not till we are lost

the ink is black, the page is white

variations of black and white

when white meets black

some grays

blackened

cold hard black.

I wrote you a letter.

beauty of black and silver,

charcoal and graphite.

I’m walking the night

making a statement.

finding it hard to believe

dark leads to light—

break it to me gently

I do.

are we?

—something dramatic like that.

everybody was so young!

berry stained lips

they fall hard

I like to imagine their dreams,

share their passions.

welcome home, Persephone;

the dark is too hard to beat.

sometimes I still need you.

in the morning

it’s hard to wake up

the first days are so hard

Black mood

dark thinkings

that final disappointment

blackened by grief

chiaroscuro

morning after dark

a life well lived

well written

wild states

anchor and daisy
something so delicate
weaving time
and time is a number that rests on the wall
repeated refrains of nature

what caught my eye
joy hidden in the willow basket
rugged and true
a box to hold the universe
velvet evening

bring me lilacs, please
bring me the light
I'd be a liar if I said
you make me feel...
...beautiful

nothing is black and white

[i did not write these lines; i only found and arranged them]
[i may have read Mornings Like This recently]

Thanks, E. Jean

A note I wrote to E. Jean, my favorite hero nearly 2.5 years ago:

Dear E. Jean, I'll be blunt: I am afraid I have been channeling Edward Casaubon for much of my life. Channeling a postmodern E Casaubon, that is. My reasons: (1) I am in my third year out of coursework and have yet to produce a viable chapter; (2) I am dating a man as virtuous, lovely, and great-spirited as Dorothea; (3) I am convinced that I am incapable of enduring friendship. The first two worry me least (the man is not a worry at all, in fact). The third, however, is dispiriting! As a good postmodernist/Kierkegaardian/existentialist (circle one), I am well aware that I cannot deserve any friendship: friendship is a daily offering of generosity, not a professional contract. Etc. But how do people do it? Let me state in my own partial defense that I am not entirely a social cretin. I can be charming and rather humorous company. I enjoy being around others about as much as I enjoy solitude. Still, I marvel at the friendships my friends experience with others. They endure over the course of many years—decades, even. They may ebb and flow, but there are phone calls, visits, emails—communication—across all sorts of distances. This is not my experience. Once a friend has left my zip code, friendship, like an unwatered plant, loses its bloom. Ah, my would-be Philoctetes, you say, why not call up these pals, send them emails, letters, flowers plan visits? I do... Perhaps not as much as I ought to do, but I have such a sense of intruding on their lives, taking up their free time or of insisting that they talk to me, now! that it is difficult to sustain the effort. If this had happened once or twice, I should think nothing of it—not all friendships are of the life-long or even years-long nature. But this has become such a regular pattern for me that I am faced with the strong possibility that there is some relationship between this incapacity for friendship and my own character. How can I overcome the limitations of my own character and learn to have lasting friendships?

Some things have changed in the interim: I have produced almost and nearly viable chapters. The current draft of chapter one my dissertation director has in his hands may indeed be viable. I do now worry whether the man and I will be able to forge a relationship that endures into the future. What hasn't changed is my fear of forcing myself on others. I feel I speak the language of friendship brokenly, with insufficient vocabulary and no grasp of verb tenses. 

I suppose the answer is in the metaphor I just wrote: If I wish to become more fluent in friendship, then I must devote much more time to it.

a new piece of the puzzle

I think I find poetry so hard to bear because it is so very strong, so concentrated. I find the dilution of prose easier to swallow. 

And so I prefer my poems very short. My attention wanders after more than, say, twenty lines. Not for lack of interest, but because the twenty-first line undoes me. Perhaps I should approach the poem as I approach the push-up: add one new repetition daily and rest as needed. 

The poem requires me to relinquish speed and I may as well admit that I generally choose to wolf down great mouthfuls of oatmeal prose and not sip slowly the port of poetry.

But the message I am finding in all things these days is Slow Down. Muscles are built and made strong by tearing them up. The heart is a muscle, too. Perhaps while I paradoxically simultaneously tear down and build my muscles with pushups and lunges I can tear down and thus build my heart with poetry.

Poetry may be the best church of all

Watching the rain pouring from the street down through the cracks in the trainyard on Friday I felt delighted and buoyant and eager and it took me several minutes before I could locate a name for the unexpected feeling: happiness. The thought that followed--that it has, I think, been some time since I have felt such happiness (and that I am surprised to have not recognized it)--didn't diminish that happiness in the least. I was pleased to feel so happy. 

And the thought occurred to me that perhaps I can develop a taste for happiness; acquire a knack for happiness. If I can learn to savor the taste of beer or of chevre or of olives, then perhaps I can also learn to love the taste of happiness, "like small wild plums":

The Plum Trees
by Mary Oliver

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.

reading wallace stevens in the new year

I.
I don't understand poetry. I can see beautiful things in poetry--in small and in large. And there are things I do and can understand sometimes and in some poetry. Reading, say, Wallace Stevens lately, I have the sense of something beautiful down deep where I can't see/fathom/conceive. There is something there inaccessible to me and I don't know what to do about or with it.

The only activity I know to take with writing, with words, with the letters is to take the words and phrases and lines apart. To try to break the thing into constitutive pieces. But the poem, it seems, is not made of bricks. I can't undo the edifice to reveal the building plans. It is not, say, a chicken, and I cannot, like a master butcher, carve it up, moving my knife into the spaces between the bones to divide it effortlessly into essential pieces. The poem, it seems, is more like a painting and my approach to the poem is rather like trying to understand a painting by removing each layer of paint. The poem is like a large piece of pottery--a sealed urn--and inside that urn there is something. The urn gives me that sense somehow.

Whatever there may be inside that urn, however, requires the protection of the pottery for its existence. I don't know how it is I know this, but I seem to know it. So how may I understand it? How can I understand the urn if I don't understand what it protects? How can I know the secrets of the urn unless I open it somehow?

I try to take apart the words and lines of the poem in order to understand it. Even while I do this, I see that I may as well smash the urn and, with violence, force the secret from it. What do I find?  Aha! There is... ! Liquid gushes and spills everywhere good for nothing and no one and ruins my shoes. Or a peculiar smell--and nothing else--escapes the shattered vase and is lost in the ether. No, a tiny thing like a homunculus--hairless and fragile--scrambles among the sharp pottery and bleeds to death trying to hide his nakedness.

How can I learn to understand poetry and not destroy it?

II.
Perhaps poetry is particularly tough (or so it seems) because its medium is the same as that of strongly analytic scientific work. Like a painting done in equation-paint or a sculpture done in moving gears. How, now, can I tell the difference between the factory and the gallery? Between the library and the laboratory?

I tend to focus on the stuff of it, the material, on the sense of the building blocks and/because I cannot apprehend the poem as/for/in itself. Words mean things. But what/how does that mean in /for poetry?