Mere Life-the little stuff-poetry

The poetry class turns out better than I thought it could. For one thing, Kathleen, the teacher, is the real deal: a great poet, smart, direct, unflinchingly emotional. For another, she can teach. She reads, sees the bullshit and calls it out in a gentle way. And there's the matter that I'm the only student- I'm the best damn poet in the class.
The class is for people who've published a little and want to get a book-length manuscript together. My project is called BOOM! in love; a book of love poems. The method is something like this: first I draw up a map, a story line of everything I've loved for the past twenty years or so. Then I eat some of those neon orange mushrooms that grow in Carpenter's Woods, take off all my clothes, sit in a sweat lodge and write poems about it all.
Okay, I was lying about everything after the part about the map. But the map makes sense. It points to all the emotional termite-mounds in the landscape and that's where the poems seem to be. Beats that ol' geiger-counter and metal detector method that I had been using.

Here's one of the first poems from the map. I translated it into Italian because it seemed operatic enough.

note from a libertine, dying

it was not a lack of love
and not, i swear, a love of lacking
love.
it was not a wanting of a better thing
or a eye to the future
or an ear to the past
it was
the flood of you, just you
that washed away the ground
and left me in
a kingdom made of air.

•   •

biglietto di un libertino, morendo

non è stata una mancanza di amore
e non, lo giuro io, l'amore per la mancanza di
amore.
non era un volere di una cosa migliore
o un occhio al futuro
o un orecchio al passato
è stato
il diluvio di voi, proprio voi
che spazzato via la terra
e mi ha lasciato in
un regno fatto d'aria.