Category: faith

The Mountain and the Door

With Jean Valentine.

No, I don’t want to do it this week, any of it. So this morning I linger here, taking in the well-kept secret of you, hiding in plain sight. You worked with what you could not understand. Your work was translation. You threw most of it away, keeping only what continued to kick after the scratching out. You moved a lot. Said later, it was probably preparation. For what others called your tough strangeness. Of Dickinson, you remarked: Happy are those who can choose their refusals and survive. Considering Plath, you wondered over the thin line between the subversively unconventional and despairing state. How close you were to the edge. You feared its pull, that you might leap, but your friend, a nun, understood what you were, reminding you back. Write every day, she told you. That is your prayer, your health, your everything. 

***

I have been spending time with Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain (New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), and this morning I read Amy Newman’s 2008 profile of the poet in Ploughshares. Today’s post is assembled with phrases from Newman’s article, which includes quotes by Valentine.

Between Stations

Call and response.

Editing a manuscript but the voice will not hold until I see it. Who must be the unborn who decided to save a life by delaying the opening. In the meantime, the weight of eyelids shutters the shores of lost continents and the priest repeats: You must. Be ground like wheat until. And I cannot leave this body even as its pilgrimage in other lights seems just beginning, and there is a voice caught in the throat and she is in a running dance after the sauntering river until she stops. Again, that sense of waiting for the lens to adjust. But into what? Then the thick sound of hawk lifting behind my head––off now, that circling cry.

Bearings

and findings.

But how? When submerged in a field of study. When the subject of discourse is the limits of knowing amid a sustained ordination of unknowns in a place of ebbing permanence. When the illuminating hope is for another possibility. When the practice of this hope demands that I accept of the unreliability of impressions passing through this passing form, and witness anyway.

Of this Earth

And walking.

It was another day of humiliations, said the poet. I did not always understand him, but these daily laments I knew well. There are whole days when you can hardly speak, mind running downhill, shining through the glass even as it darkens. Yes, it darkens. Until the next morning when you walk along the fault lines, life in your hands. Lumbering with losses, o child of blood, here you are again, still being born. These notes, if I tried to work them, would make a terrible love poem. No danger of that right now; no time. I am often in the predawn hours considering the horrors outside, how they continue.  This is a note just to say that I am smiling at the way that you continue, still being born. Please continue.

***

Reading the opening of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, absorbing a phrase here and there, and then I notice that it is Valentine’s Day and there is a funny gap between these simultaneous realities, which I can’t quite resolve at the moment but find amusing. 

Inaudible Stone

What aches to hear.

The affliction of this moment is the speed of its demands––no, not even a moment, a recognizable now, but a storm of futures hailing hard against the roof, and faster. I still breathe, but breath is shattered. That which I might listen through is thick or I have slipped from wherever that other sound was, into some other frequency. Cold now, and afraid. That when you call, I will not hear.

Scrutiny

Without escape.

The sorrow quotient settles in a deeper register
of knowing, a bog of drunken insight and cat eyes.
It was said of the first poet I loved and recognized
that he lacked the rooted normality of a major voice
and this makes a new kind of sense to me now.
What rough vocation demands such strident use
of sick days to repair the broken levees of a fool
soul bent on protecting the unlooked-for
where sky and ground roar a running river
to spell variations in chorus on the page?
This silence for want of better words
only lives by careful collections of foragers
on shores who number shells on shelves
and bird feathers by weathered tendrils
of larger limbs. The thin page.
The shaking hand.

To Watch

In constant vigilance.

What quickens
toward some destined end
in keening cry. O bird.

Weep for this house,
in spiraled anguish.
I feel you poised.

A sense of something
making an exit. Shore foam
and the ebb of us, waving

Kelp -swaying praise
dance toward surfaces above
which seabirds circle, ready

To dive. Then Black Hawk
shadow, lined against
the light. What comes.

What Flies

And the numbers now.

Will this what then not let itself be counted,
what when it was not permitted any stop?
I walked on limbs while sorting them:
this, and then this, and so on, what
passes for mind an organizing principle.
Unless this flesh is made of minutes
would you save it? I meant to answer.

Current, fly through me.
You must be time.

Is this the hour, then?
Am I?

Ready or Not

The warmup.

Not sure what when I am waking
I am doing, waking thinking, what
am I doing here? with the what that
I am needing not enough still and yet
going on: up anyway, out again. I have to
gather my what for an hour with my coffee
just being here in this bed with this book, these
books that I may be a semblance of passing for ready

when I leave.

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