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Missing Words

Missing Words

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Half an hour into Wednesday’s eight-hour drive I realized that I had left my journal behind.  It wasn’t the sort of item one turns around for, this notebook of half-baked ideas, first lines of poems, morning thoughts. But for the last two days I’ve felt its absence.

What I’ve missed is not just the potential, the blank pages waiting. I pressed my calendar into service on that errand right away, and now the odd week or two when I had no appointments, nothing in particular to remember, are covered with scrawl.

No, what I miss is the weight I carry with me, the journal as repository. It’s as if without the words I’ve written I’m not exactly me.

Before the Walk

Before the Walk

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Before the walk comes the poem, a verse or two to take along the path.

I see more clearly with downcast eyes, pondering a private line.

Words tilt the sky, straighten the trunk, unmask the liquid

line of the horizon.

There is still much more unnoticed than revealed.

Bucophilia

Bucophilia

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It’s still dark at 7 a.m., a cold inky blackness that does not invite exploration.  Leafless trees, downed branches littering the yard, a sky just light enough to promise hope.

It is a season that calls for poetry (as if all seasons didn’t). So I return from the library my arms full of Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Maxine Kumin.

This morning, Kumin makes me smile:

Bucophilia, I call it —
nostalgia over a pastoral vista —
where for all I know the farmer
who owns it or rents it just told his
wife he’d kill her if she left him, and
she did and he did and now here come
the auctioneers, the serious bidders
and an ant-train of gawking onlookers.

Bucophilia — it’s a word I’ll take into the day.

“Realms of Gold”

“Realms of Gold”

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Today is Halloween and the birthday of the English poet John Keats, who described autumn as a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”

After two stormy days that were much closer to Percy Shelley’s depiction of the season —”O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” — I slip back into Keats’s quiet vision. Autumn as a time of reflection and poetry, of observation and even of revelation.

Here is my favorite Keats poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told          5
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;   10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Anniversary

Anniversary

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On October 12, 2004, I went to work as a writer/editor for a university alumni magazine, ending a 17-year freelance-only career. I can still recall the strangeness of that day, the sound of high heels on the hard floor as a designer dropped off page proofs for me to read, the lunch I shared with two new colleagues. I even remember the outfit I wore, which included sandals because I hadn’t yet gotten around to buying “work shoes.”

Though I’ve long since grown used to the routine, some days it still seems slightly surreal to trade sweatpants and slipper socks for a skirt and flats, to travel elsewhere to do what I do at home all the time anyway.  But the routine has enlarged me, has given me plenty to think and write about, has helped me feel closer to the place I live.

Writing will never be just a job to me. But for many of my waking hours these days, that’s exactly what it is.

Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea

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I spent the early morning hours (the fruits of insomnia) copying out passages from a book that must go back to the library today. It’s a posthumous collection of the letters and diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Against Wind and Tide.

I read the book before I went to the beach, and I was delighted to find in it the seeds of her Gift from the Sea, a favorite of mine that Against Wind and Tide prompted me to re-read. How illuminating to come across her original thoughts — thoughts she would later hone into the book that sold three million copies — on solitude, relationships and what it means to be a woman and a writer.

On that topic,  Lindbergh quotes a nineteenth-century writer who says that a woman writer is “rowing against wind and tide” — hence the title of this collection.

As I push against a steady current of my own, I’m happy to row for a few moments with Lindbergh’s words, words like these: “I feel a hunger now — a real hunger  — for letting the pool still itself and seeing the reflections. I feel a hunger for the kind of writing that I feel is truly mine: observation plus reflection.”

There were many passages like this one. My fingers are sore from typing them. But my mind is dancing with thoughts and images.

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

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The crepe myrtle blooms when other foliage withers. It adds springtime hues to a late-summer palate. It does all of this and more.

But only if you have sunlight to sustain it.

Our two crepe myrtles have decided this is not the case. So we have the leaves and in one case even the buds, but not the flowers.

But what is the essence of the plant?

For some reason I think of Yeats, who speaks of that and so much more:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

Paper Cut

Paper Cut

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Injuries incurred while meeting deadline:

Eye strain

Neck pain

Paper cut

Yeah, I know, the last one sounds silly. But, as I said to myself when I sliced my hand (and right on the life line, wouldn’t you know),  paper cuts don’t happen in a digital world. Carpal tunnel syndrome maybe, or some other repetitive stress injury, but not paper cuts.

They are, then, a dying malady. A problem that will (it’s safe to say) plague us less in the future.

Say what you will about the printed word, that it’s being eclipsed by tablets and smart phones and bottom-line bosses — it can still make us weep and make us bleed. At least for now, we continue to live in a tangible, touchable, tactile world.

Waking Up

Waking Up

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Up and out early. Moisture fills the air and glows in the lamplight. I play some Gabrielli but it’s too loud for this delicate time of day. I try Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning.” Ahhh; that’s better.

I consider turning off the music entirely and listening to the birds. They’re waking up and singing lustily. But the music is good, too. In fact, it sounds a lot like the birds, has the same gradual crescendo.

There are few cars on the street at this time of day, and the ones I see drive sleepily, as if they, too, are just waking up. The day seems to be holding its breath.

On the main road, cars are more numerous and faster. I ease into a trot. The tall grass is wet as I brush by it. Time now for louder music. “Day by Day,” a sung prayer.  I’m fully awake now. Ready to come home, touch the keyboard, write.

Birds Take Flight

Birds Take Flight

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“Every day,  I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady.”

This is from Terry Tempest Williams’ new book When Women Were Birds. A few pages later, Williams writes: “I am a writer about place who is never home.”

I link these two passages. The walking and the writing about place.  Each essential to the other. One to prime the pump, the other to fill the jug with cold, clean water.

So where do the birds come in? Williams meets her husband at a bookstore, as he’s buying a bird guide. Williams finds her voice through a special teacher who reads to her about the winter owl. A peregrine falcon once slit the corner of Williams’ eye. Another time, Williams sees a painted bunting that arrived in a wintry Maine on the cusp of a fierce winter storm.

“When dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue and green. … I have not dreamed of white birds since.”

When I finished Williams’ book I flipped through the pages with my thumb — and saw the birds that illustrate the outer edge of each page fly back and forth as if alive.

Birds take flight. So do words.