Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. I did not walk around with a poem in my pocket today. You can though. That would actually be pretty cool. The idea is to share a poem with others. While my coworkers and fellow train commuters would think me odd for handing them a poem and asking them to read it, I suspect, visitors to the blog would find it fun.

My poem also comes with a photo of my first tattoo which I got because of the poem and what it means to me. The poem is by Adrienne Rich and in the collection A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. The title of the book is actually the first line of the poem “Integrity,” the poem I carry in my pocket.

[...] I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.

Nothing but myself? . . . My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known.
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere – -
even from a broken web.

And then, today, as I was thinking about my poem, I came across a Walt Whitman poem that I think I will carry in my other pocket. It is called “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres
     to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor
     hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I asked my Bookman what poem he has in his pocket and I was not surprised when he said Otherwise by Jane Kenyon. We actually have a framed broadsheet of the poem hanging on a wall by the dining table.

And you, what poem is in your pocket?