On the far side of the house I found him pressed close against the old iron-bound oak door of the chapel. He was talking, apparently to someone, but I was afraid to go near enough to hear what he was saying, lest I might frighten him, and he should run off. Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic when the fit of escaping is upon him!
How is it that I have lived so long away from my heart? It seems rarely here, instead out, a-hover, as if moth-winged, as if combusting. As if conflagration might be willed. As if a catch could come so simply. And will the words that scatter join the words that return. In this garden, afire with all that will not count that will not ascend to the level of form to furl and cling and fall, to gather in petaled piles. I watched that branch seep and shudder and bud and burst and burst again. Then avid birds devoured its fruits and I came to know it was not mine to take. The shrivel and the dwindle are besetting now. The cold hurry. The heartsick nonstop.
Across the world vintners dance the new wine. And can I imagine crossing the world without my heart. And why my heart. Why not (say) the flat of my hand, that which would reach. Because though the hands also flex, also fumble, in their flanneled sleep they quiet. The hands have their work to do all day. They stay at their post, tolling the letters and the words, refining. When they stop, they are still here. I echo Aurora Leigh: I recognise my hands. But oh. But. What has crossed the world is my heart, without me, in the dark night and the rain. And I know this by what still unspools out of sight: that string somewhere under my left ribs, that cord of communication refusing to be snapt, bleeding me inwardly. And I know it by the absence above the spooling, by the glory cooled and ashed in that hollow, by the bloomed-off things that would fall from me if I slipped open this rattled bone cage.
Some stories we know so well we cannot believe those in them do not know. Behind one door, toothmarks appear on her neck and still all suspect pinpricks, anemia. Behind the next, he mourns her heart while she hears dismissal. But behind the last, at least for tonight, comes the thing even we do not know how to read: he sees the shadow of no parting from her.
The shadow of no parting is what my heart has either flown out to find, or has found and would fly: the no-parting warded off, the no-parting left shadowed, lone.
My heart will come reeling back, its coming the reverse route of its going; it has started making its way by the crabapples' tracing. And I will say, what did you see when you went where you were? And it will smile in the sadness of knowing what no reason can wrest. And I will still want to read the heart's one tablet, my eyes open like an eager bird. And my world will burn all over again, the way some worlds do.
Tonight's image is mine, but some of the words are not, or only halfway: nods here, in one way or another, to G.C. Waldrep, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Toni Morrison. My peopled soul, you see.
In the days when I thought I was going to become a medievalist, a professor of mine used to reassure me, when I had papers due and was terrified that I would fail miserably, by quoting Julian of Norwich: "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well." From start to finish today, I rang changes on those lines. Sometimes, they were as simple as simply saying please, breathing cool air through the nose, listening to rain on top of the umbrella and slipping a little in the saturated ground. Occasionally the refrain turned to why. More often it was simply a reminder of how much I can do, when the day requires. And it's requiring, and I am exhausted. But yesterday, there was this branch, and something about it was simply so there, so irreducibly present in itself. And today, I thought of the branch. And I too am still irreducibly present, still taking my lessons from Barrett Browning. Never flinch. I am still finding my unscrupulously epic way.
The secret is, look up. The other secret is, look down. A wise cameraphone artist told me that in the spring. When the sun broke its watery way through this afternoon (unaccountably seeming almost ashamed to be making an appearance), I seized a looking moment, though there is all this work to be done, though I feel a bit crushed and mangled right now, though I look around and realize that there's no physical way to finish everything I need to finish, no way to be everything I would be at this moment. That kind of half-panicked looking around doesn't help so much, not with anything at all. And so, out I went to look up and to look down. And here is some of what I came back with (not all, though: who knows when the sun will pull through next, and who knows whether I'll be able to step out into its weakening late-fall shafts; I am not good at conserving, but I'm practicing with the pictures):
I do love the look of these bared trees. I do love the green things still trying to make their ways, despite the brown, despite the killing cold.
"What are you doing there?" says the speaker of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Weed" to the titular plant that has grown from her now-severed heart. It answers (in her own thoughts? she thinks), "I grow but to divide your heart again."
Look up. Look down. Look closely at the top of the picture of the tree, and you'll see a bird taking wing.
This mug of hot milk, this one I'm drinking, has extra honey and extra nutmeg. You may know me well enough by now to have some sense of what that means.
Thank goodness for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. I've said it before, but I say it again with feeling tonight. Thank goodness.
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, - so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth -
'Tis then we get the right good from a book. (1.702-709)
When words fail me altogether, well, I suppose that means something. I suppose I even know what.
This afternoon, for the first time in what feels like a long while, I found a quiet stretch of hours within which to work slowly and meanderingly--not in a time-wasting way (though I chided myself a little bit early in the afternoon for not being more swift and productive) but in a meditative one. It is little wonder to me that this week has produced a couple of poems. It is little wonder that my brain is tired, deep down tired. And so: sleep.
Because, see, I had this dream.
In my dream I was visiting my friend in an apartment that was really a dream that was really a novel. The apartment was his, but it was mine, and he and his partner were visiting, but to make them pancakes I had to keep going to my car to get out my suitcases and bring them into their apartment, which was mine. It was made of sandy colored stone and had innumerable ledges and leaded glass windows with many panes. The apartment had two doors. It was 21G. If I went out one door, I entered a nondescript, deserted lobby, decorated like a bad late-twentieth-century bank. If I went out the other door, I landed myself on a narrow ledge, a couple of stories above the street, and I had to creep along the wall like a prowler. The sun was always out. Sometimes I realized that I needed to go back in that door and try to find the other door. The apartment had many rooms, and they were not always in the same arrangement two times in a row. When I left the correct door and passed through the lobby that was like the bad bank, I would end up on a street full of broken-down apartment buildings that were perhaps in the process of being renovated. I passed and repassed and passed again. I got next to nowhere.
Oh, see? Remember how good the light looked behind the trees it threw into silhouette? I do see. I do remember.
The sun sets further and further to the south each day. But: only six weeks more and we're on the return trip.
More to the point, who will be the menagerist?
When no one volunteers, I do. I am still guarding the moon, just as I promised I would, keeping track of how and when it smears across our congested skies. In the night the animals would disappear into the fog if the weather would hold still. In the morning the deer emerge from the foliage and stare from the yard into the house where I wait.
In the evening the power goes out, which doesn't make sense (the evening is clear and still) until one of my poet friends says one word: "Squirrels." I trust him: they've ambushed him on the bike trail this fall. He knows how they are suicidal these dark days. I do, too: in the afternoon the squirrel leapt from tree to tree outside the window, finally pausing where the trees stopped. He was so avid. His haunches tensed, twitched; he gathered for the next jump. I remembered the dead squirrel I found on the street last year who had no marks of trauma on him, and how the narrative that grew for me as my eye reached up to the slender branches traced and woven above was that of the squirrel's last leap, his startled fall. (I don't know what happened to this afternoon's squirrel, though I am fairly sure I heard him land on the roof over my head.)
Two nights ago I slept so early that I woke before dawn and did not fall asleep again. A bird started running fifths, short scales, up, up, up, over and over again. Just one bird. And I remembered that I didn't tell you about the pigeons on the auditorium's roof last week, their massed darknesses lighting off into the flex and float of wider greyness, pulling shadows across the stony walls. And how I listened to the morning bird trilling, and how I laughed in my own breath when the roof exhaled the pigeons.
I will always be the menagerist.
The first time I sat up late watching an election, it was 1992 and I was still living in my parents' house and I was not old enough to vote and I was angry about it. My best friend at the time didn't have cable, and so she and her mother were sitting up with their radio, and I was calling them with updates. She wasn't old enough to vote yet either.
Tonight I'm sitting up late in part because I've been scrolling election results all evening, which has slowed everything else down considerably. You may already have heard Ohio's news (and we raised the state minimum wage! and we're going smoke-free!). I'm eyeing the Montana, Missouri, and Virginia Senate races now. Tomorrow, back to our regularly scheduled program, if I manage to force myself to bed.
In 2004, it took me 10.5 hours to vote. Today, it took eight minutes.
But in 2004, there was no waiting for results: by the time we burst out into the middlenight, giddy and empty with having sat and stood and been filmed by TV crews and grasped at any tiny bits of news coming in from any direction, by that time it was all over, almost. We'd missed all the trickling in of numbers. Tonight, by contrast, everything looks as though it will go on and on. I check the news sites; nothing has changed. I check them again; still nothing.
And yes, I am well aware that I'm playing out a whole other drama with my checking and checking and checking, waiting for what will tip the 49.4% v. 49.5% balance. Where is that extra .1%? And what is it made of? Green velveteen, I'm guessing: that short shocked texture of slithery soft, of color that naps one way and the other, the texture of my childhood, the texture of jokes that are not. It's easy to hit the "reload" button on my browser, and so I keep doing it, well beyond my bedtime.
And yet, look! I hit "reload," and suddenly many more votes are in. Perhaps things will tip after all.
Now, I realize that I haven't said a thing about tomorrow's election, or about registering to vote, or about civic duty--or, really, about politics--pretty much ever on this site. And tonight I was about to write about something else altogether. But instead, I'm going to join the chorus of exhortation: get out and vote. Do it. Don't forget.
Tomorrow night, after we're all done voting (unless I end up in another 10.5 hour voting line in Gambier), I'll tell you what I was about to tell you tonight. You keep your end of the bargain, and I'll keep mine.
source for tonight's image: Smart Women Supplies.
Every November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, the southwestern English town of Ottery St. Mary holds the strangest of festivals: the running of the tar barrels. In the early evening, adolescents run through the streets of town with flaming barrels behind their necks. After a dinner break, the adults come out to run their full-sized barrels through the city centre. Crowds of people throng around the runners, whose barrels are often nearly as big as themselves. People sometimes surge away from the barrels. But sometimes they surge toward them.
I know these things because I was there one year, with my excellent friend (then my excellent teacher). We arrived early enough in the day to witness the young runners--and to get a false sense of confidence and control over what was to come. Not long after the adult running began, though, my friend panicked and pulled us from the city centre, a process that grew more arduous with each attempt we made to push against a thronging, more or less drunken crowd. Eventually we escaped to the lookout over the enormous bonfire on the edge of town. The whole evening stays in my mind as a moment of high adventure, notwithstanding the fact that the experience helped collapse my excellent friend's lung, notwithstanding the fact that we were pressed, folded, to the fiery savagery of the human heart. You can see it in people's eyes, in some of the pictures at the site where I found these three. We glimmered and glittered and growled like everyone else around those mobile fires, even those of us who then were pulled out and who went uncomplainingly, while a nation burned a man for nearly the four hundredth time, while we cheered and shouted. It is a strange thing to move with a mob; it was a stranger thing, that night, to move against one.
Today: coughing, writing, coughing, grading, coughing. If my voice goes out, all the rules of the game will change. In the meantime, I mark papers, and in my breaks I read about cholera. And I cough.
Which means that you'll get more from me tomorrow.
(The name I am giving this picture is "The Strange Sagacity of Chalkboards.")
Get ready to love a different palette. The last of the golds will soon have gone.
In Atlanta, I could hear trains passing by, even from thirty-five stories up in the air. On stillest nights in Gambier, I can hear the trains passing in Mount Vernon, five miles away. I have wanted to write for you about distant trains for so long: I took this picture in March, planning to use it for a train post, and yet I'm still not there. Perhaps this writing wants to be a longer piece. Or perhaps it's something so obvious as not to want to be written at all. Perhaps it's simply too close right now--which would seem to be ironic, given that what I want to write is about the opposite of closeness, because it is ravaging me again, because I am nowhere close, because the nearest sounds I hear are the ones trickling through the night from elsewhere, on nights when I am farthest from here.
When I was in love a decade ago, I kept a copy of this poem on my wall. Then it was a different thing to me.
Words, Wide Night
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I am singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and thisis what it is like, or what it is like in words.
-- Carol Ann Duffy
Wide Night Words
(with apologies to Carol Ann Duffy)La lala la. See what it is like, or what it is
like in words? Somewhere I am singing
an impossible song. Shall I say it is sad?In one of the tenses of desire that you cannot hear
I close my eyes and imagine
this is the other side of wide night,
the pleasurable moon turning away from the hills.Cross out the distance between us, for I am
thinking I am in love with you and this.
Cross that dark and I would reach to have you.The room is slowly of and on you.
Or this is.
Someone drew this picture on one of my life's many chalkboards last week, and I think it's possible that you might have to love it, even if you haven't read Dracula, or even if the idea of a love plot between Mina Harker and Dracula makes you shed a quiet, internal tear every time you encounter it in an adaptation of Stoker's novel. (I might just be talking about myself there.)
First Vertical Poetry No. 27
Where is the heart I am calling?
Heart become eyelid
of an eye on its way to where I am.
The eye is not here yet and already I can see.
Before there is a heart I am made of beating.
I am calling in an open doorway.
I am calling from inside.
You will find that the corn, this time of year, stays bent or even broken just as it has been blown. The remaining ears will not have desiccated, but all else will.
The white barn on the south side of the highway will pull its usual tricks on you. Be careful where you look: that knife's edge divide of brightness from shadow will do its best to fix you.
Cows will have been moved to the other side of the road, away from the piece of land your excellent friend calls Quagmire Farm, no doubt because the turf there needs cropping. You will want to stare at the cows' backs; you will want to think of their backs as woolen, or as pelts, or as furry. You will decide that you don't know what to call them. You will remember having learned on the plane home that cranes do something called kettling. You will want to decide to say to people, "Well, that's a fine kettle of cranes." If you don't stop this mulling, you will wreck your car.
You will decide that you yourself need to learn to kettle this spring.
You will continually fight an urge to stop the car and photograph everything in sight.
You will learn the ways that barn roofs disassemble. Once a corner of that metal comes loose, they roll up like windowshades, curling up toward their peaks or up and over like inverted bedsheets. You will swear there are more ruins now than a week ago. You will know that you're employing the pathetic fallacy again, thinking those shivered silvers might solace your unravelings.
Someone will run a stoplight right in front of you and then drive under the speed limit for the next ten minutes. You will wrestle yourself to patience until you can pass him.
Your hill will still be waiting for you when you return, but the field across the highway will have become stubbled rows.
You will realize that you have come home with no pictures at all, only colors, more colors: all yours, this group, colors without names.
