You can listen to this poem, or read it below. Or both. You do you!
Things I Love
I love a little mug.
I love any type of vest.
I love a question I can answer.
I love a small pot of honey-sweetened yogurt.
I love a bird’s name.
I love the right word in the right place.
I love a well-broken line.
I love small logs.
I love big novels.
I love new socks.
I love a fresh tablecloth.
I love two colors of sky, combining.
I love hot bacon.
I love outdoor conversations.
I love when someone’s hair is a little messier than usual.
I love a table full of candles.
I love pouring candles.
I love a candle snuffer.
I love a letter opener.
I love an eyeglasses repair kit (tiny screwdriver).
I love the library (new fiction).
I love the post office (stamp choices, sending packages).
I love the town hall (voting, concerts).
I love when people wave when they drive by.
I love a bicycle bell.
I love a doorbell.
I love a simple spell for joy.
I love a field-found quartz.
I love a roll of quarters.
I love the acknowledgements section of a book.
I love when time goes by slowly in the morning.
I love very strong coffee with very fresh milk.
I love cheese.
I love cheese so much it's hard to convey.
I love trying to convey the ineffable.
I love my strong feelings.
I love the rare moment of feeling detached.
I love it when the bathroom is clean.
I love wildflowers.
I love wild outfits.
I love wearing red lipstick.
I love it when I remember that I’m still young.
I love not being a teenager anymore.
I love my teenage self, and her journal entries.
I love changing, even thought it's painful.
I love learning new ways to feel calm.
I love the calm a snowstorm brings.
I love bringing snacks with me everywhere I go.
I love going places.
I love a hat.
I love wearing my friends’ old clothes.
I love knowing where I’ll be when the day ends.
I love that contented feeling at the end of a good book.
I love that opened-up feeling after a hip stretch.
I love pouring red wine.
I love when everyone in my family is wearing the same color.
I love singing, loudly.
I love song lyrics.
I love a baby's soft head.
I love a hunk of fresh bread.
I love it when the wild strawberries come.
I love it when a poem comes.
I love it when the poems won’t stop coming.
I love digging potatoes.
I love pulling carrots.
I love pulling tarot cards.
I love writing long emails.
I love knowing people for a long time.
I love meeting new people.
I love laughing.
I love the last light on the mountains.
I love the long light in spring.
This list poem above is not finished. I could write this poem forever, and I will. There’s a lot to love, and I don’t even mention people in this poem! (If you feel so inclined, please respond to this email with a few things that you love. I’d love to read that.)
I decided to hit pause on this poem at a spring moment so I could send it to you. I have been wanting to write/send a newsletter for weeks, but sometimes the selfhood required is hard to muster. Shit’s been dense over here. As my friend Ellie says, It’s hard being a human!
But now: the astrological year has ended, spring has arrived, and I am currently wearing an outrageously fancy hat and adult pigtails as I write this. The winter of our discontent is over. I hereby acknowledge that life has not been a cakewalk, but I am here and hatted and open to what shall come. Onward into the (warm season) magic.
Local friends! I have a poetry reading this Saturday!! You should come! You might cry little tears, you might meet a new friend, you might treat yourself to a maple creamee, and you’ll definitely learn something about the inner workings of my heart. The deets:
Farmer Poets’ Night
When: Saturday, April 1, at 7 pm
Where: Silloway Sugarhouse, Randolph Center, VT
What: Poetry readings by poets Taylor Mardis Katz and Corey D. Cook
Why: Because there is nothing like hearing poems live to make you feel alive. Because you will be enveloped in maple steam the whole time. And because Silloway maple desserts will be available!
I’ve been reading a lot of books! Here are some recent ones photographed on my blue couch:
I got to Wanda Coleman because Terrance Hayes was inspired by her sonnets and I was inspired by Terrance Hayes’ sonnets. So far, I love Terrance’s more than Wanda’s.
I pulled out The Mender’s Companion to fix a pair of Linden’s sweatpants. They are navy blue joggers he’s been wearing since he was like two, and now they have a cute green patch on one knee. Mending takes a lot of time! Mending is an act of love!
I generally read Emma Straub’s novels when they come out. This Time Tomorrow was very fun. It’s kind of about time travel, but actually more about love and aging and what sort of control we have over the paths our lives take. It made me really want to time-travel back to high school and blow everyone’s socks off with my utter confidence and badassery (gained from living many years past high school and understanding how little we all knew, how scared we all were, how desperately we all wanted similar things).
I am enjoying Going Up the Country—I mean, check out that cover photo! It’s inspiring to learn about all the ways the hippie movement affected the culture, economy, social services, politics, and general **vibe** of Vermont. Although the commune life has largely died out, many of the ideals that came with it live on to this day. (Full disclosure: this is a non-fiction book, so the chances of me finishing it are slim. That’s just me.)
I just found this copy of Ruth Stone’s poems at a used bookstore in Portland, ME and I am very excited about it! She is a Vermont poet I have been reading for the past few years. I *highly* recommend the recent documentary about her, "Ruth Stone’s Vast Library of the Female Mind.”
I haven’t read Kierkegaard since college, but recently a friend referenced this book in response to a poem I sent him, and I was inspired to buy it. I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s technically dense but spiritually thirst-quenching to the extreme. Also: it’s all about love. And…I’m into that. I shall henceforth relay a Kierkegaard quote:
“Do not forget that it would be a beautiful, a noble, a holy fruit by which love in you would become known if, in relation to another person, whose life perhaps bears poorer fruit, you were loving enough to see it as more beautiful than it is. If mistrust can see something as less than it actually is, love also can see something as greater than it is.”
YES! Loving something is like wearing rose-colored glasses. Loving is a vantage point; a coloring; a belief in something beyond what meets the eye.
love,
Taylor
Such fun. Come visit me sometime.
A Fondness For Everything
I admit to a fondness
for everything because
when the light lands just so,
everything looks quite fine.
They look good
in the moonlight as well
but, then again,
everything always did.
I’ve never seen
a lousy cloud
or an awkward bird,
especially in flight
up near those dashing clouds.
Exceptions to the everything rule
are the arrogant and the entitled.
Those we can shoot
between their beady eyes
to be left in an untidy heap-
scavengers being
famously unfussy.
Further exceptions are
smokestacks and their belchy ilk,
traffic jams and
concrete dams.
What is as sad
as a river dammed?
As a matter of fact,
there are many places
where man has put
a wrong foot.
But everything looks on,
with a sweetness,
a forgiveness
born of long suffering.
They wish us well
and with mixed emotion,
hope we survive
to adulthood.
L’Isle-4/23
I love YOU!
A wonderful post; juicy and loving and ripe and o'er flowing. Thank you.