March 30, 2012

It's dark and too early for seeing much more than the darkness.  you have to imagine clouds, and shadows, the trees in their new green.  Except for the normal noises, refrigerator, some low hum that cycles from outside, and I wish I knew what was making that particular noise, it's quiet, too early for school buses or many cars, the ordinary 5:30 truck will not pass by for long slow minutes yet.  A morning of possibilities, as every morning is, possible it will rain, possible something new will be noticed, possible to enjoy the very routine things that will happen, and some things that are not routine.

I did not know that Adrienne Rich died on Tuesday until Dawn sent me one of her poems yesterday as a kind of memorial.  She was 82 and one of the first women to write with great honesty about a woman's life.  Her early poems were formal, feminine, and rather like a shy girl trying to please the people she admired with the loveliness and delicacy of her work, which even then could not hide the bite of a mind already questioning the need to appear so . . . formal and feminine and . . . delicate.  As her work progressed, she began more and more to examine the lives of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend, poet.  She worked to see things from outside the box of expectations society had for women, to examine life the way it had always been, the way it was now, and the way it could be.  She wrote of how she did not always feel what the world would expect a mother to feel, that sometimes she was afraid, or angry, or felt trapped by mothering, that not all of her feelings for her children were "acceptable" and so made it possible for mothers who had those feelings as well to acknowledge them.  She wrote poems of protest, of the will not to go to war, of examining why we did, and how it was possible that we could not go and still survive.  In her work, so many ordinary things were made extraordinary, a woman's skill with embroidery making decorative screens showed us even such an ordinary "womanly" task could hold depths that even a "pretty" poem could not hide.   Two people sitting in a car on a beach, their relationship growing silent and distant as the Canada geese flying beyond them, so quiet a poem you almost feel as if you should sneak away before they notice you watching.  So, for today, I, too, would like to remember the poet and her work.  She showed me so many things, but especially that any thing you felt, anything that you experienced was something you could write about, not just the things you thought might be accpeted, but anything.  Her courage lit the way for many poets to make their own path, not just follow one that was already laid out for them.  And her legacy of work and courage will continue to light that way into a future she won't see but will be place she would examine with that strong light, and we will continue to use her work as a lens to see what is possible.

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich

Yes, we make things disappear, people and places and ways of life, this is not a Russian poem, it happens here.  Yet, there is still beauty here, people still listen, and yes, it's possible to start with talking about trees and move on to other things, to what is happening in the daily lives of people here in this country, that not all ways of making things disappear are happening elsewhere.  This poem reminds me of the bristlecone pines, the oldest living things, and that the park service will not tell which is the oldest living tree, for fear of someone destroying it for that reason, and what does that say about the world on both sides of making that decision, the world of people that want to protect what is unique and vulnerable, and the world of people who would go out of their way to destroy something for the same reason.  It could say that both are human, that both impulses are in all of us, that it's all about choices, we make them every day, over and over and it's those choices that tell who we are.  In times like these, we are still listening to what is in our hearts, and poets are still writing down what is in their hearts and in the world, making their observations, their choices, so we can make ours.