I unearthed my old grad school poet’s notebook this morning. Cracking the cover, I found a sheaf of paper that held several iterations of a poem (c. ’00) I remember sweating over for months. My handwritten revisions scrawled on the printed pages a glimpse into the mind of a young, hungry, hopelessly romantic, and obsessive poet trying to find “the thread,” as William Stafford writes impeccably about in his poem The way it is. I’m emotional here, finding these artifacts of myself, and re-discovering Mr. Stafford’s poem. So much time has passed in the last 15 years. So much life. Love. Loss. I’m amazed, heartbroken, grateful, and open-armed for today, and the rest of the days that I’m given while on this planet. I may be a little older, but thankfully I’m still hungry, just as hopelessly romantic, and (slightly) less obsessive. And I guess that’s the point. Somehow, I’ve managed to hold the thread.
Whether or not the poem has done the same (let alone found the thread the first place) is another story. Anyhow, I thought I’d share the finished (as it were) piece with you.
I
Exhaled from routine like birth into warm water I cannot see where I’ve been. Trying to climb from here the trees reach their nimble fingers & arms & backs & roots accept me. Hold my weight & rock me as I climb. They won’t break as I won’t break. There is always energy in the tree and myself. A will to stand.
Into the tree I am absorbed & moved with the xylem & phloem & I can see with leaf-eyes & feel with bark skin & intercambial intuition & my feet are warm & moist in the summer & cool & dry in the winter.
I will stand when I climb on my father’s shoulders or my mother’s fierce love & leap for the ring of blue sky over a field of yellow wheat & valleys of wild craning sunflower necks with their collective corolla-eyed sun-mane as they face the sun until it goes down. II
Without fail I will swing on those rings over the river that grew to swallow towns & fill harbors with driftwood & dreams & styrofoam & people who could not hold on & now float & twirl in the eddys roiling off upstream rocks to the harbor (always back to the harbor). A meromixis. Our bi-annual aqueous rotation from sediment to surface. We hold on though, for all we’re worth in spite of ourselves. III
Steam that rises from super-hot lava super-cools in saltwater forming islands that can only serve as places to stand or tie off our boats while we bob & glass the horizon for any signs of life & look at our broken oars with longing & angst that we weren’t better prepared & all of the focus in the world isn’t making me feel as though I’ll sustain the black clouds that are passing to the north of us drawing cloud buckets of ocean to distill & carry & deposit on parched, thirsty Mid-Western ground. We’re all so miraculously connected. IV
Through the course of a sunrise the philosophies of a full coffee pot & a yawning stretch make sense. The front door starts the deer from their beds, flagging through swale, slow bounding into the stand of hardwoods east of the house like a list of poems I have yet to write. Familiar & unrecognizable people mouth silent words & then disappear into a lingering sense that something important happened while I slept.