In the Middle (Barbara Crooker) , That Silent Evening (Galway Kinnell), and Dawn Revisited (Rita Dove)

I've been struggling to name the feelings I've been having lately as I watch a loved one struggle with so many human things--being sick, feeling frail for the first time, battling with demons unmasked by a long hospital stay, being afraid, being terribly, terribly afraid, and not being in control.  There is something so remarkable about this, and so unremarkable as well.  We all will deal with all of these things or have already, and we will again.  I guess I'm awed a bit by our fragility and our human spirit.  Our ability for resilience, even in the face of great hardship, is really so common, so human.  I think poetry is particularly adept at helping us see our humanity, finding our connection in hardship, helping us look at ourselves closely, and discovering moments of grace.  These moments are everywhere, I think, even if we don't always see them.  The flashes of deep insight  and articulate description of aging and love and life I've seen amidst a wash of frustration, stubbornness , and self-reproach are some of these moments.  I am including three poems i really like.  They connect us, and perhaps they give us hope.

In The Middle (Barbara Crooker)

of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

That Silent Evening (Galway Kinnell)

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in low, silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back
at our tracks twining out of the woods,
where the branches we brushed against let fall
puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence,
like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch
among the trees, which is the sound that dies
inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge
hits it off center telling everything inside
it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up
but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome,
and yet also - how could we know this? - happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow,
not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing
not to meet until heaven, but here and there
making slubby kissing stops in the field,
our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
Everything that happens here is really little more,
if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,
are almost ready, already, to bandage the one
whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when
we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches
from this moment to that. Then I will go back
to that silent evening, when the past just managed
to overlap the future, if only by a trace,
and the light doubles and shines
through the dark the sparkling that heavens the earth.

Dawn Revisited (Rita Dove)

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits--
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

Happiness and Let Evening Come (Jane Kenyon)

I've been thinking a great deal about the events that have impacted my life and my family's and friends' lives in the last 6 months, and there are some unifying themes.  One that I've already talked about, but I continue to examine is the fact that after bad things happen, the steady drum of time continues.  We can't affect it at all, even though it seems that we should.  Now looking at this, I realize how much this inexorable ticking of the clock saves us too.  At some point, we have to get up and return to our lives, no matter how unbelievable the loss.  Even more unbelievable to me is the fact that happiness might just creep in occasionally, even when it seems as if it can never happen, should never happen, is so wrong to happen, and yet happen it does.  And thank goodness it does!  I don't mean unending happiness, but a glimpse, a laugh together, a smile about the incredibly impossible sadness and loss we feel together...and then perhaps over time, slowly, it isn't so impossible to deal with all the time.  The other thing that is so clear is that we all need comfort, to be comforted, to be touched.  Ok, that's obvious, isn't it?  Well, consider the SICU, the tubes, the lights,the disorientation and it is easy to forget to hug the person who isn't really able to say, "please come over here and hug me because I'm terrified and lonely and scared and in pain." Consider the caretaker who has to deal with the sick person's frustration with being sick and their short temper when they don't feel good, etc.  One of the wonderful people in my poetry class was talking about the poet, Jane Kenyon, and I poked around here and there and found a few pieces that are directly relevant to everything I've just said, and they say it with more depth and fewer words!  you just have to love poetry!
try these:

Happiness (Jane Kenyon)

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

       It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Let Evening Come (Jane Kenyon)

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come

Forgetfulness (Billy Collins) in the ICU

I am watching my mother-in-law fight through her confusion trying to understand what has happened to her and why she is in the intensive care unit.  She has lost a week of her life and no matter how many times we tell her what happened, she cannot hold the information; it leaks out every time, leaving her dazed, thirsty, frustrated, but no more knowledgeable.  She is improving, though, but I wonder what will come of this hole in her memory?  Will it always be there?  Is the information there somewhere, or is it truly gone, wiped from her life somehow by the ICU experience and the delirium it seems to create in people?  I've been thinking about forgetting, how things just slip away that we knew cold years before.  I'm trying not to judge, but just to observe it, just to think about what her experience right now must feel like for her. How terrifying her surroundings are if she doesn't understand them at all--lights that never go out, people running around, people dying, people being wheeled in, monitors beeping, lines in and out of multiple body parts....how overwhelming this most be, how much it demands patience from people least able to be patient.  I found a few poems to share that touch on this at least a little--well, the first one does.  the second one I just really like as what he is saying is exactly the opposite of what my mother-in-law is experiencing.  try these:

Forgetfulness (Billy Collins)

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

HOW TO BE A POET (Wendell Berry)
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
- WENDELL BERRY -