Photo by Annie Spratt
What We Think About When We Think About Thinking
Anna Gilmour
There’s a therapy technique called leaves
on a stream: setting one’s thoughts to float
on leaves down gently flowing water. Picture
the stream however you’d like. Just notice
what the mind does, I instruct in the voice
my clients have called soothing, thinking
about not displacing words or how dry
my mouth is becoming or all of the inhumane
and unimaginable things happening
or what I’ll be eating for lunch.
This is what the mind does.
Instead of the Colorado River’s teal
made more teal by sunset-painted sandstone
or the deep blue spot in Buena Vista
where we got engaged, North America’s
only aquatic songbird dipping down
the water’s drift, I picture the drainage
ditch along the defunct open-pit gravel mine
that pretends to be a wetland and want to be
picturing something else. I put the wanting on a leaf,
but still the ditch persists. Resilient.
So many things want to be what they’re not.
Yet the cedar waxwings still gather there, in the open
arms of the crabapple planted as a prayer
with their masquerade masks and their lemon bellies
and, yes, their waxy wings.
Anna Gilmour
There’s a therapy technique called leaves
on a stream: setting one’s thoughts to float
on leaves down gently flowing water. Picture
the stream however you’d like. Just notice
what the mind does, I instruct in the voice
my clients have called soothing, thinking
about not displacing words or how dry
my mouth is becoming or all of the inhumane
and unimaginable things happening
or what I’ll be eating for lunch.
This is what the mind does.
Instead of the Colorado River’s teal
made more teal by sunset-painted sandstone
or the deep blue spot in Buena Vista
where we got engaged, North America’s
only aquatic songbird dipping down
the water’s drift, I picture the drainage
ditch along the defunct open-pit gravel mine
that pretends to be a wetland and want to be
picturing something else. I put the wanting on a leaf,
but still the ditch persists. Resilient.
So many things want to be what they’re not.
Yet the cedar waxwings still gather there, in the open
arms of the crabapple planted as a prayer
with their masquerade masks and their lemon bellies
and, yes, their waxy wings.