Like the Skin of a Tightening Fist

April is National Poetry Month--I believe it's also National Autism Awareness Month, but seriously, who can keep track of all of the groups that have appropriated months as their own? The Academy of American Poets website (poets.org) is one of my favorite poetry resources, and every April they offer a poem-a-day email. This year they've decided to extend the poem-a-day email into May.

I have to be honest here, I don't always read the poems. Sometimes they're too long and I don't have the patience. Other times I just don't like the way they look on the digital "page." In that way, poems are like people, and there are some you just don't feel like getting to know better (though the reasons may seem fickle).

Today's poem was nicely arranged in brief couplets and had an intriguing title, "Ignatz Oasis" by Monica Youn. I'm not sure what the title means, but I imagined that Ignatz is a person whom the poet considers her oasis. Here are the first two couplets:

When you have left me
the sky drains of color

like the skin
of a tightening fist.

The language is simple, the comparison direct and powerful. I love the poet's observation of the phenomenon of the way knuckles turn white when you make a fist, and the comparison to the poet herself after her lover(?) has left.

Haven't you felt that way before when someone you love leaves? In the case of this poem, the person in question seems to have just left the bed, but it serves to underscore even more the desperate, heart-clenched feeling we can sometimes have when the person we love does something as simple as going into another room or leaving for work in the morning.

In a strange way, I love this feeling. It's a pause in the story that is responsible for keeping the story going. It's an absence that heralds a reappearance. It's how I felt this morning when, after being woken by my cat's attempts to use my head as her pillow, I realized that my husband had left for work already and I was alone.