Correspondence

I love lighthouses, shafts of light tilting into water, scanning slowly back and forth.

Some of them radiating several planes of foggy light, ghostly windmills.

Some with thin beams, piercing as the North Star.

All built on the farthest edge. Lonelihood and sanctity.

Lighthouses connect the elements: fire, water, earth, air. And the unacknowledged element: mystery.

***

The other day in a Zoom poetry class, I told a student she seemed to belong in a lighthouse. Her eyes widened. I’ve always wanted to live in a lighthouse! she said. In every story I write, there is a lighthouse.  

It has been a magic class—“Mystery” and “Imagination” at the heart. On the first day we read “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz—a short lyric poem of couplets till the final stanza:

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

745.7 miles away, my aunt was writing a card to me. Later, I slid it out of the envelope: soft greyish white lighthouse, wind-swept beach-grasses, glimpse of slate-blue water the exact measure of my thumb.

I flip through my journal: I’m restless in these rooms. I want to be outside with water and light, away from this human condition, a lighthouse, shafts of light leaning into water, one orange eye steady on the waves…I’ll lean into any softness you proffer.

This morning a lighthouse appears on my screen saver. The water the sharp blue of tears.

As a child I’d often study Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.” A field so goldish-green it’s bronze. Her pink dress faded white with sun. Recently, Christina and her world appeared in a poem I was writing. One week later, a student from the lighthouse class wrote his own Christina poem: “that pink, like faded lobster shells.”[i]

It happens all the time, a third student said, especially when I’m reading a book. I’ll read a word like ‘siren’ and a siren will sound.

***

When I heard that Jean Valentine had died, I walked through the snow to my writing shed, insulated by sheep wool and plywood, and sat in the rocker, Shirt in Heaven on my lap, Door in the Mountain on the floor, Break the Glass and Lucy on the electric furnace. Jean, I said aloud, Jean. Outside my window, a great horned owl hooted softly.

How often have we read and written poems from and into these connections that help us feel the world as coherent; we are unified. How seldom we are awake to these connections.

Walking through the thin whitish-pink drifts of the cherry blossoms in my neighborhood, I remember years ago, when in a fit of exuberance, I began running through the falling blossoms on campus, entreating my students to run with me. Only one or two heeded the call, but I took the hand of a graduating student whom I’d known since her freshman year, and we ran in wide circles around the field. 

Once I’m home, she calls. It has been five years.

The world is connected, sometimes in unfathomable-feeling ways, but it is connected, connective; we are part of a universal anatomy that includes memory and blossoms, lighthouses and owls. Only when attentive and responsive can we feel the depth and breadth of this belonging. In all our feisty separateness, it is thus. Coincidence, déjà vu vu, telepathy, connectedness, “for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

***

Within days of being invited to blog for Harriet Books, composer Harriet Steinke invited me to collaborate on a musical piece inspired by “Hymnal,” a poem in my book Pretty Tripwire. My favorite childhood book was Harriet the Spy. I went to the pet store this morning; the cashier’s name was Harriet. I’d avoided reading the Harriet blog posts prior to mine; when I’d finished writing the first one, I took a gander. Not only did Alice Notley write something about voices, but I wrote about Alice Notley! And she’d included a postscript—as had I.

***

In my front garden, near clusters of pale-yellow daffodils and delft-blue Hyacinth, three marsh marigolds grow. I wish they’d cover the whole yard, I tell my son as we drive to the

Park where dirt trails twine down to the fast, urgent White River. We follow a trail we’d never taken, a trail closer to the river, narrower. Several steps in and I stop: carpets of marsh marigolds spread their gold all around us, creeping down into the river and off into the forest.

***

Today, on the phone I told Doug that his voice—vivid, energetic—carried the Pacific ocean. Thanks, he said, and a breeze just blew in from that ocean onto my balcony!—I’m sending it to you…. After our phone call, I meet Melody on Zoom for our weekly talk about her poems. As we sign off, she says I wish you a breeze from the lake.

***

How are we to read anyone, teach anyone, love anyone, heal anything without acknowledging first and foremost how connected—vividly or invisibly—we are.

***

My friend says maybe you could write the second blog as you write letters to me—.

I tell her I’m writing about all the connections, oft-overlooked, unheeded, that are ever-pulsing, vibrating around us—how easily we forget our interconnectedness—that if we could keep this in mind, we might not pull so hard, push so fast—. The world could feel gentler.

And how I wanted to write about poetry as quotidian—poetry springing up everywhere.

So, here is my letter to her: the moon couldn’t find its own shape tonight—somewhere between gibbous and half or gibbous and full, it hung there feeling misshapen—.

An old rabbit appeared between the shadowy hanks of winter goldenrod and the sunporch, but it didn’t freeze the way so many rabbits do. This one paused—open to possibilities.

Walk a few yards from my driveway and you’ll see first a wind-blown daffodil, then, cast on a large stone, its shadow moving like a bird in flight…and the sounds guinea pigs make are like birds when they’re not like insects or whales. The scariest sounds I’ve heard today: roosters, straining and angry and despondent.

I’ve hung one painting in this shed where I write to you: my friend Richard’s work—a small framed painting of water and stone, some distant trees. I live in that painting. When I open the door to the shed, I look at it and feel safe—as in: I am not trapped here. As in: there’s the microcosm of my being as being, not being as doing, and so, there is the microcosm of my soul. I pick up the broom and sweep, then read a book.

I read a book aloud to myself in the writing shed, in the shadows. I look out each window to make sure: honeysuckle branches there, moon through dormer, rustle of nightbirds, a distant gate here. I imagine sweet woodruff, myrtle, ferns growing beneath. Those I have planted.

To be tender, a person has to tend. I tend all over the place. I tend so much I barely have skin. Tendering is a softening.

My sons come into my writing shed. One with his novel, one with his song. I sit very close to the floor on a burnt orange pillow chair. One candle might be burning, several are in waiting, a dark wick is a closed eye. My children love the writing shed. Books line one side, one side for music, one side for the field, one side for the creek. Sometimes they bolt in, sometimes they knock. Sad I’ve seen them, sobbing too, or bursting forth a wild joy.