In this poem Susan Cook explores a sort of sketch of self, a mind trying to come into awareness. Suddenly the metaphor of a plant in a jar transforms the experience into a kind of vision or awareness of how the world (or our own consciousness) offers care to us, growth and nurture and pruning.
Susan Cook is a psychotherapist, practicing in a small Maine coast town, and a poet and essayist. She has been a semi-finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Prize. She writes and produces a series called The River Is Wide on PRX.org, available for review to public radio producers. The series includes essays: “Citizen’s Guides,” “Civil Liberties for Lifelong Learners,” and “A Department of Poetic Justice,” which includes lyrics suitable for singing to tunes from The Great American Wrongbook.
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry editor
Treatment of Myself
The disapproving eye
has done it again.
What has it done,
made me mull over
what’s come to pass
like a hesitant departure.
For a long time
I did not know
what mind meant.
I thought it was
a kind of terror.
I spent a long time
by myself
trying to find
its mood, its whim.
It had none.
I found out.
None but life
and memory
to tar back roads
to piece together reasons.
Oh, it felt so good to grow.
I lie on an un-made bed.
I am reminded where I lie,
a plant in a jar
in the window light.
An old woman comes
from nowhere
to watch and water me
picking off leaves, solemnly
turned brown.
Image at top: Susan Cook, photograph.