Alexandersmap

    Category: Poetry

    • Making the Sun Run

      But at my back I always hear
      Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
      And yonder all before us lie
      Deserts of vast eternity…

      Let us roll all our strength and all
      Our sweetness up into one ball,
      And tear our pleasures with rough strife
      Through the iron gates of life:
      Thus, though we cannot make our sun
      Stand still, yet we will make him run.
      – Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

      Spending time ought to come with a warning label. I’m revisiting this poem from Marvell. I’d first written about it before the pandemic, when the world seemed quite normal, if maddeningly out of sorts. Since then, well, we all know how things have gone.

      So what do we do with this hard-won knowledge? We have our own time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Maybe we have a few years more or less than the average, but what’s it worth to you anyway? Another trip around the sun and vast eternity ahead for every last one of us. Make the most of life now, while there’s still some of that time for you.

      Today is the day before the promise of another year more. I’m getting a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine with a hopeful eye towards the future. A future where we might run with the sun, chasing every day to its extraordinary end. Sporting while we may. The sun doesn’t stand still. And neither should we.

    • Picking Up the Pieces

      Sometimes it takes darkness and the
      sweet
      confinement of your aloneness
      to learn
      anything and anyone
      that does not bring you alive

      is too small for you.
      – David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

      I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me and hearing it anew in my head. It’s always been a breakup song, that part is easy. But what I didn’t hear, not really hear, is the background singers rising chorus of “think of me” as Rundgren stops singing and the band reaches a crescendo accompanying the singing. At the end all that’s left is the band abruptly stopping, and all that’s left is a quiet, uncertain “think of me“.

      And then I understood grief and loss a bit better than I had before.

      It’s always been there, lingering behind the brave front and the moving on and the figuring things out. The feeling of abandonment in breaking up with someone, or losing someone who had a gravitational pull that compelled you to orbit them for what seemed a blissful forever. That person literally brought you alive and changed you forever. Until the spell was broken in loss. Until your identity was shattered in a moment.

      I heard it in my mother’s voice and in my own anger when a repaired grandfather clock broke apart again, betraying us and our memories in its fragility. I saw it in my wife’s welling eyes when a song that reminds her of her sister comes up on the playlist. I’ve heard it in countless voices over the last year. I’ve seen it in eyes locked in on my own above masks that hide everything but the reality of what is missing. Now and forever.

      Son sometimes it may seem dark
      But the absence of the light is a necessary part
      Just know, that you’re never alone
      You can always come back home
      – Jason Mraz, 93 Million Miles

      I grieve for the grief of others while holding my own close to the vest, where it leaks out in unguarded moments. Forever moving on, without really getting away from the missing part. Now and then it catches you in a broken grandfather clock and you know you can’t pick up all the pieces. All you can do is try to put it together again as best you can.

      And know that you’re never alone.

    • Whispers from a Dead Poet

      There is no dusk to be,
      There is no dawn that was,
      Only there’s now, and now,
      And the wind in the grass.

      Days I remember of
      Now in my heart, are now;
      Days that I dream will bloom
      White the peach bough.

      Dying shall never be
      Now in the windy grass;
      Now under shooken leaves
      Death never was.
      – Archibald MacLeish, An Eternity

      I confess to not really knowing much about Archibald MacLeish, who died in Boston exactly 39 years ago yesterday, the day I started thinking about Archibald MacLeish at all. It started the night before, watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway and latching on to his name as someone Hemingway hung out with in Spain, as someone I ought to look into. Much of his poetry is available online, and I waded through a strong dose of it. And then I read his biography:

      “His mother was a Hillard, a family that, as Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren reveals, MacLeish was fond of tracing back through its New England generations to Elder Brewster, the minister aboard the Mayflower.” – Poetry Foundation Biography of Archibald MacLeish

      It seems I’m a distant relative of Mr. MacLeish, both of us pointing to Elder Brewster as a connection to the Mayflower. I don’t dwell on the Mayflower connection – who cares if you were the first European to settle here or the millionth? What matters is how you behaved when you got here. I think on the whole Brewster settled his accounts well. And MacLeish lived a life of consequence himself. So how does one keep up with the relatives?

      What do you make of meeting a long dead relative through his work on the very day he passed 39 years before? Serendipity? Whispers? Or just history and happenstance capturing my imagination and carrying it away once again, as it’s done so many times before?

      It doesn’t matter so much, does it? We have the advantage of now, and now. Until we lose it. Until we are whispers ourselves, hardly heard in the swirling wind in the grass. Days we remember and dreams of the future matter little compared to the urgent matter of now. And what we might do with it.

    • Where a Road Will Go

      What if this road, that has held no surprises
      these many years, decided not to go
      home after all; what if it could turn
      left or right with no more ado
      than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
      were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
      that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
      a new shape from the contours beneath?
      And if it chose to lay itself down
      in a new way; around a blind corner,
      across hills you must climb without knowing
      what’s on the other side; who would not hanker
      to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
      a story’s end, or where a road will go?
      – Sheenagh Pugh, What If This Road

      That anticipation of what’s around the bend or over the next rise is the fuel of exploration. Getting out there, seeing what there is to see, chancing upon magic and the mysterious, that’s the stuff of life. And it’s what we anticipate in the faraway places we might visit after the world opens up again.

      But the alternate path, the shake of routine to try a new way, that holds plenty of potential too, doesn’t it? I should think so. The last year has proven the point: when you can’t cross borders, the world down that path you’ve ignored for years looks pretty inviting. That dusty little corner with a story to tell is more informative in its proximity than those extraordinary places that remain tantalizingly out of reach.

      The last year has a silver lining, and it’s learning our own backyard better than we ever thought possible. Those castles and islands and mountains that call to us are just around the corner too. But for now let’s embrace the road we can travel on today, and see just where it will go. And where we might go.

    • What is Precious

      What is precious
      inside us does not
      care to be known
      by the mind
      in ways that diminish
      its presence.
      -David Whyte, The Winter of Listening

      A storm pivots around New England, sideways rain one minute, bright sunshine the next. Cold wind pushing the swirling mix about, demanding attention. I step outside and look for the rainbow that must be out there somewhere. Nothing but icy rain greets me. I quickly abort the mission and hustle back inside.

      Some days rainbows appear out of seemingly nowhere. Some days conditions diminish the very possibility. Likewise, bold ideas come to us when we’re quietly resolved and ready to hear them. Our most precious and colorful thoughts are sometimes evasive. Maybe it just isn’t their time. Or maybe it isn’t ours.

      When the student is ready the master will appear. If we are open to hearing the call. If we open our minds to possibility. The funny thing about rainbows is that they always appear directly opposite of the sun.

    • Good Fences

      There where it is we do not need the wall:
      He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
      My apple trees will never get across
      And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
      He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
      Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
      If I could put a notion in his head:
      ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
      Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
      Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
      What I was walling in or walling out,
      And to whom I was like to give offense.
      – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

      It happened once, and it seemed awkward at the time. The neighbor walked between his fence and my fence to retrieve golf balls he’d been chipping beyond his fence. He quietly picked them up, we waved at each other and the moment ended. Except that it didn’t really end. The neighbor now works from home in a pandemic on conference calls all day, head set on, chipping golf balls back and forth in his yard. And so this scene is repeated several times a day.

      You might be wondering why there are two fences up. Well, that’s a good question with a reasonable answer. The folks that originally put up the neighbor’s fence put it up four feet inside the property line, and had it curved slightly to follow the tree line. A few years later we got a black lab who liked to explore the neighborhood on his terms. We installed a black chain link fence around the perimeter of our yard to discourage this, thinking it blended in with the woods beyond. The dog was mostly contained, the trees between the fences obscured the unusual nature of two fences running parallel to each other. Mission accomplished! Who thinks of Arnold Palmer straying into your personal space at moments like that?

      Fast forward fifteen years and the brush and small trees are cleared out. The neighbors have changed over twice. The dog has since passed. All that remains is the cold reality of a pair of fences quietly marking time. And the frequent moments of the golfer gathering his golf balls while on his conference calls on the edge of our back yard. A back yard that for twenty years offered the illusion of privacy with the woods beyond.

      It’s my own fault, really. I mentioned in passing one day that the land between was his, and Kilroy has since taken great pains to stake his claim to it with errant golf balls and purposeful walks to scoop them up. It seems passive aggressive to me, like running a lawn tractor in your driveway when your neighbor is having a birthday party. Wait, that’s him too…

      If this seems like a justification for building a taller fence, well, it may be. Wouldn’t that be something, two privacy fences running parallel to each other along the yard? Frost’s old neighbor would say good fences make good neighbors. And Frost would rightly question, just what are we walling in and walling out?

    • Like Stone Nestles on Stone

      “Poetry is language against which we have no defenses.” – David Whyte

      I’ve been spending a bit of time with David Whyte lately, catching up on words I ought to have read long ago but wasn’t ready to hear. I was a different person then, more closed to the world despite the outward bravado. You learn who you are through the windy path of words flowing from you onto the page. And then you set them free to find an audience ready for that particular jumble of words to add to their own foundation.

      Let the words join
      one to another
      the way stone nestles on stone,
      the way water just leaves
      and goes to the sea,
      the way your promise
      breathes and belongs
      with every other promise
      the world has ever made.

      Now, leave them to go on,
      let your words
      carry their own life,
      without you, let the promise
      go with the river.
      Have faith. Walk away.
      – David Whyte, To Break a Promise (Cúnga Fheichin)

      For me releasing the words into the wild is a form of building my own foundation. Each place visited, each poem immersed in, and each mountain climbed is like stone nestled on stone joined together just so as a work very much in progress. Building a life out of adventurous conspiracies and schemes, written down and sent on their way out into the world for you to see.

      “The act of writing anything worthwhile always takes place at that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet… This break of the boundary between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our self is where the rich vein of beauty and insight become a reward in and of itself, and where the words suddenly seem to belong to everyone.” – David Whyte, from the forward of Essentials

      Experience and words create that thing that is other than our selves. It’s the building of that puzzle that is our self one piece at a time. What seems a chaotic pile on the table slowly forms into a picture of who we are. The funny thing about a puzzle is you finish and throw it all back in the box and build another picture. You can’t build another part of your identity until you clear the table of the old one.

      So which is it? Are words and experience stacked together like a stone wall or foundation, laid to be resilient, or like a puzzle built very much the same way but temporary in nature? That’s one of those forest for the trees questions, isn’t it? The universe views the stacked stones and the stack of words the way it views those jigsaw puzzles on the table. Everything is temporal. Words are like carbon, momentarily ours and one day something else entirely.

      I believe we ought to keep stacking words and building new puzzles, but to do it for the joy of the process. To set those words free to fly on their own. Scattered throughout the world to land where they may. To that meeting place between aloneness and intimacy.

    • Reaching Beyond Yourself

      Just beyond
      yourself.

      It’s where
      you need
      to be.

      Half a step
      into
      self-forgetting
      and the rest
      restored
      by what
      you’ll meet.
      – David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself

      Reaching beyond yourself can be frustrating, humbling and sometimes humiliating. The ego wants to be in a happier place, warmly wrapped up in comfortable self-talk and stretching just far enough… but not too far. But that’s not where the growth is. That’s not where you’ll find your limits.

      If there’s a phrase that seems to be common amongst the overachieving set in this world, it’s “leaning in”. You don’t lean in when you’re just standing there – you’ll fall right over. You lean in when you encounter some resistance. Resistance appears when we challenge other people’s ideas about what is far enough beyond themselves, but more often than not it’s our own ideas on the matter. Why challenge the status quo? Where you are is pretty good, right?

      This will be posted on a Monday morning. Monday’s serve as a threshold of sorts – an entry into another work week. And another day we’re all blessed with the gift of living on the planet. Leaning in to the work ahead, the task at hand, will soon fill us with plenty of resistance to lean in on. But are you leaning in the right direction or simply being pushed a certain way? Just where do you need to be anyway?

      Setting your course implies moving beyond your current location – moving beyond yourself. Moving beyond implies self-forgetting who you once were and meeting your new self as you progress towards this new place. How many successful people tackle imposter syndrome? All but the most narcissistic and delusional. It’s normal to question where you’re going.

      Most of us rarely think in terms of self-forgetting, but we encounter it all the time. How many jobs seem to dead-end because your coworkers thought of you as whatever you were when you began working with them instead of what you would become? Sometimes you have to leave a company or an industry to get beyond the stalled beliefs others have of who you are to grow. But what of our own self-beliefs?

      Becoming whatever you’ll be, just beyond yourself, begins with leaning in to the resistance inside yourself and moving in that direction you know in your gut you ought to be moving in. The wonder lies in the transformation of who you believe you are as you move beyond that resistance. A move into something entirely different. Towards your new self.

    • A Walk in Dense Fog

      The dense fog presses up against the glass, tapping on the window lightly, wanting to come inside. Or calling me outside. I listen and layer up for a walk to the bay. I know it’s out there, if only from memory. And walk slowly to the water.

      The fog comes
      on little cat feet.
      It sits looking
      over harbor and city
      on silent haunches
      and then moves on.
      Carl Sandburg, Fog

      The birds carry on their morning song, but not so many today. Early still. What does 98% humidity sound like? It sounds like it looks; muted and disorienting. I close my eyes and let my bearings reset. I’m the only human outside this morning. Or possibly one of thousands – who can tell in the gray billowing dance?

      Down by the water, surprising wave action on a still morning. The bay is restless, like a sleeping child with a fever. Fog blurs hard lines. Instead I focus on what it amplifies. The lapping sounds of the waves slapping on the beach. A loon hidden from view out there somewhere calling its kind. Reaching me.

      Walking up from the shore, the sweet smell of dune grass requests a moment of my time. I gladly linger and thank the grass for the invitation. The air feels different as you walk away from the beach. The waves recede, birdsong grows and the world brightens. Dawn is approaching even as the fog asserts its hold on the world.

      Much later, fog lifting, you see the details fill in. I admit I liked the ambiguity of the fog just a bit more. If only for a momentary change in perspective. And, ironically, the clarity it brought. Swirling in the darkness by the bay.

    • Living That Last Word

      See with every turning day,
      how each season wants to make a child
      of you again, wants you to become
      a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,
      watch now, how it weathers you to a
      testing
      in the tried and true, tells you
      with each falling leaf, to leave and slip
      away,
      even from that branch that held you,
      to go when you need to, to be courageous,
      to be like that last word you’d want to say
      before you leave the world.
      – David Whyte, Coleman’s Bed

      We all move through the world at our pace, seeing things as our mind opens our eyes to them. I could never have read this poem ten years ago and seen it the way I do today. I wonder at who I might be in another ten years, should I be so bold as to expect the time.

      We all transform over time and place, in each conversation and with every realization. We get consumed with thoughts of whether we do enough or become enough, we reach a point where we gently push such self-talk away or let it eat us alive. But the question isn’t whether we’ve done enough at all. It’s simply, have we lived enough?

      When you’re lying on your death bed someday 50 years from now or maybe tonight, what will your last word in this earth be? What are the last thoughts racing through your fading mind? Will you smile in your last breath or will a tear form in your eye? That person in that last moment wants you to be courageous today.