If anyone sent me one of these I would adore them until the end of time.

Meeting Poetry

When I met the Elizabeth Bishop poem One Art I was sixteen years old, slouched in a plastic chair in an overheated classroom. I was wearing an itchy grey wool uniform skirt, rolled up at the waist at least once, and maroon knee socks that were always sliding down into my beloved chunky black platforms.

I was tired, and I was bored. Even for a word-oriented, nerdy-quiet girl like me, this was not the right environment to meet a poem. The teacher handed out the copies, and I skimmed it as he paced the aisles.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I liked it immediately in a sort of vapid, unclicked way, but then the bell rang. I stuffed it into my backpack and shoved my way out into the hallway, fighting through hoards of bustling noise to my loathsome math class, and that was that. Poem in, poem out. Poem met incorrectly.

When I found it again I was about ten years older. I was feeling quiet that night, wandering through the wilds of the Internet in search of something beautiful to absorb. I happened upon it and read it properly, with thoughtfulness and attention. I read it with an extra decade of life experience under my skin. I'd lost things in my own life by then, so I understood it better.

As I read, I felt a lightning bolt thread of connection to the author. I pictured the shape of her spine through a thin white sweater, the way her back must have curved gently over her writing table as she composed each perfect word in its perfect order. For the record: I know nothing about Elizabeth Bishop. But what I see anyway is a woman with hair fading from a bright blond to something darker with age. Fair skin with light freckles, freckles that were probably dark and bold and despaired over the summer she was 12, back when she was only just beginning to learn that special feminine trick of self-judgement in all mirrors. She peers down through glasses, thick and heavy, that she only wears at night. Her black pen is just the right amount of inky as it scratches over thick ivory paper, and her non-writing hand is curled around a cup of steaming tea. She's surrounded by a cloud of quiet concentration, the kind of quiet you have to fight to find in this life. The kind you have to protect.

I believe you meet certain poems, rather than read them. The right poem is something that unfolds over you, something that actually happens to you. It has force and power and weight. It's not just words you trip over, like the magazine articles you flip through at night on your couch, or even the really catchy novel you tear through on an airplane. If you meet a poem correctly - if the temperature is right, and your temperament, and if the poem itself is the absolute correct one - then in the moment of meeting you recognize a friend. The flame of a matching soul reaches out and shakes you awake.

I have fallen into poems so hard that I will remember forever the circumstances in which I met them. I was heartsick with thick, desperate teenaged love when I first collapsed into T.S. Eliot's self-despairing melancholy. I was dreamy and adolescent when Edgar Allan Poe happened to me, reading The Bells aloud to my seventh grade English class and understanding for the first time that words could make music. I was deep in real grief the first time Robert Frost's clear steadiness calmed me.

I am still waiting to meet Emily Dickinson properly, which is becoming annoying in an I-know-I'm-SUPPOSED-to-love-her-but-I-just-don't-give-a-shit kind of way.

Mary Oliver happened to me last summer. I was visiting a little town called Amesbury, Massachusetts, on an early August afternoon, bright and breezy and perfect. I had a few hours to myself and the itch to explore, so off I wandered. The town was tiny, village-like, with colorful houses bunched cheerfully on top of each other. The dueling coffee shops were mom-and-pop and their windows were lined with local art. There was a tiny movie theater. There was a real pet store. It was pretty much small town perfection.

In the middle of their main street I spotted a stone archway between two large brick buildings. It led backwards into a sprawling stone courtyard lined with bright, lush flowers. A tiny stream trickled through the courtyard, a little ghost of the river that once powered this old industrial mill town not so very long ago.

I found a little restaurant in the corner of the courtyard, and sat outside at a picnic table in the sun. I was eating a salad and writing in my journal when a man strolled into the other side of the courtyard, busted out a fiddle, and began to play.

This was incongruous, wondrous. Startling to me in my quiet little salad moment. He played wildly, freely, tapping his feet and bouncing from side to side. He tipped his head to the ladies and winked at the men as they passed, not missing a note. He had dark shaggy hair and was dressed as if he’d just walked out of the 1920's, like he was about to hitch a ride on a train car, hobo style, leaping on and landing with his legs kicked out over the side. He was almost too much, and I absolutely wanted to judge him, but I couldn't. I was too charmed by his music. He was jubilant and triumphant and ridiculous all mixed together, garnished with a shabby top hat.

I finished my lunch and was gathering my things when he switched gears and swung into a slow, plaintive song. I paused to listen and felt my own melancholy rise up in me, an annoying, chronic inner sadness that pops up from time to time uninvited. I didn’t want to allow it into this perfect, weird little moment, so I walked out of the courtyard and left the sad song straining away behind me.

Right outside of the courtyard was a small independent bookshop, dusty and quiet. I drifted towards the poetry section, an odd impulse I hadn’t had since I was a teenager. I looked for Mary Oliver, who I’d heard of and meant to get to know properly. I found a volume of her work, paid my $14.95 and went outside. 

In front of the bookshop was an enormous maple tree. Underneath it ran a stone wall about waist high. I jumped up onto the wall and, with the leaves rustling above me, and the fiddler still playing his faded song over the sounds of cars passing by and the wind blowing, opened the book and read this poem:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

This is how you meet a poem: with thoughtfulness and attention. I had focus on this bright sunlit afternoon, and time, and quiet solitude. I was idle and blessed. These are the moments you miss in a regular adult life, with its obligations and its schedules and meetings and errands and the endless hum of electric noise invading your quiet.

In the absence of noise, and in the company of myself, I read this poem, and felt a friend come out of the shadow dark. I'm sure I would have liked this poem, maybe even loved it, if I'd read it under other circumstances. But I'm equally sure it wouldn't have tattooed itself onto my heart in quite the same way if anything about this moment had been different.

Poem in, poem out. Poem met correctly, and now carried tucked safely within me for the rest of my life. 

(Also - a nifty little title for a future blog! Ah, poem love. What a grand, nerdy habit.)

Skydivers