I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Today's poem rejoices in something at the heart of this podcast, the pleasure of sharing our favorite poems with others, rather than reading them alone.

Abundance by Rick Barrett. It must say something wonderful about my life

that my first meal in America was a bucket of chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I was ten.

Hours before, the arrival at the airport to the cacophony of relatives,

then the drive to my uncle's house and the new winter cold,

where the bucket waited like America itself.

For once, that one memory is not like the tattered band t-shirt you only wear to bed, but like the crisp task the teacher gives to her students.

She hands each of us a mason jar full of black, white, red, and brown rice.

She tells us to pour the rice on the table and sort it by color, however long it will take.

In this way, the counting and accounting, like the work of memory, is its own abundance, along with that of the gorgeous rice.

All my life, I have been drawn to exercises and patience because so many of the things I love don't love me back,

a claim that, to borrow an aching line from Miwosh, I make not out of sorrow but in wonder.

The patience of bending over a table counting. The patience of hunger.

The patience of love clinging to an image of sunlight on a hazel eye. That day we lay on the summertime grass of the park and looked up at the maples

the sun ruffled through. He told me about the stern way his grandmother had taught him how to play

violin when he was a child. I told him about my childhood newspaper route,

walking the neighborhood sleeping streets at dawn, my hands black from newsprint, stung by the rubber

bands that always snapped.

When we weren't talking about those things, we were talking about poetry beside ourselves when reading out loud the larkin poem about how parents fuck you up, whisperingly amazed, reading Dickinson's poem about how things

fall apart in an exact, organized decay.

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