My 103

You inspire me, my sister-poet, to make
some use of 103.
Is it mean to say,
lying here against pillows,
that my mind goes back and back
in that silly cliche
and deems my life good?
Is it mean to remember my own daddy
in all his best light,
buying me rats (why?)
and helping my little hands cup
the violet gray of his pigeons?
Is it mean to feel I could float
up, up, above my beloved fields
into an infinite love?
Is it wrong, in light of your unhappiness,
to think I could die happy,
having found, at last,
that good is the most real of all?

Honoring My Age

My students like to ask my age. How to answer this is a bit of a conundrum. "How old do you think I am?" often results in an amusing array of numbers--anything from teens to sixties. Sometimes I wonder if I should educate them socially by explaining that asking a grown woman her age is not considered polite. On the other hand, why should I perpetuate our culture's idea that increased age is shameful? Ask a gap-toothed first grader how old he is and he joyously announces it to all interested parties. The honest pride and satisfaction of a newly minted ten-year-old does the inquirer's heart good.  What happens to us that, after we shuffle into adulthood, we begin to hedge, rebuff, or lie? Why are we ashamed to be the part of ourselves which is our age?

I suppose the most obvious answer is our young nation's love of youth, beauty, and energy. But it isn't only that. Young adults might hesitate to broadcast their age because they don't want to seem unqualified or naive. Older adults, I suspect, may not like to match themselves up with preconceived notions of stodgy middle age or elderly dotage. "I don't feel like I'm ____ years old," we often say. But truthfully, how we feel now is the actual feeling of our age for us--not whatever idea we had attached to it in our head. For myself, about to tip into my thirties, my deepest sense of discomfort concerning my age is a sense of wasted time and unreached milestones. Yes, that hurts--that sober reflection tinged with shame: what do I have to show for this?

Yet each year is personally meaningful to me. I lived each one! Each carries its own manifestations of joys, wonders, and sorrows. Each tastes of particular regrets and restorations; each offers its own hue--some darker, some brighter, all a part of the weaving of a life--my life. Cresting a year indicates a certain accomplishment. Goodness, traversing 24 hours can be quite a feat! I've heard of birthdays taking on peculiar meaning for cancer survivors. When you realize, starkly, that you might not have made it here, somehow the number becomes meaningful as an old scar, or first snow footprint, or a whole new journal to write in. In light of certain darknesses, I am glad to have achieved my age. In some moods, I feel a bit of fierce victory about it.

For the rest of my life, I want to be pleased and grateful to be my age. In light of this, I have taken to answering a simple question with a simple answer:

"Ms. Elena, how old are you?"

"I'm twenty-nine."

See, it's not that hard.

The Wind Blows Wherever It Pleases

I do not wish to forget                                      
the great organ music--
the pipe organ music
in my little white car
rushing through
horizon to horizon
windmills!
White windmills--
space-age sleek;
hard wings stemmed
into the sky;
each arm outreaching
the semi truck scurry below--
in their rows, they mark positions
in a grand ballet.
They will not disobey
the direction of the wind.
What joy to be a pipe
or blade alive, athrob,
all open-throated song
of the Spirit.

Puzzling

Our lives are like
a new puzzle knocked
from the table's end,
spilled from the box
and scattered
by an exuberant toddler.

Some of us have more pieces
still clumped together:
 loving parents, money for school
(or supper, at least),
the thought that God may
not always frown--
but we must, all of us,
still wonder, at times.
What parts of us went missing
that day the world broke?

Poets and Poetry

I have impressions of poets (and their kin) circling my brain tonight: Denise Levertov's Caedmon, called from his loneliness into the surprise of words and belonging; Jane Kenyon and Sylvia Plath, who both felt depression, both married fellow poets, yet sang quite different songs; and Richard Wilbur's mother-in-law, Edna Ward, who was not a poet, and who died with "the thin hand reaching out, the last word love." I am tired, have a weekend trip starting tomorrow, and am (unfortunately) no student of these poets, anyway, so I'm not going to say anything profound about them. Still, as one of their very little poet sisters, I am fascinated by their examples of what we do with our poetry and our lives.

In his poem "Cottage Street, 1953," Wilbur describes a moment of Edna Ward's hospitality. Though what we see of her life seems common place enough, she lives 88 years of "grace and courage." Her guest Sylvia Plath's tortured life stands in stark contrast within the poem. Plath (who ultimately took her own life) is "condemned to live" for now. She "Shall study a decade, as she must, / To state at last her brilliant negative / In poems free and helpless and unjust" (lines 26-28).  This characterization of her work haunts me. How terrible for one's life work to embody a "brilliant negative." (As a side note: I don't know how fair Wilbur's judgment of Plath is, and I feel empathy for her suffering and sadness that she lost her battle--one that I know is brutal.)

I don't want to state any "brilliant negative." Nor do I want to stand aside from humanity in general. Some conventional knowledge paints artistic types as extreme individualists, a bit at odds with ordinary folk. Poets can be observers and recorders of the outer world or cartographers of the self. But what I'd like for myself and my poetic endeavors, is to bring a kind of hospitality in the midst of fractured life. I'd like the general effect to be some kind of knitting together. (That was a horrible, vague sentence, but it's too late at night for a manifesto.) If I had to choose between a life of loving engagement with others and the ability to create poems, I hope I would choose the former. But surely poems themselves can be a thin hand reaching out and words whispering love, love in a thousand sharp or subtle ways.

Going / Back

The present, is it like performing a
recital piece? Or like the way one knits
a scarf? Lithe armor wards the cold away,
each link a piece of all the whole, no slits
to break the one long thread of notes or yarn.
So much the same, with yet a difference--
a song must not be stopped, must always yearn
inside each dancing now, the dissonance
of error slid from mind already drenched
in this next moment. Knitting is not so.
One old, forgotten stitch means long rows wrenched
to crimped string till the cloth is whole. Each soul's
agape with stitches dropped and melodies
and hunger for the hope that never dies.

Something

You can do a little--

add a little understanding,

a little bald-faced tenderness,

a little pale blue, pinking-sheared beauty--

in the midst of a general unraveling.

Here, Hoping

I'm sitting at Mom's place, relaxed in the flowered chair, light from the round room east window glowing through the potted plant's leaves. A sparrow chirps outside, wind ruffles the tree branches, and a distant lawnmower shades the air with its hum. My heart feels a little sad and lost. I love it here. After the city's constant ruckus--the space and quietness, the layers of bird song, the big tranquil sky--seem almost alien in their wonderment and beauty.

Yesterday I pulled weeds from the back flowerbed. Beyond me, miles of fields spread to the dusty blue horizon anchored here and there by clumps of trees, blue green against the yellow green carpet of corn seedlings. Barn swallows and other birds zipped and flitted over the field. Three brown thrashers landed in the grass near the house. A wren investigated a birdhouse my brother made to hang in the ash tree. I love it here, and I cannot stay, and I no longer belong.

Even since despair began to dog me, I've remained convinced--deep down in the same place where I know that God exists and is personal and good--that there is true beauty and goodness sprinkled throughout God's creation. It can be found in stories, in music and landscapes, in wrinkle lines of a kindness and humor, in children's belly laughter, in the red of apples at the grocery store, in a pleasant greeting. It's all over, and sometimes we see it. I am convinced of this, but I struggle to accept my place in it.

In Psalm 139, David tells God, "I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well" (v. 14, ESV). Such a clear example of counting oneself a part of God's wonderful works, and yet it is so difficult to embrace that truth, to relax my soul into it and trust it will hold the weight. That's the thing about hope. Though necessary and wonderful, it is bitter indeed when it seems to betray. The fear of failed hope turns the act of hoping into almost a physical pain.

"The Lord is gracious and merciful," David says, "slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all he has made" (Psalm 145:8-9, ESV). I sense God beckoning me forward, coaxing me to relax my clenched grip and embrace the sweep of change, to follow with Him far, come what may. And from my dark corner, my small voice replies, "I can't. I've tried before, and see where I am? The same hole. I always fall into this pit again. Always. And I am so tired, I would just rather be done, please."

And so, I seem to come again to the choice--the choice to believe what I cannot see, to trust God rather than the messages of my distorted perception. But perhaps that is not quite right. Perhaps my alternative is less a cold blooded, iron-willed choice, and more a cry for help. After all, "The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them" (Psalm 145:18-19, ESV). Someday, I hope, I shall see the beauty here, too.

Pilgrim's "Un (Titled)"

I'm honored to share this link to a poem on my sister's blog. The lives of several young women she met during outreach to Uganda inspired this lovely poem, "UN (Titled)."

Botanic Gardens, Spring 2013

The magic was
light through petal glass--
Easter basket strewn on grass,
a clutch of modest lamps,
crocus cups of sunshine.
The magic was
the daffodils alight,
the confluence of
fragile flower skin
and glory.
The magic is
the inner opening,
rejection of
the tight, dark place's
cocooning bud,
folded in, layer on layer
against itself like a preborn,
knees and arms
tucked tight to chest.
The magic is
the quiet reception
of sunshine.

Butterfly View

The grace behind a caterpillar gait,
the gauze-thick stillness muffling dying
while hung from one thin twig--the slice, the break--
You are the sun's embrace of these wet wings,
and You the warmth, the warning: "Do not touch."
The architect of each flight's filament,
dust-wonder wings You coax aloft to brush
the sea-deep substance of the firmament.
Invisible, You hold both flake and sky,
Your nearness much too large to understand,
the warp and woof through soul and body
spread out beyond the last round curve of land.

In You, our living, moving, being,
our wild winging, almost seeing.

Rethinking Thinking Badly Of Myself

After another round with negative self-talk, I find my attention drawn to Ephesians 2:10: "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The lies I feel (I do more harm than good, I can't amount to anything, I am pitiful or contemptible) become difficult to defend when confronted by God's words. The truth takes me aback. How I view myself is more than a personal matter. When I choose to view myself as irredeemably flawed, judging myself and my future through a lens of hopelessness and disgust, I devalue something of worth to God. For if I am really God's workmanship, my life is (and is becoming) an expression of His beautiful grace. I think of my own cherished handiwork: poems, drawings, music--creative expressions which bring me delight and communicate something meaningful to others. In their own small way, these creations are important, and I would not have them dismissed or ridiculed. So how can I discount my own life? Surely the work of the Master in each one of His children merits celebration, anticipation, and wonder.

Ready To Try

I sit in my living room, boxes of Christmas decorations at my feet and the despoiled tree at my elbow. Outside, a freezing drizzle falls in the twilight. Inside, dishes call for washing, laundry for folding, and floors for attention. I have ample stock of reasons not to write: my stomach hurts, my life is a mess, ect. For about a week now, I've known I should write of the glimpses of God's loved graciously sprinkled through these days--days of mediocrity and the most ignominious kind of failure, the failure to try. The glimpses still come, the gentle answers to this season's prayer: "Lord, teach me to give and receive love well." Part of me wants to clean up my life, or at least my living room, before looking for words to express God's gifts. But in waiting, I begin to forget, to rationalize, and to listen attentively to the accusing voices in my head: you've lost your chance, He doesn't really love you like that, those were nice psychological warm fuzzies. His kindness found me in the midst of this mess. Perhaps it is not so unseemly to write it here.

28

So much less sure
of words, ideas, and
correct positioning
upon the earth.
Revelation and confusion--
headlights in fog,
the high beams blind,
while low win
a foot or two
of clarity.
God always offers
just the right amount
of light.

Jonah

I'm with you, brother, asleep
while your companions fight against the storm.
You have nothing better to do--
or rather--you have something, but
determine on undoing, instead.

I'm with you, brother. I imagine you hollering, resigned,
maybe almost welcoming death:
"Throw me in."
You saw, you had too see,
how your small stubborn cannonball of rebellion
splashed tribulation over everyone nearby.

I watch with you, watch the water lock
(fathom after fathom) above our heads,
slowly stopping the light:
"'The deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land whose bars
closed upon me forever . . . .'"

You are audacious, my brother--
turning your face to the last of the light--
and crying for rescue from this--
the end of your running--
the down deep bottom
of not going to Nineveh.
Even from the fish's belly,
your lance pierces me, prophet:
"'Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.'"
In all my running, all I have wanted
was love I couldn't escape.

How small must have been your world,
and how large your peevishness,
to begrudge God His mercy
and others His forgiveness.
You are like me, brother, small
in a saga much bigger than yourself,
servant of a God Who bends
to send you storms and great fishes,
a vine and a worm,
sunburn and a question.

Fall Song

Summer superfluity evaporates over a freezing fire; cold burns the fall.
Cornstalks (as they should) complete their dying; golden tear drops churn the fall.

Vigor tightens, rolls toward this, whirls onward shedding ribbons of excess.
What to plant, and where. Watch the sky. All our calculations concern the fall.

Old gold paper lines the walls. In the bed, the body is a kernel in a paper husk.
Soft pages rustle toward a close. Breathing slows. Watchers can discern the fall.

Blue heavens tingle through mortal veins, flame all cheeks, turn all drinks to cider.
Life stings--means so much in so short a space--a single cricket nocturnes the fall.

Beetles burrow under bark and wedge behind the woodwork. Birds take wing and flee.
Willing to die enough to see, if you stay, Swallow, will you learn the fall?

Growing Toward Hope

I love stories--other people's stories--pretend or real-life. Many excellent minds have expressed the power of stories to win hearts, to enrich life, and to embody truths. Today, however, I sense that sometimes I misuse others' stories as a retreat from my own. Ideally, stories give us courage and wisdom to carry back into our daily experience. I've wrongly used them--particularly mediocre TV dramas--to get away from my story. Hiding from fears and shame over my flounderings, I watch pretend people do significant things. Even when they encounter difficulties, the plot and purposefulness of their stories creates a comforting world for me, the viewer. It is as if I trust the screen writers to create a good story more than I trust God to create something intrinsically worthwhile through the unfolding of my life.

Despite being of an age where I should be relatively established financially and socially, I lack a well-defined career path and am underemployed. The sad thing about this is that I haven't seriously pursued what I am trained for and love. I've been timid and afraid and procrastinated over and over again.  I am ashamed of these facts. Socially, I am not in much better condition. As a little girl, I thought the advantage of growing up was the chance to nurture one's own family. Now, not only am I not in a fair way to getting married, I begin to doubt I even want to be! I appear to have become a type of person of which I am ashamed: an "adultescent"--one who just won't quite exert herself into full-fledged adulthood.

If it is true that we have "besetting sins" or personally tenacious temptations, mine may be despair. I suppose few who know me are much aware of this. Then, again, they may have guessed. I fight the thing fairly often, not in one long and terrible battle, but through a lot of little skirmishes. You can't face this. You're doomed. You can't change. Remember how hard you tried before? Remember how you can't even seem to try hard anymore? it whispers. Give up. Come on. Just give up. 

The prelude to such reflections often involves a nagging panic, a great fear that my life will end up as one pitiful failure. The answer to this alarm may include less worrying about what I think and feel, and more doing what I have to do. But there's more to it than that. For one thing, action has become strangely hard for me. And for another, this time in my life is a chance to embrace faith in every step. Nothing comes easily right now, and the effort of my steps slows me down and offers me the choice to trust and to keep going.

Earlier this week, feeling unable to view my future accurately through a discoloration  of fears and shames and sadnesses, I decided to embark on a mini pilgrimage. I wished I could sob for a whole night and somehow wash the sadness out. Unfortunately, I can't cry on demand or for long durations. So, instead, I drove to Lake Michigan and stood knee deep in the water, throwing stones. I pictured in all that vast water the greatness of God's love surrounding me and stretching out of sight in front of me. Holding a pile of smooth rocks in one hand, I named each stone for one of my cares and flung it into the lake. The waves were so mild that day that I could see the circles from the disappeared stones spread over the bobbing water.

In the past few days since my visit to the lake, I have realized something. I have to throw those stones every day. The cares come back, and I can choose to hoard them or to throw them and myself back on the resources of God's love. I think it would be easier if only I could understand and resolve everything. I wish my feeble vocational attempts would turn up a bit of concrete encouragement. I wish things would go right when I try. But God holds the pen, and I pray that I (with His help) will embrace His story line--not just in trust for the future, but in trust for this moment.

In Romans 5, Paul says,

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (v. 1-5, ESV)

Because of Christ, I am standing in grace--I am growing toward hope.






 

Greater Far [bedtime ruminations on ambitions and God's love]

I'd like to grow old and wise,
heart stretched loose and wide enough
to add at least one more concern, experience, friend . . .

I'd like to be as steady as the tide
often bringing in some delightful surprise.
I'd like to not be always cautious, tame, sweet-y shy.

I'd like to shimmer star mist words--
to catch the hint of things beyond our say,
or, at least, to balm a bit of someone's lonely pain.

Of course, I'd also like to master
the impossible everyday:
keep the dishes washed, make various split ends meet.

There is a lot I'd like,
but somehow, tonight, being so loved is enough--
somehow, that love will always be enough.

Irritation

The light is the problem--
the street lights, the headlights of passing cars.
The beams catch in the crack, make it
a white-hot slash across the windshield--
wake its slumber, turn its familiar presence
into something foreign and fractured.

Your uncompromising light
stings in the splinters of my vision.
The landscape fragments behind a web of sparks--
little threads throwing angry colors.
I must believe that, unlike glass,
My sight shall be mended.

That, I suppose, is exactly Your point.

* * *

This post is participating in Life:Unmasked , an opportunity hosted and created by Joy in this Journey.

To God, near Father's Day

What does it mean for You to be our Healer?
Too long I have bounced my prayers off a low ceiling,
tracing the marks under a thin coat of paint
and feeling that You are far away from me and my troubles.

Too long You have seemed to me a father who doesn't write back
and whose number always leads to voice mail--
or who does call back, only to tell me to get it together,
leaving messages in hot-eyed preachers' mouths.

I want so badly to be close to You,
close enough to lay my head against Your chest
and hear Your heart singing beneath my ears--
the only sound that counts.

My Father, be my Healer now,
let me know the place Your Spirit lives--in me!--
and the strange wonder of being seen--and loved!--
by You. Let me hear You whisper,
and help me whisper back:
"Yes, yes," and always
"Yes."