Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

There’s an abundance I experience at the Farmer’s Market, in my Saturday shopping ritual, that makes me think of sacred gardens.

I typically gather my reusable bags and make my way to the market closer to lunch time, so as to patronize my favorite taco truck which seems to have been dropped from heaven. While standing in a long queue, shielding my eyes from the sun, I listen to a ragtag band of musicians play covers of Bob Marley songs. Children perform handstands in front of the stage, one whose knotted hair gathers in a bunch and covers her face. A father gently bounces his sleeping baby in a sling; his partner tastes a sample of fig preserve on a gluten-free cracker and considers buying. They smile after taking another bite then kiss the baby’s forehead. Just beyond, on the outskirts, an outdoor yoga class is in session. Smells of cooked cuisines waft across the crowd.

I wolf down my carne asada and begin my hunt for the perfectly shaped cucumber, the brightest bouquet of fresh cut flowers, the smelliest artisanal cheese, the tastiest home-cooked red beans and rice, the most comfortable shirts made from the most natural fabrics. I am among the crowd who savors freshly harvested honey, those glass containers of golden amber that seem like jarred sunshine.

In this near-prelapsarian space of abundance, nothing pleases me like the sight of two people walking hand-in-hand through the crowd, slowly making their way from booth to booth. One carries a bulging tote bag of green vegetables and olive bread with a picture of Joan Didion holding a cigarette in hand, and another, a banded bouquet of sunflowers, which looks like a wand. I imagine that their shared glance over smoked salmon is a window into the quality of their connection. That their languorous indulgence of the earth’s bounty is an extension of their passion and love. How they study cartons of berries suggests life flows beneath their skin on this side of the broken world.

Today’s poem inhabits the breathlessness and press of love, that is creatively generative, that is organic in its speed and purpose, that is feverish and holy in its corporeal intensity.

from “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return”
by CAConrad

          it was
       sexy how
      you politely
     declined the
    larger halo
  ocean waves travel
 thousands of miles
never revealing the 
 source of their power
  enough poems have been
   wasted on human cruelty
    we dig hard to
      find the
       other 
        world  
 press pen with
    everything in us
       write Gate to open
             9 pages at once
                          stay open
           ignore how much
           you want to close
           I love you it must
           be said I love you
can you hear it arriving
 after countless miles
  hold my hand as we
     feel relief with the
       crashing waves

From “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” by CAConrad. Used by permission of the poet.