Euthymia

(March 2023. Written mostly at home but inspired by my time in late February in San Francisco. I spent a lovely week hanging with my wonderful friends Mackenzie and Quintin at their place in the Castro. The seeds for this poem were sown on a very average rainy day driving back across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley.)

Euthymia (for Quintin n Mackenzie)

I try again and again to write you this poem and fail.
When beaten paths fade, dead end, leave you the same lost twice, it’s time
To turn, to look in the face of a fresh new notebook page and speak,
To carve dark raw echoes across pathless white blank—
(In the phenomenological texture of this poem, gray squiggles of graphite
almost flat on the lightly ridged papery paper Mac bought for my birthday).

I want to share something beautiful with you (warp water into words and well-wishes,
condense the fog over our little piece of the bay into something cool and life-giving
like a redwood) because you have shared your beauty with me.

Maybe humans have a sort of responsibility to beautiful things—
A responsibility to observe, for in observation we participate in what we both become,
A responsibility to reflect, for in my mirroring your beauty back to you we double it,
A responsibility to refract, for this discoball self of mind is Indra’s diamond,
and when faced with the light from the glance of your eyes I deflect & diffuse
a thousand new faces of conscious illusions, wonderful hallucinations of chance—
a prism of water christened by the dazzle of grace.

The windshield wipers of my mind wash away the poetic wax & we’re back in your car,
A perfectly normal gray day in the Bay, rainy traffic driving slow
Home across the Bay Bridge, not particularly happy or sad or any sharp qualia
But content, silent, satisfied to be slowly surrounded by fog together,
And I think I no longer wish to romanticize mental illness— rather
I’ll romanticize whatever this warm gray dream is— euthymia—
Three brilliant people with everything to say and no need to,
Three raindrops on glass quietly collide, slide along together, effortless.