Imagination's Shadow

Poems about walking through anxiety

Photo by Kevin Susanto on Unsplash

It’s not surprising, is it? Turn someone’s capacity to see and hear and feel and tell stories up to 11, and it’s easy for them to dial over into Overwhelm. The question is, what do you do next? For a poet, the answer may be: write about it.

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ANXIETY                                                                                                   (2014)


Nothing is wrong. Dread quivers along my spine,
shifts, stealthy, behind my eyes. Nothing 
is wrong, except my skin no longer fits;
I need a different skin,
a different spinal cord, a different story.

Textile artist in Shanghai,
copy-editor in London,
harpsichordist in Cologne – 
I need someone else’s scraps
to piece and shape, grammar to parse
in someone else’s prose, the intricate surface,
fingered over and over, of someone else’s counterpoint.
Now, please. Someone else, and elsewhere. Now.

Fist in my throat, its swallowed ache
in the hollow behind my ribs; dear God,
for a different skin. And nothing 
is wrong.

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THINGS THAT ARE YELLOW                                                                 (2024)


Force of will has moved you out the door
and down the sidewalk, down the quiet street,
while all the time, unchosen, unexplained,
a mute and clamoring dread is clamped around
your shoulders, stiff in your hips, robbing
each breath of half its air. A thing that should
be simple, that was simple yesterday,
today – again, again – is nearly more
than you can bear; no knowing why, only the fear,
the hopeless here we are again that wants to slam
you to your knees here on the sidewalk.
                                                                        Then,
from a familiar, half-forgotten corner
of your mind, the quiet voice speaks up:
Take a look around, what can you see
that’s yellow? Come on, name them, make a list,
things that are yellow. Go.
                                                Okay.
The dandelions by this fence. The trim
on that green house across the street. The letters
on that bumper-sticker, and the flowers
on this woman’s skirt. (Hello. Nice day.)
The logo on that van, its parking lights.
A bandanna knotted like a jaunty bow-tie
on this young beagle’s harness. (Hi, good dog.)
The painted hatchwork of the crosswalk – 
                                                                            yes,
and look, you made it to the corner, yellow light
is turning red; stand still, breathe, look around.
(Is that guy’s sweater…? No, more of an orange.)
Your breaths grow deeper, shoulders drop
and straighten; blue sky, black pavement,
things that are yellow and a world
of other colors in between, and here you are
as well. Here you are. Green light. Keep going.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poems using the little widget above the photograph.]

For a long time I had other names for it. Once I understood what it was, I tried to downplay it, to laugh it off, to scold myself out of it. Oddly, it was the enormous external existential dread of the COVID pandemic shutdown that helped me come to terms with how much anxiety I’d lived with, for how long.

In the last eighteen months or so, as I have shifted my writing practice from Occasional to Imperfectly Regular, I have … not grown less anxious. Not even a little bit. But I have become a lot more tolerant of my anxiety, a lot more willing — when it’s one of those days — to give myself some grace and to do the things I know how to do to help myself. I’ve learned, really learned, to understand anxiety as the shadow-side of my capacity for awareness and imagination. Would I set aside my original superpower, to get rid of its shadow? Not a chance.