The Writer

I had a strange encounter tonight.

I rode my bike down near Liberty Heights Fresh trying to catch the a little fleeting sunset for a "10 Minutes from Home" photography assignment. After a few minutes of futile searching, I stepped off my bike and started to walk, hoping my slower pace would help me to spot a subject. I had just finished a nervous photo-shoot on a neighborhood doorstep when I heard a voice call out from behind me. The man asked me to come a closer to where he sat on his porch across the street, and, surprised and unsettled, I obliged him.

He first showed me a beautiful rose he'd nurtured near the front wall of his house. I quickly took a few pictures in hopes that he'd let me go. Just as I began to walk away, however, he asked me in a smooth, quiet voice, "Hey, do you have 15 bucks?" I immediately started backing away, "Oh great, he wants to sell me drugs," I thought.

"No, I don't have any money on me."

"I don't care if you have it on you! Have you ever had 15 bucks?" He asked.

Phew, what a relief! He's not going to try and rob me!

"Well, yeah, I guess so."

"Well head up to the Museum of Fine Arts!"

He then spent about the next half hour delivering a subtle and eloquent narration of his experiences with Picasso and Monet, artists he previously hadn't cared much for. "When their pictures were only this big, Pssh!" He told me, indicating with his hands the small size we normally view these masterworks in. His story resonated with simplicity and beauty, like a true contemporary writer.

I've always imagined it'd be a little strange to meet an author in real life. They almost feel a little too disconnected from normal life in their work to have real interactions with people. Now, I think I know what that is really like.

***

The PoetLoses his position on worksheet or page in textbook
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions

Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities

Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next

-Tom Wayman

Balm of Gilead

I think sometimes there's no better treatment for pain than to know someone else has felt the same aching. I don't think I'm ever really alone in hard times, as exceptional as I'd like to think myself. My mother first taught me that lesson years ago after a particularly hard night.

I laid in my bed, closed my eyes and thought through, over and over again, how I'd finally goofed up for real and things could never go back to the way they had been. My eyes, and the bridge of my nose ached under the strain of too much emotion. Dear memories rebelled, and stained themselves red with regret. I wallowed there in my broken condition until finally I decided I could no longer wait to talk to someone. I woke my mom up, asked if I could share her bed for the night, and choked out everything that had been bothering me. She chuckled slightly, and unbelievably recounted to me how she'd had a similar moment while she was in High School. A small hole opened in my anguished defenses, and soon velvet darkness came to put me to sleep.

***

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

-Robert Frost

Seeing the Torturer in the Mirror

This is a poem I thought I'd forgotten about, but now that I've rediscovered it, I realize how much it's lurked in the back of my mind.

I've struggled to realize the value of art since the moment I began taking it seriously. I remember realizing I missed something wiser people saw after attending my first theatre conference. A man stood behind a podium and declared to an auditorium of thousands that drama meant more than just good entertainment. He told us that we suffer, even before getting on stage, to give an audience a gift many of them may never fully appreciate. He used other words to teach the gathered actors from around the state, but I heard his message for me clearly.

I took the first step when I realized that I missed something when I observed art. Since that time I've been trying to figure out what that missing something could be. For years I've pursued the theme to fill the hole in my experience. "If I can only find the theme, I'll have it!" Only recently have I started to understand that the real meaning of a poem can't be reduced to a theme. Additionally, a theme can't even be caught through direct pursuit. They're far too subtle for that.

I don't know exactly where that leaves me. I'm still trying to find a way to proceed. But I feel like I've made progress, and hopefully, even learned a little about myself on the way.

***

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

-Billy Collins

Soft Summer Searing

The summer heat and I have always had kind of a back and forth relationship.

I remember when I first arrived in Utah to a record breaking summer day. We stopped by a bank on the way to our new house and visited with a teller there while we were taking care of whatever business we had. The teller off-handedly commented on the scorching heat, to which I boomed, "Heat! Ha! This is nothing! We just got here from TEXAS!" Perhaps my response wasn't quite that blustering, or maybe not even really spoken aloud... at all... but I've never been more proud of my southern heritage! It seems like only a few short years later I slouched drenched and oppressed in New Orleans, Louisiana and caught myself hoping, just a little, for some of that nice dry Utah heat and a stiff breeze to dull its searing edge.

***

Heat

O wind, rend open the heat,
Cut apart the heat,
Rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air --
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts
The points of pears
And rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat --
Plough through it,
Turning it on either side
Of your path.

- H.D.

After Hours at the Hotel Frustration...

Ya know, you never realize exactly how limited blog editors are until you try and get them to display some kind of poetic formatting. Forget about handy things like, you know, adjustable line spacing, who needs that. Oh, and preserving tab spaces? Forget about it.... P.S. Don't ever try and adjust your template, it's a nightmare.

Believe me, it's not worth it...

Have my worst challenges really lead to my greatest successes? Although that's a maxim that has been broadcast to me my entire life, making me naturally distrustful of it, I think it's an idea I really believe. There's something for me to learn from and strengthen myself against in every barricade. Even those who suffer worst, born starving in war-torn countries with little hope of escape, seem to grow in meekness and gratitude for what they have. Today, on pioneer day, I find myself envying my (non-biological) ancestors. Although they suffered horribly, enduring the loss of loved ones and limbs, they grew so strong in their obedience and will power. They've left a legacy we honor even 200 years later.

The evidence is undeniable to me. Suffering benefits me, no matter how uncomfortable. I've only to set my shoulder against the boulder, and push.

***

Nightingales

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.

-Robert Bridges

Aaaaand, we're back....

I just came home from a steady place. Each complacent pond and every wine-red sunset testifies every day of the unalterable quality of the rolling hills of Kansas. Hills past endurance. Hills that share their fountain of youth, the elixir sheltered deep in limestone treasuries, with each inanimate object that sets root there. Buildings buy immortality with their motion. They sacrifice their activity, their soul, to share in the promise of immortality. Lifeless but never dead.

Chips of paint flee their homes, the now cold sides of never-dying houses. A vine reaches through a defunct window, to devour its rotten wood. Roofs implode. Insects stake claim in dark corners of shudder-cold building-caves. They construct mud temples with their spittle. Mindless hives for raising imps who learn to prey on more noble creatures. Still the house stands.

A boy stares at the undying houses; Two horizontal lines left on a white canvas. Balance. Peace. Reliability.

The boy sighs, alone, but content, and leaves the still unmoving houses to their rest.

***

Written in Very Early Youth

Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky.
Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,
Home-felt, and home-centered, comes to heal
That grief for which the senses still supply
Fresh food; for only then, when memory
Is hushed, am I at rest. My Friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would allay my pain;
Oh! leave me to myself, nor let me feel
The officious touch that makes me droop again.

- William Wordsworth