1 poem
EXPERIENCE, A LOVE STORY
We were having an argument about where we should live.
Our argument was city versus country, pretty standard. There’s a way the city makes you feel, like you were meant to be there, like if you were there, something would happen to you. You’d go to the movies.
You were telling the story about the first time you found the donkeys. You told it slowly. Because you hadn’t gone for the purpose of seeing them at all. You’d gone to that place to make a fire.
You never wanted to get anywhere. The landscape passes through you – you don’t pass through it. At heart you’re just a scavenger, making due with very little. So, having an experience has something to do with there not being a lot of something, light, or money.
What you were saying had something to do with time. If time runs out, you said, you have to just stand there. You can panic, ok, but it’s like a panic in the house.
You can’t think your way into your body. You can’t think your way into time. You can’t have an experience by trying to have an experience, I said to you, and you said, why not?
I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you because maybe an experience is something that happens on the way.
What else am I supposed to do?
I am always on the side of the country. I don’t have had anything to say about the people in the country. I don’t know any. I think the point of the country is that people are secondary to it.
Katie Peterson is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Life in a Field (2021) and A Piece of Good News (2019). "On the Boundary," an exhibition of her collaborations with her partner Young Suh in photography, film, and mixed media which includes this poem, will be on display at the Datz Museum in Gwangju, South Korea from August 2021 - October 2021 (https://datzmuseum.org). She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis where she is a Chancellor's Fellow.