Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve lived in my house for almost 16 years, but before that I moved almost every year for 10 years—apartment after apartment after apartment. This meant packing up my things every year when the lease ended, and also negotiating with my then-partner what to keep, what to get rid of, and where to put everything in the new place.

The first decorative object item I bought for my first apartment, as a first-year MFA student 25 years ago, was a glass head. I found her in a shop and named her Fiona. Fiona still lives in my house now, in the entryway, where she greets anyone who walks in the front door. Sometimes, despite the many shifting variables, objects can be a constant. My life today is very different from my life 25 years ago, but Fiona is still here.

Today’s poem makes me think about these small negotiations, and also about timing—how the lives we’re living might have been different if we’d made different choices along the way. Who might I have been—or with whom, or where—if the timing had been different? Did I arrive too late to certain parts of my life, or too early? Or am I right on time? The “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect of life is something on my mind a lot. I suspect it was on this poet’s mind, too.

Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield
by Mikko Harvey

I love the shape of our apartment
as I walk through it in near-total darkness. I love walking slowly through that
darkness with my arms out, trying not to bump
into furniture. How many apartments
have I done this in now? I loved
them all. Or possibly I just loved
how they held darkness, slivers of streetlight 
sneaking into the fortress, amplified and lent 
personality by the darkness surrounding them. Wherever you are
is a country. Touch it softly
to make it stand still. Your hair getting caught
in my mouth all the time, like a tiny piece
of you calling—like a tree trying 
to speak to a rock
by dropping a pinecone on it. It is my intention to listen
but my hands keep giggling while reminding me
I don’t get to be a human being
for very long, as if this were the punchline to a joke
whose first half I missed. I arrived too late.
I typically arrive about three years too late.
I wish I had been able to sit
in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face
but I was not ready. I was still on my way.
I was lingering inside the perspective
of the spider I noticed crawling
along the baseboard. You fried
an egg. Is it possible to change
who we basically are? Thank you for serving me cups of lemon tea
with honey in it. Even though such copious amounts of liquid
would no doubt drown the insect
I imagined myself to be, that was kind
of you.

"Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield" by Mikko Harvey from LET THE WORLD HAVE YOU © 2025 Mikko Harvey. Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press, Inc.