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

Some poems are compressed like diamonds,

like small gems you can hold in your palm.

They shine up at you,

and you can come back for the glint of them whenever you want.

I love poems like that. Other poems are like strands of pearls,

long and lustrous and nearly impossible to gather into your hands all at once. I love poems like that too. Today's poem is a long,

beautiful strand. Listen and enjoy. Go by Kathleen Ossip. It is a cube, it is red, it is mountainous, it is a bird of fire, it is the bones of the pelvis,

it is a walnut, it is treasured, it is yellow Saturn wobbling in its orbit. It is danger, squawking.

It is the desire to sit down with strangers in cafes, and then it is the strangers in cafes.

It is the man with the black t-shirt labeled unarmed civilian,

and it is the blind man with him and his painful trembling.

Always it is oxygen and more oxygen.

It is the fight in you and the fight in you dying.

It is the need for water and the water that falls from the sky.

It is desperate for a theory and it is the acts you call evil, when you know

there is no evil, only desperation. It is that bravery, that arrogance, that blindness.

It is the pink morning and your smile in the pink morning.

It is a phantom and the thin neck of a tree.

It is a little project called loving the world.

It is howling in the dirt.

It is an extravaganza.

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