March 2024 (Vol. XXXVII, No. 3)
Dear Friends ~ Each day after morning kindergarten my mom sent me harrumphing to my childhood bedroom for a nap. The sun would shine through the tree outside my window, casting shadows on the peach hearts wallpapered around the room. Begrudgingly at first, I settled into the quiet space, but eventually the shimmying branches lulled me into stillness.
Above my dresser hung an embroidery piece—yellowed with age, and cross-stitched with pastel, looping letters like the ones in the old family Bible my mom kept in a box. I didn't know how to read very well, and the scrolling font made it a special challenge to puzzle out the stitched message. For many months I contemplated and daydreamed about what it might say, until the mysterious cipher revealed itself: a prayer for a resting child. "Now I lay me down to sleep..."
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
For me, imagination is synonymous with discovery. To imagine, to discover, to carry our bit of light to the living penumbra where all the infinite possibilities, forms, and numbers exist. I do not believe in creation but in discovery, and I don't believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus, a luminous explorer of the world it discovers. The imagination fixes and gives clear life to fragments of the invisible reality where [we are] stirring.
I think often we get sidetracked around the public responsibility of the poet. We don't spend a lot of time talking about the private responsibility of the poet. Which maybe we should. Very recently, I had my thesis students start "required daydreaming." They have to sit there and daydream. And they can't do anything else.
tonight? Low & full
in the baby-blue sky. A friend
at my door, the sound
of her laugh & well-loved
heart. I want to be held
up like that. I need a poem
about happiness I haven't
written yet, an ode
to the ducks in my neighbour's
pool, another for the pink
magnolias of spring—some trees
make it look so easy: Yes,
I can hold all this beauty up.
We all — adults and children, writers and readers — have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
is central to the art
of loving.
When we can be alone,
we can be with others
without using them
as a means of escape.
The trickling of water seeping
Into the ground, so that your soul may
Be softened and healed, and guided
In its flow.
Imagine what it would feel like, taste like, and smell like to believe you don't have to prove who you are by your accomplishments and labor...The culture we live under does not point you toward this deep truth. It instead has told you and reinforced the idea that you came into the world to be a machine, to accomplish, to labor, and to do. Nothing can be further from the truth and when you slowly begin to believe and understand your inherent worth, rest becomes possible in many ways.