This week we took refuge in a poem called “The Wild Cheese” by James Tate, who lived and wrote poems and taught many young poets. He died in 2015.

In 2006, Tate talked about the dissonance of living in a world where “heaps of evil” are being done — while so many of us live in peace and privilege and have time to read blogs like this one. He said about this dissonance in 2006: “I, for one, am not giving in. I am not going to walk around in tears all day long. I still want to have a good day if I can.”

One of the ways Tate made a good day within a distressing world was to make poems. His poems do not point to their own beautiful dressing or attempt to shuttle you out of our astonishingly complex situation on angel’s wings. Tate works close to the earth in “disarming simplicity.” His poems tells stories. They are weird. In alarming times, they let us catch our breath. Here’s “The Wild Cheese”:

The Wild Cheese

A head of cheese raised by wolves
or mushrooms
recently rolled into
the village, it
could neither talk nor
walk upright.

Small snarling boys ran
circles around it;
and just as they began
throwing stones, the Mayor
appeared and dispersed them.

He took the poor ignorant
head of cheese home,
and his wife scrubbed it
all afternoon before
cutting it with a knife
and serving it after dinner.

The guests were delighted
and exclaimed far into the night,
“That certainly was a wild cheese!”

Listen to Tate read “The Wild Cheese” and other poems at the University of Arizona Poetry Center