In Which We Occasionally Find Our Way

Occasionally it feels like we’ve found our autumn rhythm, each morning creeping chillier and chillier towards dawn, the first golden leaves on the cottonwoods, the river suddenly dry after a six month season of trickling through the willows.  Occasionally it seems like we are in balance–a dinner planned more than 1/2 an hour before mealtime, the fruit tidily preserved in jars or the freezer and no longer swarmed in fruit flies on the porch, the homework done in time, the instruments practiced, the press release mailed. We make it to the mountains, barely. We make it to bed and dream what dreams we can before the next morning arrives, a sliver more darkness edging the new day.

Extraordinary things happen: A book release at the bookstore with a crowd that laughs and cries in all the right places, that celebrate with me the triumph of having translated the inner world to the page, to poetry. Unexpected things take place, like a correspondence with college students in Los Angeles studying Refugia followed with a video conversation that leaves me stunned at the wisdom and compassion of young poets, of young people. How fortunate I am to have such readers as these. They ask me about the making of poems, but also about hope, and about making art when the world seems to be ending. They ask about the ways in which generations merge–mother into daughter into grandmother. They ask about the proximity of beauty to death, and about how landscape informs language, creates meaning. They want to know about vulnerability. I have a great deal to say in reply.

I think about those questions, which are slight variations of the same ones I am always asking. I hold them lightly, but don’t let go. They swirl around inside me, make their way onto the page. Now and then, a poem happens. Not a lot has changed, really. I’m folding the laundry, jogging down the dry river trail, sweeping the floor. A couple mornings each week I drive in the darkness to the hospital to nurse those who are unwell. I light the candle, occasionally, at the dinner table. I say my silent prayers.