Month: November 2011

Gestures and Nods

The greatest disappointment of my life thus far is learning that we are as isolated in our joy as we are in our sorrow.

Sometimes the kindness thing we can do for one another is remain silent.

I write poems so people I love can come with me into places and experiences I love.

There is a difference between bringing people you love along with you in a poem and trying to do so in real life. The former is improbable; the latter impossible.

Everything said publicly is now said through indirection, secretly—through gestures and nods.

Eternity isn’t something we are deluded into believing. It’s something that, over the course of our lives, we are disciplined out of believing.

The End of Times is perhaps the only way we can justify leaving something as beautiful as the earth behind. Why not shift the responsibility for that misfortune to God? We need a great story to justify such a great loss.

The truth is, without knowing it, I used to admit only the concept of a God who wanted us all to be rich. And because so many of us are poor, I didn’t think there could be a God. That’s how deeply rooted capitalism is within me. That’s how—even though I am the ninety-nine percent, I do the work of the one percent—the work of striving, of failing, of blaming the failures of a system on myself and others who don’t control that system or even understand its inner workings, of blaming God for not being a capitalist who works by way of greed and exclusion.

I had no life before poetry. I had nothing. I was lost.

In my case, it doesn’t matter how gifted the life is. Without poetry, it’s impossible to see the gifts—the way a frog will die even if surrounded by flies, if those flies are not moving. The frog is simply not programmed to “see” flies that don’t move. Poetry, for me, makes things move, sets the gifts of the world, the gift of the world itself, in motion.

Things to do in Walla Walla: 1. Write a book of poems, 2. Grow out your hair.

I think the best marriage in a poem would be Charles Wright and Steven Wright.

Thinking for yourself is always a good thing. Thinking for someone else is never a good thing.

I like the letters to the editor in the local paper. They help me figure out who to avoid.

Tonight as I left the Farm Labor Home, one of the kids I teach ran behind my car, waving goodbye to me under the waxing gibbous moon.

Before we talk about sharing wealth, we need to ask ourselves where that wealth came from—who suffered or died, what lands and habitats were stolen, destroyed or altered beyond recognition—for that wealth to have been amassed in the first place. I don’t know about you, but there is wealth in this country, in this world, that I don’t want any part of.

Removing producers from this country—largely situating workers overseas, over there, beyond our boundaries—also removes the very body that could make a difference, that could rise up and make a difference.

The Chosen Life

I knew before moving to Eastern Washington that the land—by which I mean the soil, the air, the water, the flora and the fauna—as well as many of the people here, including native people, had suffered and were still suffering deeply.

The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues.

I knew this side of the state had taken in or had foisted on it some of the worst industries imaginable, from personal and industrial waste to toxic waste.

I knew unthinkable things were being done to animals in one of the country’s largest meat processing plants, that its walls housed extreme suffering.

The river was being poisoned. I knew that. I knew the ground was contaminated by the radioactive slurry left behind and improperly stored at the Hanford Site and that the ground water was also contaminated.

I knew all this and I came here not in spite of these realities but because of them. I’d been living in the Seattle Bubble for too long, going about my daily business without issues such as these entering my consciousness, let alone being at the forefront of my consciousness. I led a relatively easy life, one in which I believed that if I earned a certain salary every year, if I had a certain type of living situation, if I had this or that material object, then I could extend my sense of happiness indefinitely.

But I always knew that was no life, and that the “happiness” I sought out, relied on and through which I defined myself was as flimsy as the plastic cover that stretches over a swimming pool in the winter months. It was easy to break through that “happiness” and fall into the depths, into frigid water that could kill.

I lived for something more. I craved something more. I wanted to connect in a deeper way with the world. I tried to bring that about—to create some kind of transformation—in my writing. I attempted to write myself and those I loved into spaces of myth and healing. Writing poems also altered my consciousness temporarily by giving me the feeling, the fleeting feeling, of transcendence.

The poems were only clues, though. I realize that now. They were clues and little addictions. You can’t live from the high of one poem to the next any more than you can say you are living on a higher plane because you chain smoke cigarettes all day. The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues. Yet they might become enough of a trail to keep you headed in the right direction, which is toward a life in which you place your faith in something and then act from that position—in the interest of other, of community, of the infinite within and without.

Moving to Eastern Washington was the best decision my husband and I have made in our adults lives, other than finding our way to one another in 1995. Coming here set me on a path whose end I cannot see, but I do know it’s a long journey—a life’s journey and one worth taking. It is here that I have learned true love in all senses of the word, including a true love of place. Though this place is not my home, the land has welcomed me and taken me in. It has led me down its paths and back roads, so I could see its scars and wounds. I have seen those wounds up close, and I worry that they are fatal. I worry that the land I have come to know and cherish is dying, and that is a grief I cannot tolerate.

I have no choice but to act. I must act in any and every way possible on behalf of both the land and the people. I must commit my life to this. And the poems will never tell the whole story. They will only be clues to the life I have chosen, the one I am leading.