, I just remember that being such a time of intense loneliness and isolation for folks that my friend was really struggling.

Um, and then it was just It’s kind of like this little crack looking around and being like, God, life is so terrible, but look where we are. And like, how dare the world still insist, you know, on just being so gorgeous with everything going on. Like, look at that incredible sunset. Look at this beautiful evening that’s upon us.

Look at all this love that is between these two people. Sometimes there’s a kind of, uh, incredulity. That the earth and the world, um, and life still just has this incredible insistence on being beautiful. in spite of everything.

Yeah, the book, Instructions for Traveling West is literally about leaving and leaping, jumping into the magic dark and seeing what happens, and also trying to be really honest about that leap. You know, I didn’t want to suggest to my readers that you do this big leap like I did, I left my corporate job. I left my relationship.

I left my home in Ohio. I sold my house. I, I moved West all by myself to Portland, Oregon. And I wanted to tell the truth about that experience that it is both. And it’s been incredibly beautiful when you take, you really bet on yourself and you sort of throw yourself into the magic dark. But I also wanted to be honest about the grief and the complicated  Things that come with big change and big shifts and so yeah, I think throughout all my work I’m sort of oh, I’m trying to like haunt both the shadow and the light at the same time

Yes,  and just that line.  Okay. I’m gonna read a poem called when my friend is low We walk by the river and it’s from my book instructions for traveling West  that okay  Thank you