I know this is a day late but I don't think it matters. This morning I was looking at a book I have called Life Prayers: 365 Prayers, Blessings, and Affirmations to Celebrate the Human Journey. I bought the book used online, from an independent bookseller, and I noticed a note on the very back page. I won't mention the names here, but the note read "My brother: I hope you find some prayers in here you can remember me by, and remember it is not who says the prayers but who you say them to. Your bro." and next to the note was a photograph of a young man who looked to me to be about 15 or 16. Dark longish hair, thick brows, a slight smile, wide friendly large dark eyes, a blue chambray shirt. Face not heavy but full. and, it seemed to me, open.
I found this poem in the book:

We look with uncertainty
Beyond the old choices for
Clear-cut answers
To a softer, more permeable aliveness
Which is every moment at the brink of death;
For something new is being born in us
If we but let it.
We stand at a new doorway,
Awaiting that which comes....
Daring to be human creatures.
Vulnerable to the beauty of existence.
Learning to love.
--Anne Hillman

I'm sorry these are a bit dark. great songs.

 

 

I love this poem. I pulled it from Roger Housden's wonderful anthology Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems. His collections are marvelous.

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch the sea to the sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
want more than it has--
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon: one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses--as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

--Holly Hughes

Pens. Not pencils, mind you. I don't much care about them though I suppose I should. and as a teacher  I am uncomfortable with this predilection to keep my ink to myself and wait for the perfect chance to whip out that dusky green archival nib and make....a grocery list, perhaps, or a note to myself to get my car oil changed. I tend to hoard my pens, particularly ones with very fine narrow points. I don't like a blunt ballpoint. they are good for almost nothing except filling out official forms where you need multiple copies and you don't want there to be only dusty smudges where information should be. I like pens in dark deep colors like burgundy and forest green and purple. I keep basic blue and black ballpoints on hand for those students who, freakishly, do not have pens with which to write their essays or warm-ups. I can't imagine being in that situation. I like to travel light but there is always a small family of pens congregating in my bag, as if there were suddenly going to be some sort of apocalyptic event that would make pens a scarcity. Have I thought about the psychological implications of all this? sure. I think it means that should that creative epiphany come along, that light bulb moment that will set me to writing furiously no matter where I am, I want to be prepared to approach it with the perfect instrument for what it has to say. It might take me a little while to figure it out, but that's all right.  The words have already learned patience, and I know they can wait.

Birdwings


Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been waiting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes,
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence
is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

--Rumi

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

--Emily Dickinson

Recently my job has taken me into those places. Occasions that allow or force me to be present in a very immediate and conscious way. this is sometimes challenging but of late it has brought me much joy.
Yesterday, for instance, I worked after school as I always do on Wednesdays, tutoring seventh and eighth grade kids who need extra help in reading or writing. I don't usually deal with more than about eight kids and yesterday there were only three. the usual suspects: I'll call them David, Jeremy, and Alberto. all thirteen. they came into my classroom and took up their usual spots: Alberto front and center with a worksheet on symbolism that made no sense to me, Jeremy sitting under my pencil sharpener reading the same Harry Potter book he's had forever. And David on one of my computers, watching the light outside the window. He kept getting distracted from his project by the changing light--the pre twilight brassy sun, the fast moving gray and pink clouds, the blue sky, the shifting hues of everything. How it pulled itself apart and then back together. I walked over to see it from time to time, drawn by the changing shadows and light. And there it was: a huge, distinct rainbow, sprouting from the pine trees just beyond the athletic field. I saw it first. "Look!" I called out. "A rainbow!" All three boys rushed over and kind of gasped in astonishment. It really seemed to be rooted in the trees that they had come to know. They said "A pot of gold down at the athletic field! I wonder where it ends? could we get there? I think I see a leprechaun!" They were goofing, but it was so beautiful, to feel their joy and witness it in what felt like a very pure, present way. To experience it myself and be in it. I held the moment loosely and felt it warm me. I let Alberto take a picture of it from the window with his cellphone camera, and then they began begging: "Can we go outside and see it? Just for a second? in the air?"
I said, sure, let's take a little field trip, and we trooped down the hall and I held the big metal door open while they went outside and stood in the cold golden air, awed by the big spool of color in front of them. Laughing innocently and without self consciousness, like the children they are. And I too felt the peaceful joy of a happy kid just happy to feel the weather on her face.

I learn from the land. Some day like a field I may take the next thing so well that whatever is will be me.

--William Stafford

This song reminds me of traveling through upstate New York in summertime and then going back to my autumn life, years ago.

On impulse I picked up Judson Mitcham's now out of print  first volume of poetry, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, this evening and turned to this poem. He is from my hometown and I've loved his poetry for years, since before I knew he had known my parents in his youth and that my mother had taught him Sunday school. He has written a couple of very fine novels and about three books of poetry. I'm not sure what he's doing now, but he was creative writer in residence at Emory University in Atlanta last I knew.


What You Have Need Of

Again, the stars gathered like children at dark
into light, taken like the clearest of dreams
into quiet, yet there, you are gone.

Once, the old World Book still tucked under your arm,
you led me into a field, away from the lights of houses,
to show how the whole figures are not there,
and therefore, you draw your own lines, how then
you can link what's scattered into anything.

And what you have need of flares in that far
eternity that dies too, quiet village of the universe.

Tonight, when sleep, failing, has fallen into old grief,
I have walked out into the back yard, hearing that voice,
and waited where the land slopes downward miles
to the town's lights, a clear lake raised to the stars,
darkness floating on the far last ripple of streetlights.

There are those who defeat their dreams, who know,
when the brother of childhood stands in the doorway,
not to believe, but I am not one.

--Judson Mitcham

Ookami posted part of a poem by Wallace Stevens on another blog site, and I ended up posting this, the second stanza of Sunday Morning, also by Stevens. I called it my religion and he said something like yes, it is a religion. it says it all for me.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

--Wallace Stevens, from The Palm at the End of the MInd

Teddy Thompson's voice kind of reminds me of Lyle Lovett's. I still love Richard and Linda though. hard to beat Shoot Out the Lights.

 

 

Stillness within one individual can affect society beyond measure.

-Bede Griffiths

from yesterday.

 

 

I always say I'm going to write gratitude lists. Sometimes I do, but not that often. I've never written them every single day. The days when I do take the time to write them, though, are days when I feel less buffeted about by the world. More connected, saner. At peace with any solitude I have chosen or that has chosen me and more capable of listening and really hearing. Sometimes the lists are shorthand scribbles of image and reminder and other times I try to flesh them out a bit.

So, today I am grateful for the amazingly fresh, hot-from-the-oven cookie my carpooling seventh grade science teacher friend Patricia brought me from Deb's Bakery, just across the train tracks from the Piggly Wiggly where we take turns leaving our cars during the day. The cookie was mostly oatmeal but there were raisins and chocolate chips too. She held it out on a piece of wax paper for me so I could eat it as I drove along and its sweet bready hunks and crumbles melted in my mouth.

Then there was the sunrise. As we drove along Refuge Road the sky was just turning different colors and layers of rose and cimarron and peach flushed into the deeper shades like blue and purple that were further up. A scrim of moon hooked part of the slowly lightening blue and a planet winked above it. maybe venus.

Then there was the school spelling bee. I had four students in it and one of them, a tall beautiful girl I'll call Samara, won third place. I was really proud of her. She has a brashness about her that I have often thought masks a real vulnerability and I really sensed the bold voice that she usually uses softening during the bee. For the first part of the competition she clasped a gray jersey hoodie in front of her but then after a couple of rounds she set it aside.

During fifth period, I had students work with "mentor texts" (novels and stories I have on my classroom shelf) to locate pronouns and show some things about them, like what their antecedents were. (I don't spend all that much time on this but they have to have a basic knowledge of it if they are to pass the big mandated state tests. And I try to show them how to use what they know in their own writing.) at any rate, one of my students, whom I'll call Dean, called me over and asked if he could use The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson as his source. I hesitated for a second but then I opened the book to ‘the soul selects her own society.' He had a pleading look on his face and I told him sure, he could use that book. A few minutes later he came over to me and said, you know, I don't see that these pronouns really have that many antecedents. I thought about it and said, no, you're right, but use the book anyway if you want. Just leave those words that come before I and you out. I loved that he saw that and that it made me think.

On the way home, listening to NPR, I heard the words "President Obama" as soon as I turned on the radio. That always gives me a pretty big thrill, remembering that something this wonderful and immense has happened.

As soon as I got home, I realized with a start that I had no clear sense of where my county-issued and -owned laptop was. It could be in Patricia's classroom, in the girls' bathroom on the seventh grade hall, in the custodians' lounge for safekeeping, in the hands of a mysterious thief, or in my own classroom behind my desk. I went as fast as I judiciously could right back to my school, some twenty miles west, afraid no one would be there to let me in and that I would have to worry about the laptop all weekend. Fortunately it was in my classroom sitting next to a bookshelf where I'd set it down to lock the door. I dismissed my dark fantasies of unemployment and penury and remembered again to be grateful for my work.

Then I went out for dinner to 61 Main, the local restaurant that serves almost solely locally grown and produced food. I had some buttered parsnips that were interesting and fresh, with an odd bite like cool earth mixed with warm frost as well as some grassy green tea and a big hunk of carrot cake to go. While I was there I read about Pickens County's Mountain Conservation Trust's latest land buys and what they're doing to help keep Longswamp Creek from being further polluted. Among the names of the members of the trust I saw those of my aunt and uncle and lots of other people I know and love. The day felt full and rich behind and around and before me in the light from the restaurant's windows as I walked past the health food store and the ancient barbershop to my beat up old Honda and then headed home.

After weeks of watching the roof leak
                        I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board

--Gary Snyder, from Haiku MInd: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart

The words loved me, and I loved them in return.
--Sonia Sanchez

I miss the places where writing poetry used to be. Where it took me. I feel sure those places are still there, but I am acquainted with them less intimately, less readily than I used to be. The cadences of poetic language, the metaphors and imagery of poetry, have felt elusive for some time now. I've written a couple of private things. But poetry came back so powerfully and satisfyingly to me in April of 2007, after a long hiatus, that I was sometimes giddy with the fun of it. Not everything I wrote felt right or complete or good, but the impulse towards those rhythms, towards trying to be that kind of language lens, was strong. I'd gone through brief periods of writing poetry before, but I'd never taken it very seriously or allowed myself to love it. This time, though, I wrote lots. I wrote poems about books I'd loved, heat waves, oatmeal, migraines, leavetakings in crowded airports, forgotten ticket stubs in overcoat pockets, seashells, swamps, stir fry, found pennies, the ravine below my house, love, dictionaries, graduate school, and power outages. Perhaps I am just thinking less metaphorically now. and I am certainly very busy. But I miss writing poems, and I don't try very hard to do it in what spare time I do have. I don't want years to go by before it sidles back into what I do. The other day I was sorting through old notebooks, letters, and papers and found some poems on yellow legal pads, written in 1996 when I was living in Athens, Georgia and had not gotten sober yet. The poems weren't terribly refined, but there were lines in them that worked, that felt gratifying to read. I was glad I hadn't thrown them away.
so the thought that keeps coming back here is that of making poetry a habit again. an impulse I turn to readily and with a desire to push past fear and reticence. I want to listen to and respond to my world in ways that carry the seeds of poetry, not just the cognitive crispness of daily work or the stream of consciousness musings of journal writing. I want to write poems about the jawbones of Coyote found in the winter grass and mud along Old Grandview Road. About shoveling ash out of my Buckstove and huddling close to the warmth of burning oak when my furnace has given up the ghost. about tossing a handful of juniper needles and hawan samagri into the snap of fire to bless the coming year. I want to write poems about photographing pennies beaded with rain in my dad's old wheelbarrow and about the mossy vinegarsoup of collard greens on New Year's Day. About helping a sobbing teenage girl up off a cold hallway floor, about losing at Scrabble, about the flash of red fox crossing Mineral Springs Road last week, and about the freshness of finding a modest stone-lined hidden pond with a big gnarled tree growing up out of its center, over behind the old Pickens County post office.
Sometimes it's enough for me to scribble these things down in my notebook. I always plan to revisit them and see what they do when I listen. The truth is, though, that my spirit hasn't felt much like listening these past few months. I don't seem to have the stamina or the willingness to be present for the fox and pond. I'm not empty enough. What eludes me just now is how to let the emptiness I know is always already there show me how to speak. I have, on the other hand, had fun writing prose from time to time. I've written goofy paragraphs about hoarding pens and I've created lists of what sustains me. And I seem to be writing some sort of story about a stuffed elephant that I found years ago in the toy bin at the Canton Goodwill store. I began this story back in August while modeling a writing warm-up for my students, using the elephant as a visual prompt. The prompt wasn't just visual, though, come to think of it. I passed the elephant around so my students could hold it, smell it, feel it, see it up close. and I held it myself, noticing small things. I continued this story with each successive class throughout the school day. I remember vaguely liking it at the time but I didn't give it much attention. Then a couple of weeks ago I was cleaning out old papers from my classroom and brought home the battered spiral notebook with the elephant story in it.  It wasn't finished, but I loved that elephant when I reread my story. And I loved the words I'd written. They were simpler than usual, quietly fanciful, almost childlike in the gentle ways they came together. I suppose the lack of time to self-edit helped all that along. I've added a bit to the story since I rediscovered it, and I like where it seems to be going. It feels like this story is helping me along towards letting language come to me in the ways it seems to need to come. Letting it find me but also working for it by cultivating the stamina, willingness, and faithful emptiness to receive it.