the plot is not my own

I haven't read poetry in a long time. Not because I don't love it, I do. 

Most of it.

It's more that most poetry doesn't fulfill me in the way that fiction does. It doesn't transport me so completely. And at this point, if what I'm reading doesn't transport me, doesn't transfix and insert me into the easy machinations of the story, I don't have the head space for it. I want to be transported, taken into another world, another life.

It's not that I don't love my life. I do. But at the end of the day, I want to experience something else, something fresh and unknown. Even if the story or the characters aren't fresh, they're new to me. The plot is not my own.

But tonight Djuna pulled Turneresque by Elizabeth Willis off the shelf and brought it over for me to read to her. This is her new thing. She brings me books, plonks herself in my lap, and sits still for 5, 10, 15 second stretches before she's off again, in search of the next book. (We are raising another reader for sure).

So as I flipped through pages of my old poetry teacher's book, I happened upon a poem that reminded me of being in my early twenties again. Of that feeling that I was living with all the unknown ahead of me. Every day an adventure, every book or movie or song a life I might live or emulate.

untitled by Elizabeth Willis

The day left off with a kind of singing "bang." Golden-
rod in a small sea-like air, specific and unbroken. I cannot
favor hunger or its alternatives. I cannot describe salt. In
a parallel universe does anything intersect the confused
blossoming blueness of a wall that is not sea, not golden-
rod, but the paper fastenings of you, standing against it?
I favor concrete between our rage and its mirage. Its
broken line. Catch the flying saucer but spit out its metal
mystery. Adore the big green nothing of the past, the
rationing of calm late in the century, like the arches of a
brick heart, letting go.


[image: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, from Old Palace Yard, with Westminster Abbey, c. 1834; watercolor and gouache with scraping-out and stopping-out on paper, 55 x 80]

clearing the sill of the world

The Writer

BY RICHARD WILBUR

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,   

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys   

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:   

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.   

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor   

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;   

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,   

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove   

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits   

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,

Beating a smooth course for the right window   

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish   

What I wished you before, but harder.

[via enhabiten]

when our firstborn slept in

My breasts hardening with milk--little seeps
leaking into the folded husband
hankies set into the front curves
of the nursing harness--I would wander around
the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little
longer than usual. When she was awake, I was
purpose, I was a soft domestic
prowling of goodness--only when she slept
was I free to think the thoughts of one
in bondage. I had wanted to be someone--not just
someone's mom, but someone, some one.
Yet I know that this work that I did with her
lay at the heart of what mattered to me--was
that heart. And still there was a part of me
left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain
by mothering. And when she slept in,
I smelled the husks of olive rind
on that slope, I heard the blue knock
of the eucalyptus locket nut, I
tasted the breath of the wolf seeking
the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the
bending of the cedar under the sea
of the wind--while she slept, it was as if
my pierced ankles loosed themselves
and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy
of the unattached. Girl of a mother,
mother of a girl, I paced, listening,
almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped
breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me,
next to the small motions as she woke,
light and wind on the face of the water.
And then that faint cry, like a
pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would
turn, pivot on a spice-crushed heel,
and approach her door.

From One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds.

Thanks to my mom for sending me this last week. I read it while Stella napped, relishing the quiet and the solitude to savor the words.

adrienne rich, 1929-2012

One of my favorites and one of the best, poet Adrienne Rich died while we were in Hawaii. A sad day indeed.
 
One of my favorite poems:


Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.