My Body Says "Quiet"

I arrived home from the Embodied Life retreat with a very sharp pain in my mid-back. It turns out some ribs had gone awry. I've spent the last two weeks mostly lying on my back and breathing consciously. Sort of like meditating all day, interspersed with naps. Apparently something in me was not ready to return to hecticity.

While at Santa Sabina I discovered a poem that delighted me. It’s from a book of poems by Kenneth Koch called New Addresses. The poem is To My Twenties.

To My Twenties

How lucky I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman—
O woman! O my twentieth year!
Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine-or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey! And then another
And another—and water!
I’m still very impressed by you. Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?
From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X_____N_____, who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time! In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies. I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.
You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest
Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

Yes, each decade has its own charm, doesn’t it? Maybe even its own personality. My own twenties didn’t have nearly so many exclamation marks. I was married and raising two kids! (Wait, there’s an exclamation mark right there!)

I'm still pondering why this poem grabbed me as it did. Something about that twenty year old, that thirty year old, that (you get the idea) past me still operating in the present me. Plus wondering what I'd say to my twenties. Could we finally just sit down and talk?