I have been reading poetry in the morning. My blood pressure spiked at the doctors last week. Then it was high for a couple days in a row. It’s back down this morning. I hate thinking so much about this. It feels like an unhealthy preoccupation with my own stuff. Like the invalid who is constantly taking his own temperature.
On the other hand, I want to be grown up about taking care of my body so that when I die it’s not entirely because of my own long range stupidity about how I lived.
I think I have found a new poet to read. A few posts back I put up a poem by Demetria Martinez. I inter library loaned her book Breathing Between the Lines.
I have read this book and was so impressed I ordered a copy from the Paperback Swap (a web site where you mail other people books you have made available and they will mail you books they have that you want, all free of charge expect senders cover postage).
I also found her novel, Mother Tongue, on the site and ordered it.
She has written several more books and I will probably pursue reading them.
I was amused to read the following passage in her afterword in Breathing Between the Lines:
I made it a habit to go to a restaurant or outdoor cafe and read first thing in the morning. I opened a book of poetry at random, waited for the caffeine to strike and for a stanza to reveal some secret of the universe. It always did, in imagery that was a far cry from the supply and demand which I had tried learning at Princeton.
My kind of writer. And reader.