Balm by Christian Wiman The heart, it hoards —KEVIN YOUNG “The poems are a balm,” the poet said, whose ear endured, besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift, history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords, afternoons of disappointment and self-taste too heavy and humid to move. “Amid it all,” the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning deaths, meaning the lack of meaning infiltrating even heart and hoard, love and death, “the poems are a balm”—meaning, in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous, effective, for a time, against decay.
I love the bit about “mosquito demons” and how it reminds me of how emails and oil changes are just these annoying little things that won’t go away til you squash them