Tracy K. Smith

Here’s a poem for a Thursday morning by American poet and educator Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972), who served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.

I Don't Miss It

But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.
And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,

The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke
Climbing the walls while the hours fall.

Straining against the noise of traffic, music,
Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.

And that scamper of feeling in my chest,
As if the day, the night, wherever it is

I am by then, has been only a whir
Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.

--Tracy K. Smith