IV ii
in the middle of traffic at Church and Gerrard I notice someone,
two women, for a moment unfamiliar, not crouched with me
in a hallway, for this moment unfamiliar, not cringing at the
grit of bombers, the whine of our breath in collapsing chests, in
the middle of traffic right there for a moment unfamiliar and
familiar, the light changing and as usual in the middle of almost
dying, yelling phone numbers and parting, feeling now, as the
light beckons, all the delicateness of pedestrians. I wish that I
was forgetful. All that day the streets felt painful and the
subways tender as eggshells.
-Dionne Brand
---
in the middle of traffic at Greentree and Old Georgetown I notice the
two black women waiting for the crosswalk to start counting down,
20, 19, 18... I step confidently past them, I walk across the six lanes,
the light is green; I have the right of way, the light is green and I step into
traffic; I step out on to the dark macadam and the car turning right
honks, the driver leaning into the sound, and I keep walking. The solid thunk
of my books keeps thunking across the six lanes and the light is green.
I'm not who I was. I hold my head up. I stare into middle distance. My boots
thunk on the solid road.
all the delicateness of pedestrians. the last time a driver honked at me while
I had the right of way was while crossing a four-lane (five lane?) (six lane?)
road in Damascus. I do not wish that I was forgetful.
And yet:
all that day the streets felt painful and the subways tender as eggshells.
---
"And my personality is such that I'm more likely to just sit and try to figure it out. But I'm getting better at using M___ as a resource, I think."
He looks at me closely. Nods. "Constitutionally, I'm like that. Maybe it's a Mennonite thing. Take care of yourself, be self-sufficient. You know."
I can feel the corner of my mouth tipping up. Yes. I know.
"But you're still having fun," he asks, before sending me on my way to catch the bus. "You're still feeling like you're growing? Because that's high on my priority list."
I pace in the elevator, too alive to keep still.
---
I close Dionne's book, holding my place with my index finger, think of what else I've read on this bus route. Fahrenheit 451 is the first thing that comes to mind.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
The man next to me gets off at Rolston Road. I think of Jacqueline Berger's poem
The Failure of Language, think "there are no right words," ask myself "...or does it only deepen what we know of loss?"
I get off the bus at my stop. Marywood Road. I start trudging up the hill. It is dark; I think of the little red cabin in Pennsylvania that my grandparents took us to when I was small. I think of the streetlights on South Fulton Street. I think of walking late at night on the roads west of EMU.
I think, as I walk, of Jacqueline Berger writing about her friend's kitchen; I don't have the whole poem memorized but I know the line about the glass, the etched walls, "and add it to a box marked Kitchen."
That line is the whole poem, I told Thia once. The weight of it, the amber against the glass, all of it wrapped in words (newspaper) and reduced to a brown, nondescript box... the poem was trying to rescue
rescue her friend from her radiant perishing, was trying to see and love what was vanishing, and the language was important. The language was so important, was the thing that could keep a life from disappearing into a small brown box.
---
I estimate that since January 1 of this year, I have written very nearly 100,000 words. They have taken the form of academic essay, poetry, blogging, journal entries, and attempts at fiction.
Oh, and letters. Maybe - maybe add a few thousand more words to that tally.
---
I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense.
-Ray Bradbury
---
Last week I was looking through an old journal in search of something and stumbled across this instead:
...and also him telling me that he had heard i can 'read a book and know it.'
They make good companions, books do. They are worth carrying around in your head, worth the mental space.
---
It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
-Ray Bradbury
---
There are no right words, if by right we mean perfect. But there are good words, and words worth remembering.
As I walked up the dark sidewalk to the door of my apartment, I had a line of a poem knocking around in my head - "I am not done with my changes."
I couldn't remember where it was from, and so I looked it up. Oh, yes.
the layers by Stanley Kunitz.
how shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
yet I turn, I turn...
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go...
I think again of my conversation with K___. "You're happy?" he asked me. "You're growing?"
I think of Lancaster, of Harrisonburg.
Some losses. Some gains.
Maybe I am finally learning how to love the place I am in.
---
In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.
…A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something.
Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
Such realities, I think, are at stake in a poem.
-Paul Celan
