Designed to Fly (Ellen Waterston) and Wait (CK Williams)

So summer is here, and we have all been feeling the sweet  languor of it.  Especially me, I think, since I still can't do much of anything with this boot on my de-bunioned foot.  Will has been working  a little and hanging with his buddies as they enjoy each other and the bittersweetness of their last summer before college. I can almost watch him mature in front of me.  He went off to a friend's house tonight, and I was sorry to see  him go.  I must have shown it as he sent me a text asking me if I wanted him to come back home and hang out.   Ok, what does one say to all that goodness?  I said no, of course, but how nice for him to offer.  Katie too has been away in Tanzania having a wonderful time doing good works, so it has been quite here.  All of this is soon to change as the new medical school class comes in at the end of next week and all the craziness starts again.  But for another few days, there is still some lovely peace around here.  We have put a new patio on the back of our house, and I realize that we have an entirely new room and a brand new view into the back yard.  We have never been able to do this, and even in the inner ring suburbs, we have a deep, wooded lot with so many wonderful trees whose leaves make constant music that is lovely and loud.  A mating pair of cardinals claim our yard as their territory, and I have begun to recognize their call and response.  And many days in the last several weeks, a deer has been lying at the very back of the yard, just lying there in the sun.  Our wonderful dog is getting old, and her cataracts must be significant as she didn't even see her or smell her somehow.  Finally, as I was sitting on the patio on Sunday, a huge owl flew right by me and perched in the huge evergreen in the yard and stayed there for several hours.  Wow, a back yard full of grace, how lovely!  Now if I could just slow the time down a little and lean in to all of this for a few more....years...but no!  That I cannot do, and I will enjoy the new excitement of the students, but I could wait another month.  Oh well.  I'll enjoy it all anyway.  Here are a few poems I have come across recently and really like.  see what you think:



Designed to Fly (Ellen Waterston)


After ten hours of trying
the instructor undid
my fingers, peeled
them one by one
off the joystick.
"You don't need
to hold the plane
in the air," he advised.
"It's designed to fly.
A hint of aileron,
a touch of rudder,
is all that is required."

I looked at him
like I'd seen God.
Those props and struts
he mentioned, they too,
I realized, all contrived.
I grew dizzy
from the elevation
from looking so far
down at the surmise:
the airspeed of faith
underlies everything.
Lives are designed
to fly.

Wait (CK Williams)

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—

not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,   

time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,

one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,   

another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was   

for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,   

relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.

Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,

you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,   

my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,   

trying to heave itself back to its other way with you.

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran

as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you?

Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds?

Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,

a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,   

not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,

how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.

Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over

the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,

to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?   

We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

When a Woman Feels Alone (May Sarton) and Lovely Early Summer

Well, the day has finally come and gone.  Our myriad, often complicated connections to University School are forever changed as Will takes off his US tie for the very last time.  How could we possibly be sad when the graduates were so joyous with their cigars and hugs and wonderful friends and family all around?  I ask you, does it get any better than this?  Maybe, just maybe if they'd been able to win the State Championship game the day before....but even that couldn't stop the flow of good cheer-- no, delight--that poured out of Will and all his friends as they said goodbye to high school.  We all had a wonderful time too just watching the love fest!  Also, having my sister there was wonderful too; she too has had a long, complicated history with US.  But I think we both felt some closure and joy being on those grounds we know so well with a boy who so audibly and visibly loved it there.

So, I've had some time to think, as I recuperate from toe surgery (and have to sit around and wait to be driven places-yuck).  Now that all the excitement is done, KT is off on a trip to Africa with her school, Will is off working or hanging with the boys, and Chip is being Chip and working until he drops, and I seem to have some quiet time to write and think and begin to enter the silence around this lovely place in this lovely early summer time. Maybe I'm just getting older, but  I think I need more quiet time now than I ever have before--maybe it's age, maybe I just understand more about what I need and want--I'm not sure of the reason, really.  But silence is something powerful, I think.  My wonderful writing group and teacher are exploring the theme of silence without me this session, but I love the topic, and I've tried to keep up with the writing.  Silence can be incredibly noisy sometimes, depending on how one might define "noise".  most of the noise I struggle with is my own inner noise--you know, "you aren't a poet, you can't put two words together, time to do the laundry, how old are you?", you know what I mean.  Well, I'm working on controlling my noise, as I work on wrapping my arms around how I change my relationship with my son when I'm not waking him up every morning and sitting down and talking to him every night.  And how do I embrace getting older and beginning to bump up against this large birthday that is looming.  The loss around all of this still feels imminent, but maybe not, maybe we adapt and enjoy watching the growth happen, I don't know...but I have some time to think and write about it.  If I come up with anything pithy, I'll pass it on.
Try this lovely poem by May Sarton

When a Woman Feels Alone (May Sarton)


‘When a woman feels alone, when the room
is full of daemons,” the Nootka tribe
Tells us, ‘The Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night”?
Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past.
From as deep as the ancient root of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.

To My Son at Eighteen, Optimism and The Envoy

I was going to talk about the poetry and caregiving conference I went to at Duke, and the wonderful reading and master class with Jane Hirshfield, (who I think is wonderful by the way), but I think I have to talk about something else, too.  Will found this picture in plain sight in our study, and put it on his senior page.  I hadn't really looked at it in many, many years.  I know Chip, my husband, took it and has always loved it, but I hadn't looked at it--really LOOKED at it-- in years.  You know how it is, the picture goes on the bookcase and we never see it again.   In these few days before high school is done and we all start a different way of relating every day to our son as he goes away to college, I can't seem to take my eyes away from it.  I guess it justt captures that breathtaking (or so I think) bond between mother and child so well.

Oh, the boys are still in the championship race!  They have a very big game tomorrow that is in no way a guarantee.....but, if they win, they are on to the State Championship on Saturday just before graduation on Sunday.  Very exciting around here!  Hope for a little sun...or at least no rain!!

I have included three poems.  Two from Jane Hirshfield that I love--"Optimism", and "The Envoy", and one of mine that I am working on about that picture.  I think Jane H's poems also capture a great deal of what I'm feeling these days.  Both the feeling that some huge emotion keeps raising its head that I can't always name, as I contemplate Will's leaving, and my hope to be resilient through all of this and able to embrace all this resinous, unretractable change!  Enjoy!

To My Son at Eighteen

I didn’t think I knew how to hope

for the man you have become

when this picture was taken.

Then I looked at it again,

all these years later.

We are both so young here,

You’re must be two, I’m in my

early thirties, and I’m holding you

naked against me, your thumb

as usual, in your mouth,

your heart to mine. 

We are framed by grey stairs rising

above us, a palm trunk at your back,

a beam of the stairs at mine.

The lush Florida world stays

slightly out of focus behind us,

soft light except on my shoulder

away from the camera,

a patch of brightness drawing the eye

into the circle our bodies make.

The white of your baseball cap

turned backwards on your head

and my white shirt parallel

again the rising steps,

and focus the scene on our

faces, inches apart.

My hair touching yours,

colors matching perfectly,

we seem to whisper the world

to each other;

our silent language loud.

In the intervening wash of years,

Time has tumbled us like white water

over pebbles, flinging us forward,

driving us into a rock or two,

releasing us changed and gleaming,

But in this photo we are anchored

forever in this mute moment

together.

As I look, I can see the man you are now

so clearly in your boy eyes. 

I can feel your goodness and wisdom,

even pain in the heft of your body,

and somehow you’ve always known mine.

As if we knew then what we know now.

As if we have always been telling each other,

that through it all,

I am here.

Optimism (Jane Hirshfield)

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the  light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

The Envoy (Jane Hirshfield)

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something -- terror? happiness? grief? --
entered and then left my body.

No knowing how it came in.
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.