welding pool

into the black lake at midnight,
a teacup full of ink beneath the brighter stars,
we dove, dark into dark, improbably,
piercing the oilskin surface, the thick black gloss,
molten steel poured into the mold of the hills;

plunged like metal fragments,
we were melted down, dissolved,
and the whole world was made from
or becoming formless black;

we were destroyed, we were born.
reassembled in the moment we rose to the air
from the void, from the cool furnace
forged again into our selves, retempered, new.

in which i theorize

For Dr. Turner's poetry workshop last semester, I had to write an artist's statement to go along with my portfolio. I'm sharing it on a whim, though it is long and awfully high-falutin.


In other words, don't read it if'n you don't want to. Obviously.

-----------------

When I write or read poetry, what I am looking for is a kind of knowledge that breathes, that bears the shape and rhythm of our world. We live in a created and creative world, after all– the fertility of this place is unbounded. Sometimes I picture our universe as a tide of energy flowing constantly from God’s creative passion, and all of its diverse people and objects and spirits as manifestations of that one energy. We try to match the pulse of this energy, and that is holiness. This is an essentially creative view of the world, because to be like God, we must be creators as well. We want to place ourselves as artists in the center of His energy; we want to match the flow and rhythms of that tide, match the patterns of God’s unsettling, dangerous, yet transcendently lovely creative power.


There’s much I don’t know about how this works. But I am at least convinced of three attributes that poetry written by these beliefs has: it is held to the highest standard of craftsmanship, it is accessible, and it is resonant. Einstein once said that God is subtle, but not malicious. I paraphrase: God is subtle, but He is not esoteric. He is not trying to trick anyone. He wants to communicate and be understood– God, after all, is Word, is revelation. Thus, I seek a poetry of revelation, a poetry of connectivity between the author and the reader. There’s no room here for the self-indulgence of works that are only meaningful to the author, or that are vague enough to mean anything to anyone. This is only complicating what I believe we instinctively know– art is communication, and the driving desire behind communication is to be apprehended, to be fully revealed and understood. There’s no need for the alienation that often arises between author and reader.


Thus, paradoxically, creating like God means creating on a human scale, with a human heart and sympathies; it results in a poetry of generosity that longs to give itself away. Pablo Neruda wrote, "I have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry. . . I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. . . A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat." This last metaphor feels especially right and whole. I want to create poetry that is nourishing, that welcomes people to itself like a full table. Like the food we both produce and consume, poetry should both sustain life and be the product of life.


The perfect poem, I think, would have the craftsmanship and integrity to appeal to skilled readers, and yet be something that the person who doesn’t like poetry could read, and find a piece of themselves or of their world that they hadn’t previously known to look for. Such poetry may not accomplish much in the way of artsy cleverness, or reference and allusion to our literary canon, but then that is not what I want. I prefer a poetry that is closer to our collective heart than it is to our fading cultural memory.


There is an elegance to our universe; we see continually how all its divergent parts ultimately serve the whole. In keeping with this, I believe that art can never be simply for itself. It must be fertile– it must serve life, even (or perhaps especially) if this service is unquantifiable and mysterious. I believe that the highest function of any art is to teach people to love their own lives, to train them to see and hear and feel so that when they shut the book, the life they return to is a life deeply rooted in the best things of the earth, a life well-tended and beloved.

neruda on poetry

"I have always wanted the hands of people to be seen in poetry. . . I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. A poetry of loam, where water can sing. A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat."

"Poetry is song and fertility. . . it emerged from its secret womb and flows, fertilizing and singing, It kindles with its swelling waters, it works at milling flour, tanning hides, cutting wood, giving light to cities."

choose the day

I've developed something of a Pablo Neruda obsession recently and am reading through the mammoth sized (1000+ pages) volume "Poetry of Pablo Neruda." I found a poem the other day that resonated, so deeply, with our (mine and Dan's) vision of who we are, and wanted to share the two most beautiful stanzas (the second of which is written on our chalkboard wall)--

"Two happy lovers make one bread,

a single moon drop in the grass.
Walking, they cast two shadows that flow together;
waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed.

Of all the possible truths, they chose the day;
they held it, not with ropes but with an aroma.
They did not shred the peace; they did not shatter words;
their happiness is a transparent tower."

one by pablo

I think I'm headed full-tilt into a Pablo Neruda obsession. I read him, and I feel as if I've gathered some wandering part of myself back home.


Unity

There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,
repeating its number, its identical sign.
How it is noted that stones have touched time,
in their refined matter there is an odor of age,
of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep.

I'm encircled by a single thing, a single movement:
a mineral weight, a honeyed light
cling to the sound of the word "noche":
the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears,
things of leather, of wood, of wool,
archaic, faded, uniform,
collect around me like walls.

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,
a crow over death, a crow in mourning.
I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,
centric, encircled by a silent geometry:
a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,
a distant empire of confused unities
reunites encircling me.

-----

I wish you could all hear this in the original Spanish (such a breathtaking language for poetry! I think if I could write in any language I would pick Spanish, and Romanian for rainy days). Claire read the Spanish version to us the other night, in her lovely best accent, and it was so beautiful and round and deep. It sounded much more like what it meant than English ever could.

for your sake

lowered, once

into dark water

the last light closed

into the closing door

“time cometh when I shall

no more speak

adrift in a troubled river

“I go away

“I was not there

lowered, once, into dark water,

how long before I knew

what I was there to be

cleansed of

how long before I knew

it was not water

“I was not there

the last light closed

into the closing door.

unmoored in textured darkness

the heft, the stain, the drift

of wine, of blood

“yet many things to say

to you, but ye

cannot bear them now

submerged in that lush

simmering dark how long

before I knew how I

was cleansed:

“if I go not away

the comforter

will not come unto you

lowered, once, into darkness

the last light closed

into the closing door

“I have yet many things to say to you

“time cometh when I shall no more

speak to you in proverbs

“and I am glad for your sake that I was

not there

Parícutin

Maybe there were signs beforehand: earthquakes,

restless animals, the slender stream unseasonably warm

in its shifting bed, the ground puckering or gaped

at random in Dionisio’s resting fields, as a garment

from an apprentice seamstress–

Dionisio and Paula Pulido, farmers, citizens

of the Mexican state of Michoacán, Catholic, members

of the indigenous P’urhépecha tribe, whose ancestors

were there when the Spanish arrived, tilling

the same fields he rose to tend that morning;

Dionisio and Paula, in early February, in 1943,

burning brush off their cornfields, preparing

for spring plowing, when the earth yawned open,

shrugged ancient sleep from its hunched

and crumbling shoulders and rose against them:

“I heard a thunder,” Dionisio said, “the trees trembled. . .

there was a smell of sulfur.”

The people of Parícutin: did they pray for a miracle?

Did they dig up their potatoes in time?

Harvesting the winter vegetables before they were ripe,

hurrying, one eye on the blooming volcano,

on the tongues of viscous lava creeping toward their homesteads,

kerchiefs tied across their faces against the white-hot ash.

Maybe they sewed money into their clothing,

went to the fields each morning with pockets

stuffed full of their belongings, ready to run.

Was he jealous,

Dionisio, the cuckold farmer,

his pregnant field swelling with some other seed

than corn

as the volcano loomed meters higher every morning,

as lava spread ten miles outward from his rebellious field,

as the government evacuated Parícutin, relocating

to California as seasonal farm labor the people who spoke

neither English nor Spanish, but their own language

like a field tilled and fertile for a thousand years.

Years later, when the movie came to theaters, “Captain from Castille,”

“The largest location expedition ever to leave Hollywood

went deep into Mexico to the actual local

of this romantic story of conquest!”

did they take their children, their friends, their American

sweethearts,

to show them the mottled wasteland, the drowned village,

the volcano in living technicolor! pointing to the church spire

still visible above the swamp of seeping lava;

did Dionisio go back again the next day

and the next, paying fifty cents to squint his sun-bleared eyes

at a grainy screen, searching for some trace of the fields

his oxen could plow without guidance; trying to guess which mound

of lava crested his buried home, or where in all that barren writhing

his plow lay waiting on its side?

Midwinter

The sounds of passing trains settle like silver dust on our houses

on still, subtropical nights like this, before a storm. The doors are open;

somewhere down the street a child is crying.

A freight yard borders the neighborhood,

and on clear nights we can hear the clanging bells.

The sounds of passing trains drift like airborne seeds above our houses,

sowing weedy, shapeless memories of places we've never been.

The neighbors play the mariachi station in the street at twilight;

trumpets spill from dashboard radios in a jangle of bright shapes.

Somewhere down the street a child is crying.

The ice cream man still takes his cart three times around the block

on temperate evenings. It’s painted aqua and pink, but plays no

music. On nights like this,

the sounds of passing trains accumulate in drifts against our houses,

and somewhere in the dusk a child is always crying.

Small Big Things

I've been thinking today about the Small Big things in my life. Not the Big Big things-- hearbreaks, proposals, plot twists-- but the little details or objects or moments that ever-so-quietly created a shift in my life, like a rock thrown into a small stream. I thought I'd share some.

1. A thick, green, hardback book I pulled at random off my parent's bookshelves when I was 11. Anne of Green Gables. Reading that book was one of the great epiphanies of my life-- all of a sudden I knew who I was, and I knew that I had never really known who I was until then.

2. This shirt, bought when I was 15. It was the first piece of clothing I ever bought that I would still wear now, and for years it was my benchmark-- I compared all clothes to it, and only bought them if they had the same 'feel.'

3. Discovering this blog last winter. It's inspired me to think about what kind of life I want and then make it be that way, and it's been a constant reminder to have Happy Fancy Fun, not just Boring Fun.

4. Going to my first poetry reading at school and feeling so at home.

5. A slim little book called "The Hundred Dresses," by Eleanor Estes. I read it at age 7 all in one sitting at a grown-up party my parents went to, and it rocked my world. It was the first book I ever read that made me think and care and ponder. It changed the way I read. (and, ps, every little girl needs to own this book. it's pretty exceptional; the lesson is wise and timely, and presented so gently and artfully that it feels silly to call it a 'lesson.')

6. Stumbling across my parents' old Michael Feinstein-singing-Gershwin CDs. Oh man. Such a happy day. That was when I fell in love with that kind of music.

7. The day Dr. Rodriguez chewed me out for trying to stay too in control of my voice while I sang. Yeah, it helped my voice, but it also set off a whole chain of realizations about myself that caused me to change in pretty profound ways. I've been happier ever since.

8. The day when I was 16 that I wore red lipstick to the Grace Chapel meeting. I must admit to a certain amount of pride over this-- keep in mind, this was 2005, some of us were still wearing denim skirts, and this look wasn't The Thing at all like it is now. Red lipstick didn't show up on runways for another two or three years at least. A couple of people that day said it was too bright and red, and for the first time I was able to not care and just wear the thing that felt right and made me happy. It was so liberating, and from then on I was willing to look different from other people and develop my own sense of style.

So those are some of mine. Tell me yours?

Moo.

Sometimes, being a creative writing major makes me feel like a cow. A word cow instead of a milk cow. Moo.

Batch Two of poetry is due Friday afternoon, so I'm burning the midnight oil and drinking the midnight coffee, working. I'm experimenting with some different styles and topics right now, which is super exciting, but does make things complicated-- I keep not knowing how to edit, or whether things are working, because I'm writing outside of my comfort zone. But that's a good thing-- I definitely think it's improving my work, or will in the long run.

It cracks me up how predictable the creative-writing-assignment-emotional-cycle is. In the last hour or two I've hit the depression phase, where you feel like everything crumbles when you touch it. This pretty reliably happens a day and a half before the assignment is due, if you're operating on a normal procrastinatory timetable. Tomorrow night will be more like a high, which will continue through Friday when I turn the poems in as a somewhat beatific state of artistic fulfillment. This will then subside as I realize that I must immediately set to work on the next assignment (another short story).

Haha. I sound like some kind of wonky weatherman.

Completely unrelated aside: On Monday I started drinking a green smoothie for breakfast or lunch every day, and today, only two days later, I was craving that instead of sweets. I love how quickly our bodies respond when we do what's right for them.

Descent

This year, you’ll know winter’s coming

long before cold or calendar or barren

trees or lengthened nights insinuate

the hour of its arrival. Deep in the broad

hot heart of summer you’ll find

a knot of ice, you’ll feel the ebbing

summit of an arc become descent.

Maybe you used to measure seasons

by hours or days, regulated

in a ticking grid of time.

You’ve changed. This year,

your reckoning will log the waning

intervals of light, the malice

of the slowly lowering sky.

You might have guessed

the calendar wouldn’t help you

in the end. This is the year.

One day, soon, you’ll understand

what kinship binds the tree limbs

and your bones. That’s how you’ll know.

In the memory I've never understood,

we were walking, (the early 90's, I wore velcro sandals

and a dress with sunflowers) and at the old

Mrs. Baird’s there was a delivery truck idling

by the curb and the air so full of the reek and rise

of diesel and warm yeast, it smelled like earth and

home and highway and hunger and full and everything

was heavy beneath my breastbone all at once and

I breathed it in till my ribs ached. I had no words, then,

like ‘Totality’ or ‘Existence’ or ‘Paradox’ or ‘Evocative’

or even ‘Longing’ only the familiar shapes of is, and am, and be,

and was, filled.

Lullaby

such lullabies we sing

to one another in the lamplight

we cradle, reach and rock, and

the low fullthroated melody sings the wildness

of the moaning winds, cold stars and empty streets,

the nameless shadows of a paling moon,

and then sings hush,

we’re here

and darkness is only a deep-voiced humming

and all that is not us is a murmuring haze

our songs like silhouettes of homing birds across

the dusky sky,

we draw the horizon close with low

warmthroated singing, lips

to your ear whisper, hush, whisper,

murmuring, hush.

This Canvas World

Painting my kitchen (green

as oak leaves in the sun) I watched

how willingly the wall took the color

Thought of how the thirsty ground is ready

to take in rain, water’s shadow

spreading effortlessly, drawn

Drops of sky-blue watercolor,

heavy with hue, pull from the bristles, fall,

and bloom across the ready page,

till all is blue and blue and blue

This canvas world– even the air fills

with fragrance, fills with sound and song

All things are suffused with one another, filled

to the brim and over, permeable, except

this page furrowed with crabbed trenches

of pencil lead. This white recalcitrant vastness

never saturated, only scratched and scarred

December 22nd, Solstice

Chopping onions, you think about grace,

About the knife’s edge as slender

As the solstice afternoon. A starling

In the yard. Cooking steam in the stairwell.

The lowering dusk is heavy with ice

And most of all with silence.

You can’t ignore such insidious silence,

Waiting behind every door. It takes grace

To descend stairs slippery as ice:

The wrought-iron handrail is slender,

But you still hold on, going down the stairwell.

The hard surface of water confuses the starling.

Fading light on the wings of the starling

Reveals their sleety glitter. Silence,

Darkness gather at the foot of the stairwell;

The eye of a storm is no more still than grace

When it gathers, a reprieve as slender

As the birdbath’s tentative crust of ice.

The driveway, the branches coated with ice–

No matter where it lands, the starling

Finds no sure foothold. One slender

Line of light left in the trees. Silence

And darkness meld. Say grace

Over a lonely supper, listen to the stairwell

Which is too quiet. What waits in that stairwell,

With capable fingers, cold as ice?

It’s too much like the action of grace

For comfort; you’re skittish as the starling

Whose alert eyes do not trust the silence–

Sharp as a knife, with an edge as slender.

Midwinter solstice, like the slender

Hairpin turning of an ancient stairwell;

These early evenings you hear more in the silence

Than in the anonymous noise. Falling ice

Startles the watchful starling

And your thoughts turn, inevitably, to grace:

Its ice, its silence, its revolutions,

How it flickers from watching eyes.

Grace pools in stairwells, in off-hand times and places,

A slender edge, a subtle widening.

Synapse

Birds rise in unison of wings,

a flock of neurons firing

at the impulse of some unseen spark

while on this page, the gap

between each word is a synapse

intention may or may not cross

Do birds feel this way, vaulting

across the myelinated passage

between earth and sky–

An aphasia of flight

when earth and sky feel far

apart as in a child’s watercolor,

twin stripes on opposite

edges of the page,

the unformed space between

so vast, so spattered

Radius

No light left in the sky except the chalky pink around the rim, the circle of sight. Across the street my neighbor’s open garage door is a frame glowing in the thickening darkness like picture-book illustrations of the nativity, a fluorescent porchlight where the star would be. Andy stands at the washing machine, turning to scare his daughter, five other children. They scatter, flapping like startled pigeons, flicker in and out of the light, moment by moment transformed from flesh to silhouette to flesh again, bumble into storage bins and laundry baskets. These narrow post-war houses overflow with my neighbor’s lives and goods; mismatched dogs and children cross and recross the street, make everything feel smaller, as if their footprints stitched the path of a gathering thread, the wrinkled sidewalks and exhausted yards puckering at the tug. Furniture sits uneasy on the porches, in the yards, fills the garages while cars throng streets and driveways like escaped and tentative cows. A silhouette slouches stealthily across the light holding a stick in crooked arms like a gun. A moment later children scream in English, in Spanish. Impossible to know where each belongs, which houses will claim them as the streetlights hum drowsily, shedding slumber from their amber eyes. Illumination ripples across block after block, like the whistle from the nearby freightyard. The darkening window empty, a tiny glass drained; pungent liquor only drunk one horizon-full at a time, one strong sweet sip, one window brimming, warm.

Psalm

O David

a new song won’t

be enough this time

O Chief Musician

–more, a whole

new language, honey-

savored, spice-warm

on the tongue

O Abba, Father

how I’d come

running, an eager mouth-

full of fragile

newfound syllables

Harvest

I watched a boy in a Superman t-shirt try to climb

a low-slung live oak and fail, stumbling backwards

Remember the apple trees in the yard

of the rented house? A good climber, they sent me

up after the apples– mealy, but tart and fragrant, brushed

with the crimson I looked for through waxy leaves

Or the pear tree my uncle climbed

before we knew he was dying, to shake ripe pears

from the limbs. We ducked, laughing, gathered them

in brown paper grocery sacks decorated with falling leaves,

falling snow, “May Your Days Be Merry And Bright”

'if anything all that lives'

Just discovered and had to share this transcendent poem by Denise Levertov, who may well be my next poetic obsession:


O Taste And See

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning the Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.



What can be said? Poems like this restore my faith in poetry.