August 21, 2012

This morning on the way to the market, no, we did not get around to going yesterday, there was a huge, soft, white cloud, almost transparent covering most of the sky, making the most peculiar light.  Even though my eyes are still unreliable, need to get the other one done, the light made everything look very vivid, the green this bright dark color, the blue of the sky at the edges of the cloud this deep vibrant blue.  I took off the very dark sunglasses I have been wearing and found the colors still very strange.  Almost like looking though some kind of lens that both brightened and developed colors to their maximum saturation, a really strange and almost magical light.  It did not last long as the cloud was thin and fragile and soon dissipated to the usual summer brightness.  Though it didn't last, like lots of beautiful things, it's a lovely memory now.

Several years ago, Dawn and I were writing poems together over a couple of months. One time we collected these lines from other writings and tried to use them to make poems of our own.  I remember my lines came from a newspaper article about Arthur Ashe and another one about Charles Darwin.  I don't remember where Dawn's came from, but I found them in a folder where I did not find the poem I was looking for.  I had written several things from those lines and found I liked some of what I had written.   I worked on those lines again, thinking there was something pleasurable about using other people's phrases, almost like a framework, to build something new.  The "borrowed lines" are in italics; the other lines are the original ones from me.

Open Lines

The scary part goes like this . . .

That there is always something

you don’t see coming,

excruciating and profoundly scarring,

you are blind-sided by ignorance

by not knowing what you need to know,

watching a giant empty thing topple to the ground

right in front of you so you can’t miss it

so there is nothing to do but live with it

vulnerable, exposed, it bears the impossible weight of expectations

of wanting to be incorporated, part of your

vocabulary, a daily mechanism held in the heart,

the sum of a thousand tiny complications

it longs to be filled with discoveries,

drenched with every kind of light.

Transformation is change from one thing to another,

but it started as nothing,

falling through the world you never suspected

landing at your feet ready to become something other

It was you who broke the new wood

you harvested to begin the work of change

and breaking it you began to recognize it.

Now is a time for carving,

to pick up the tools and the salvaged pieces,

to make something of nothing you ever wanted..

I like the idea of making something of salvaged pieces, of nothing you might have wanted, of taking the pieces from other writers and making something new of them, like building a box to hold new thoughts, new memories.  We all stumble across our ignorance every day, we confront things that scare us, things that frustrate and anger us.  We understand the world will never be perfect, but that it is preferable to take whatever tools we can hold and make something.   Even the giant emptiness we sometimes contain does want to be drenched with light, even the odd vibrant light that comes from being half-obscured, that will come brighter later.  We just have to be willing to do what we can, change what we must. take those tools and begin making.  That's why it's so satisfying to create something, to take beads and make a ring, to take words and make a poem, to take wood and make a home for books, even making clean clothes, polishing the furniture, making a meal, all satisfying on some level for making order and beauty.

There is work enough for us all, the making keeps holding the world together, keeps replacing destruction, filling up that emptiness with meaning.