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Doing Nothing Today I purposely sat with eyes closedAnd listened without irritation to the reiteration of a vehicleBeeping at its chores across the street. This beeping has been going onFor weeks and, before, bothered meAlmost dreadfully. I would take my hearing aidsOut of my ears, and sulk. But, having yesterday readA book of talks by a Tibetan-born meditation leader,I knew better. Listening, I heard other sounds alsoAnd for the first time did not think of them as noise. Tomorrow I will try again to have nothing to do.I will sit with eyes closed and pay no heed to my mind’sJabbering, beseeching, pleading, cajoling voice. Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. He is the editor of Bright Cages: Selected Poems of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965; reissued 2018); co-author with Mark I. Wallach of Christopher Morley (Twayne: 1976); and editor of A Little Patch of Shepherd’s Thyme: Prose Passages Of Thomas Hardy Arranged As Verse (Moving Finger Press: 2013).
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