Last high-summer, I was writing poems like this:

I’m still writing poems like this. If by “like this,” I mean: in rivers; as an act of sanity; when I’m sad.

I’m also writing poems with this August that I would not have imagined ever coming from me. I’m in the midst of a hot season that feels, for the first time (ever?), luxurious.

Not that it’s always pleasant, precisely. I don’t like heat, or large spiders indoors, or the necessary evil of air conditioning, any more than I used to.

There’s something new in the relationship, though. A slowness, a sensuousness, an easing, that I think everybody else in the poem-speaking world discovered a long time ago. It shows in the imagery, the subject matter I have access to this time of year, for the first time:

All of my poems are love poems. Poetry is an act of love because it’s an act of attention. But I’ve never been a writer of what I, at least, think of when someone says “love poetry.” It feels…I’ll go ahead and be imprecise-but-accurate here: it feels weird to be approaching that now. Certainly to share it like this, which is absolutely one reason I’m doing that.

I was on Whidbey Island recently, where I picked up a poem collection by a local author, called You Can Teach an Old Bitch New Tricks. I’m not an old bitch, not yet, but new tricks? I kind of thought I was running out of them. I mean, I didn’t think that in so many words, but I’ve spent plenty of the last couple of years acting like I thought it was true. This despite significant evidence to the contrary.

In the way that I learn things, this understanding has been accumulating on a cadence slower than dailiness or thought, until finally it was big or wild or just pushy enough that I had to attend to it. It turns out I’m not always the person I thought I was, and that’s not always a bad thing.

I think we could safely call this, in the parlance of our popular culture, a “mid-life crisis.” I’m 40, after all. But I don’t experience the ways that I’m changing (or realizing, or growing-into) as a crisis. A cracking, an opening, an ocean-deep shift — okay, those do sound pretty intense. And, yes, on the whole, this is intense: this wild becoming.

Also, sometimes it’s just the desire to write a love poem to a human now and again.