Writing

On Hélène Cixous

The first and most important things that strike me about Hélène Cixous’ theory, and her life, are that both are positioned at a time when the very nature of writing and speech, and the relationship between the two, were being fundamentally questioned by some of the foremost scholars of her/our time. Cixous’ work is directly related to philosophers such as Derrida, who argued that neither speech nor writing can lead us to any fundamental truths, since both are caught between the signifier, the word, and the signified, the meaning.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed.

What Cixous was working, writing and theorizing against, then, was a concept as old as the Western world—what Derrida framed as logocentrism, which relied on dichotomies such as mind and matter, light and darkness, presence and absence, and nature and culture. This opposition resonates with me in terms of my own writing, in which—in line with many feminist writers and theoreticians—I hope to overtly and covertly challenge binary oppositions, including self and other, male and female, sentient and nonsentient, dominant and submissive.

Cixous, however, manages to sidestep one of the pitfalls many feminists (and other champions of a non-oppositional way of thinking about relationships between human beings and among and within elements throughout the world) inadvertently stumble into, which is to favor or articulate only one “side” of the story: that of the oppressed or shunned group. Instead, she “ … did not simply privilege the ‘female’ half of an existing binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ … she questioned the very adequacy of an either/or logics to name the complexity of cultural realities .”*

The result, of course, is that some have in turn questioned or shunned Cixous’ ideas. Those who frame the world in terms of binary oppositions might find it confusing or frustrating to interpret or confront thoughts, speech, writing and theories that don’t conform to such dichotomies. In contrast, I argue that Cixous’ approach could serve as a model for all poets. (It’s absolutely a model for my own poetry.)

For what is poetry if not a lifting of the veil of culture, even if only for a few moments—an opportunity to delay categorization, as cognitive theorist Reuven Tsur would argue, in a world that is increasingly (at least in the West) prodding us to rapidly categorize our surroundings, experiences and interactions? As if the experience of the experience weren’t enough—the one we are currently engaged with at any given time—we are seduced into gazing out as if along a rural Kansan horizon at the next experience, and the next, and the next: All of them lined up before us like diary cows waiting to have their teats automatically milked, those heavy udders of potential experiences ready to burst if we don’t tend to them immediately.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed. When we can see the world as this or that, that or this—or being the operative word in each case—we don’t have to use much cognitive (and hence emotional) space to relate to that world, its objects or its inhabitants at any given moment. This frees up even more time to rapidly categorize new experiences and move on to the next (and the next), as if living as a sentient being were simply a matter of peeling out at 60 miles per hour from one drive-through window to another.

Furthermore, overturning dichotomies momentarily only to shift the power (in theory more so than in reality) from one group to another or to reassign blame from the latter, shunned group to the former, desirable one—that adhesive rat trap so many well-meaning theorists and activists fall into—is merely a matter of executing awkward acrobatics on a stage, as opposed to pulling down the props, dismantling the stage, removing the exhausted, underpaid aerialists and then taking a seat in the audience to see what’s left occupying the now-empty space.

Creating empty space in place of dualities and other cultural and cognitive assumptions—space the mind can inhabit and move through unhindered and uninhibited—is the job of any good theorist, any good thinker/feeler.

And hence it’s the job of any good poet, or at least any good poem, or at least any poem I personally would actively take the time to seek out and read and sit with and return to. For if poetry won’t help us resist fast, easy categorization of this tremendously complicated world we live in and instead encourage us to slow down, remove our blinders, snap out of our cultural trances and realize all that we can never realize, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will do the trick.

*from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by William E. Cain, et al.

Light, Capture and Release

Sometimes our lives don’t turn out the way we would like. Sometimes we imagine futures that never materialize. We keep trying to have those futures, but even though we spend time imagining ourselves inside them—happy and confident and secure—they never appear and allow us to be who we want to be or have what we think we deserve.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it.

So we become revisionists. We look at the past and try to make it into something close to what we want. We let nostalgia kick in and do its tricky work of glazing over details until nothing hard is left in our memories and our experience of our lives has been worn as smooth as a worry stone.

I had worry stones as a child and developed an almost unnatural dependence on them, carrying several in my pocket at once and running my thumb over the hollow in the middle every time I was afraid, lonely or nervous.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it. Recently I was asked to share a baby picture of myself for a “fun” game of guess-which-adult-the-baby-picture-belongs-to. It was difficult for me to open the album containing photos of me as a child. Most of them showed me in close proximity to an ashtray or a glass of vodka. Those certainly wouldn’t do. I finally found one of me as a toddler wearing an adult’s baseball cap. I looked happy. Children are too simple and hopeful not to be happy despite the realities of their lives—or at least to be optimistic, as if each moment carries bright promises on its back that glimmer like sequined wings, throwing light in all directions.

I’m sure the photocopy of my baby picture is in the trash now, the silly game of match-the-adult-to-the-baby-photo long over. Seems appropriate. If only it were that easy to drag all my childhood memories to the trash, like computer files I no longer needed. If only I could overwrite that block of memory with something new, or even leave the space blank until something, anything, worthy of being remembered came along.

My Little Poetry Pep Talk

The shit is hitting the fan. In my life, in my friends’ lives, in everyone’s lives—or so it seems. I’ve been thinking a lot, more so than usual, about poetry the past few weeks. And by that I mean I have been dreaming about it, since I was already thinking about it nearly every waking moment.

If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

What I think is this: We are all going through tough stuff. Every one of us. And poetry is more important to us than ever. We need it. Others need it. The gift economy is where it’s at when the other economy fails.

We are at war. I see us—every single committed poet—as being at war against silence, against sloth, against insult, against injury, against conventional thinking, against greed, against selfishness, against the turning away from self, against depersonalization, even against fear.

I see some poets turning away from poetry, out of necessity in some cases. But in any case, the turning away is an act of betrayal. I had a poet email me two days ago saying he had to stop focusing on poetry and start focusing on what would pay the bills. Yes, pay the bills. By all means. I am in the same boat, so I know where you are coming from. But don’t leave poetry behind in the process. Do not commit that betrayal because it is a betrayal of self and of the life you’ve given yourself over to as a poet.

I see poets leaving the ranks, and it makes me sad. Because of money, because of fear about poetry, or because of the perceived inability to write poetry. Because of any and every impulse in society that tells people poetry is not a worthwhile endeavor or that it is only a worthwhile endeavor by and for certain poets or through certain mechanisms of study.

Sam Hamill says, The way of poetry is a way of being alive. I believe that. Poetry makes us stronger. It changes us. It is our gift to ourselves and to each other. If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

Yes, it is difficult to stick with poetry, to turn to poetry when our world and our lives are a mess. But that is the trick. That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t. We have to do that work, and report back: to articulate the confusion and frustration inside the poem. To let the mess be the poem. But in a way that conveys, that communicates. For, as Hamill also says, The possibility of the poem exists in communication.

We must be here for the poems, and in doing so, be here for one another. This is how we talk. This is how we talk to each other about what matters.

I’ve been trying to ask myself every day when I wake up: How can I use poetry today to change my life and the lives of others. That is how I am entering the mess and staying deep inside the mess.

A Convseration with Dorianne Laux

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005.

Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January 2008.

Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Best of the Net, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as the New York Quarterly, Orion, Ms. Magazine and online journals.

Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Petaluma, Calif., and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. For the last 13 years, she has taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, as core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Her summers are spent teaching poetry workshops in the beauty of Esalen in Big Sur, Tomales Bay, Aspen, Spoleto, Italy and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In fall of 2008, she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, will move to Raleigh, where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State University as a Poet-in-Residence.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dorianne Laux the summer of 2006 when she was teaching at The Tomales Bay Workshops Writers’ Conference, and she agreed to this email interview with me so I could share a little bit about her work and her approach to poetry.

—

You have called yourself, in part, a poet of personal witness. Can you explain what that means?

There seems to be a general discomfort right now with the personal, the private, the confessional and the narrative. Of course, poets have been writing poems of personal disclosure since the beginning of poetry. And since the beginning, people have suffered through great historic upheavals, war, geologic disasters, famine, and enjoyed great times of renaissance, scientific discovery, political change, explosions of art, culture, philosophy.

We know some of what happened. We keep records, diaries, logs, news reports, pictographs, paintings, photographs. But it’s poetry that informs us of what we felt while those times and events rained down, and it’s poetry that recalls us to our selves. It’s our emotions that are in danger of being left out, and it is poetry that accounts for, is responsible to, the human element.

I’ve been re-reading a favorite book of poetry with a student in the Pacific MFA Program. The book is called The Moon Reflected Fire, by Doug Anderson. He was a medic during the Vietnam war and the first section of the book recalls that experience in vivid narrative poems that introduce us to the narrator as well as to the men and women he worked with and for and the Vietnamese people we were making war against. The next section is filled with short, lyric persona poems about Goya struggling to create art during the Inquisition. The third section contains poems in the voices of minor characters from the Odyssey and the Iliad, the voices we didn’t hear in the first telling. The final section returns to the narrative, poems about recovery, from the war, alcohol and drugs, damaged relationships, those broken by the war.

The poems are gripping, wrenching. One of the most arresting and heartbreaking lines is when Doug Anderson, the soldier, the medic, asks a wounded soldier slipping in and out of consciousness: Hey, what’s your mother’s maiden name? He’s trying to keep the man tied to the world though memory.

That seems to me what poems do. They call out to us, not by just any name, but by our particular name, and keep us tied to the world by accessing our memories. Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives. There are many ways to do this, and combinations of ways to do this, but personal witness of a singular life, seen clearly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

When we write a poem of personal witness, a poem about an ordinary day, an ordinary life, seen through the lens of what Whitman called “the amplitude of time,” we’re struggling to find the importance of the individual who is stranded in the swirling universe, a figure standing up against the backdrop of eternity. I think of the fisherman’s prayer: Dear Lord, be good to me / the sea is so wide / and my boat is so small.

You realized you were meant to write poetry after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Some poets have that feeling when they first start writing but aren’t able to sustain it, at least not all the time. Have you been able to sustain that sense of being meant to write ever since you started writing, or have you ever had times when you felt poetry left you?

I don’t think we ever get back the energy of our youth, the idealism and innocence of that time. But with that loss come certain gains: experience, patience, a sense of wholeness. Once we’ve begun the journey of a reading and writing life, we begin to see certain familiar themes, ideas, language, returning again and again, in our own work and the work of others, and we can sometimes tire of it.

But there is nothing like finding a new love at an old age. Poetry will go underground for a time, but will also pop up when I least expect it, fresh and new again, and more importantly, when I seem to most need it. Poetry saved me early on, and it continues to save me, just at longer intervals.

I also look around at the poets of the generation before mine, now in their 70s, 80s, 90s—Stanley Kunitz just died at 102 and was writing the best poems of his life. Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone. All poets who still have something mighty to say and are saying it with power. These poets inspire me and help me to see again, to feel a life sometimes buried by habituation and stagnation.

And younger poets coming up all the time who give us all a fresh way of looking at the world. I’m moving soon to North Carolina after living on the West Coast most my life. It’s a big move for a 56-year-old woman, and I welcome the adventure of it. I know it will shake me out of certain mental ruts, enliven my art.

I also have a stint this summer at VCCA. I haven’t been to a writer’s retreat in a few years now and just knowing I’m going there has motivated me. Looking forward to a time when I can be quiet and alone with my inner life. I think many times when we think we’ve lost poetry, it is a matter of lack of solitude, lack of support. Poetry is always there, waiting to be unearthed. To be necessary again.

I’ve spoken to people who think we have too many poets and aspiring poets in this country, and not enough ways to sustain those poets—or enough readers to read their work. Others have a different view, seeing this as one of the most vibrant times for American poetry. What are your feelings about the state of poetry today and its future?

I think a bit of both visions are true. Everyone seems to want to be a poet, though I think this has been the case for a good long time. At some point in a life something happens that is just so incomprehensible and emotionally powerful that it seems the only way to process it is through poetry.

If you went out on the street and asked people if they had ever written a poem, I think most would say yes, at least one. If you asked if they had ever painted a portrait or composed a musical score or sculpted a bust or thrown a pot you’d get fewer yeses. Poetry is the art of the people. Anyone can write a poem. And that’s a two-edged sword.

On the other hand, there can never be enough poetry. It would be like asking a drunk if he’s had enough wine. What’s too much? And how will we find the next Whitman or Dickinson, the next Neruda or Akmatova? One could be living right now, hidden away in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in the middle of America. A young Etheridge Knight in Corinth, Miss., or a Gwendolyn Brooks in Topeka, Kan. That’s the kind of democracy that makes way for genius.

It also makes way for mediocrity, but you take the good with the bad. So yes, this is a vibrant time for poetry simply because so many people are interested in reading and writing it. And no, we don’t have enough support for all these people, but there is also more support for poetry now than there has ever been in the past.

The expectation here is a bit skewed as well. Most of us don’t enter this practice with material gains in mind. The university system has helped to create this expectation of fortune and career, as though poems were a commodity. A good book to read to disabuse oneself of this mindset is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which has just been reissued on Vintage Books. When it first came out in 1983, the subtitle of the book was Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. That’s been changed to Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

Lewis Hyde* uses anthropology, economics, psychology, art and fairy tales to examine the role gifts have played and continue to play in our emotional and spiritual life, and describes how poetry is the one art that resists commodification and holds tribes of people together.

You’ve talked about being drawn to, and about writing, poetry with some blood in it. Can you describe what that means, both in terms of your own work and the work you are most drawn to?

Yes, blood. In other words, poems that possess a heart beat, the blood pumping, flowing through the veins. Poems with energy and drive, force and counterforce. Poems speaking with directness in the telling, where the reader can feel the human need from which the poem emerged. Hot-blooded poems. Which doesn’t preclude quietude. But a weighted silence, in which you can hear someone breathing. Poems with tension, velocity and vigor.

We get born from salt water into blood, we suffer injustices and loss. Sometimes unfathomable injustice, unbearable loss. And we die. Sometimes quickly, quietly, sometimes slowly, painfully. Always alone. I want a poetry that acknowledges this. I want to be broken into, like a house. I want to have everything stolen from me but my life and I want to wake up grateful for being spared.

I want poetry that tells the truth with compassion. I see so many poems of which anyone could say: There is absolutely nothing wrong with this poem. Or this poem is interesting. Or this poem is so smart. What does that mean? Smart? Was Neruda a smart poet? Or this is so well-crafted. I’m looking for poems that leave me speechless. Breathless. Slayed. My spell check says there’s no such word as slayed. And this is what I mean. I’m less interested in the right way than the only way.

When I read a Sharon Olds poem I think, this is the only way she could have written this. She’s our D.H. Lawrence. When I read a Philip Levine poem I think, this is a poem that has some sweat on it, some muscle and bone in it. Lucille Clifton, daring to tell us what we don’t want to hear, with power and anger. Yes. These are my heroes, not because they have mad line-breaking skills, but because over and over they are trying to say something important about what it is to be human.

Gerald Stern. Talk about energy, force, drive. He’s our Whitman. He cannot be contained! You can’t coolly appreciate Stern. C.K. Williams, his forward momentum, his brooding vision. Adrienne Rich at her fiercest and most direct, Ruth Stone beating out the singular loss of her husband over and over again, struggling, at 93, to get to the heart of it.

Galway Kinnell’s rawness, riskiness and originality in a poem like “The Bear.” Jack Gilbert, a poet of great compression, bearing the weight of his loneliness, his bleakly romantic vision. Stanley Kunitz, the pressure of that early cruelty, injustice and grief forging a poetry of compassion and tenderness. When you read these poets you don’t say, Gee, isn’t this a great line break, you say, Jesus!

And craft is important to all these poets, but it’s not why they sat down to write or why I have to sit down to read them. Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of living. Sexton and Plath. Yes. And I expect no less from myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t write poems that fall far short of my own expectations. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. I want blood.

—

This interview originally ran March 14, 2008, on Read Write Poem. I am reprinting it here with Dorianne Laux’s permission. You can find Lewis Hyde’s The Gift at www.lewishyde.com/pub/gift.html.

Drizzle

Last night I slept as well as I’ve ever slept. I woke up at one point just long enough to think Oh God I’m sleepy! Could I sleep any better than this, ever? before falling asleep again.

But now that I’m up, my head feels like a bowling ball. How much does this thing weigh anyhow?

I just looked it up: about 12 pounds. That is a lot of weight for my delicate neck to manage. No wonder I have tight shoulders and suffer from neck pain. No wonder my trapeziuses are overdeveloped and make me look slightly freakish with my shirt off. (And yes, trapeziuses is the plural form of the word trapezius. I looked that up, too.)

My shades are closed because I still want to inhabit the small domain of my house for a while longer before acknowledging that the world extends beyond my doors, windows and walls.

I can tell it’s out there even without seeing it. Birds twitter and cackle. I just heard the shrill reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of someone’s scooter trying to make it up our hill. The street’s incline is so steep that it always taxes underpowered vehicles and makes them sound like wind-up toys.

Now I hear a small airplane rattling its way from somewhere to somewhere else.

If I were to tell you what the world consists of based solely on what I hear, I would say there are scads of birds, a scooter and a single plane. Wait, there go two cars. Add two cars to the list. The world is growing larger with each moment.

Now it’s silent. The world, for the moment, is empty.

Even with the shades closed, I can tell it’s cloudy and will probably rain. What little light comes through the blinds is as diffuse and gray as the sky. I hate it when the sky holds the sun hostage this way, blanketing it in dark wool as if its rays need to be dampened for our protection.

This is another reason I am reluctant to look outside. I know we’re in for about six months of this nonsense, and I am not ready to acknowledge it: sky whose color ranges from wet cement to drying cement to freshly dried cement, mountains obscured by clouds that try but fail to mimic the shape of mountains, everything running for cover from rain that’s not even heavy enough to earn the label rain—more like the effect produced by the Wham-O Fun Fountain I had as a child than anything wondrous or natural.

How I long for Midwestern thunderstorms, the way light and sound move through everything. I want a storm that shakes my windowpanes and rises through my feet. I want rain with rhythm and intensity. I want an unapologetic downpour, not its inferior substitute, drizzle.

I Want

I’ve woken up feeling comfortable, relaxed even, which leaves me not knowing how to go about writing. I like to work against something when I write, and often what I work against is my own feelings of discomfort, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. My state of comfort will pass, of that I am sure. But for now, I feel untethered—not quite sure how to write what I want to write, so instead I will focus on what I want to write.

I want to write about holograms. I want to write about time, space, the notion of self.

I want to write about authorship, the need to author. To own. To get credit. To take credit.

I want to write about poets being so obsessed over having “publishable” work. When did publishable become our standard for writing?

I want to write about women who are obsessed with acting like and being seen as girls. When did womanhood go out of fashion? When did we decide we wanted to trade whatever level of empowerment we have as women and go back to having much of our lives scripted for, dictated to us, as girls? It’s not all baby-doll dresses and piccolo voices and hopscotch on the asphalt playground. When did we forget that?

Do we really want to feel our first abuses all over again? Do we really want to be dismissed? Do we really want to unlearn our bodies? Have we forgotten what it took for us to survive, and do we not want to own, get credit, take credit for what we’ve managed to grow into, even as forces worked against us all along the way?

I want to write about my strange dream, where a room in my house was filled with plants. I could see spores rising from every leaf, wafting toward me. Some were threads, others particulate, the majority large and ethereal with skins thin as oolemmas and insides like jellyfish. I tried to grab the large ones, but my hands cupped nothing. I batted at them with my arms. The heat my movements generated made the spores move faster and more unpredictably. I want to write about how it felt to take those spores into my lungs.

I want to write palindromes but can’t seem to find anything worth saying as a palindrome.

I want to write about how thick the body can become with wanting.

Unfathomable

I remember when 1 million seemed unfathomable—the number of zeros strung along after the 1, as well as what they signified, impossible for me to envision.

I remember people telling me things were supposed to be awkward during what they called my awkward years. I’m not so sure I ever grew out of my awkward years, although I am no longer gangly and my teeth managed to grow in straight.

I used to run away from everything by climbing up a tree or running along an overgrown path to one of many hiding places. It’s not so easy these days to run away.

As soon as I think I’m good at something, someone comes along and reminds me I am not, then tells me the reminding is for my own good.

They tell me I know what I want to say when I write, but that I don’t know how to say it. They tell me my writing is uneven, slightly wrecked. Of course that’s the case, since my writing reflects my life. How could it be any more together than I am? And what’s better: writing that is even and predictable, or writing with a pulse—albeit sometimes weak and irregular—writing that moves under its own control and in ways you, and I, could never anticipate?

For a time after my mother’s death I forgot how little I like people. I thought it was her I disliked and that her death had freed me from that feeling. Turns out it had not.

I went to the grocery store yesterday to have a cheese sandwich. I looked around as I ate it. I had no idea what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Not one person in that store made any sense to me.

We are all wasting our lives in so many and varied ways.

Writing is just another way to waste time, but at least it allows me to keep a record of how I’ve wasted it. I will always know that yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and took a nap. I will always know the sadness I feel right now, even if one day I manage to move through and beyond it to something else—something that at this moment feels unfathomable and that I can’t yet see clearly.

The Sixth Bird

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Evening. My husband and I walk south over wet sand at Cannon Beach, roughly parallel to the ever-shifting waterline. We come across a dead seagull. Another. Another. A carcass every few hundred feet. Each body we come upon is more recently dead than the one before—more in tact, more body-like, more recognizably bird.

We pause at the fifth carcass. It is clearly only hours dead, if that. Thirteen seagulls surround the body. They systematically strip it of flesh.

It seems at first like a random attack but is in fact an organized effort. At any given time, three gulls have the dead bird in their beaks, one at the neck, two clasping either leg. The three pull in unison, stretching the still-pliant body into an expanding triangle until chunks of feathers and flesh tear away. The body breakers hop off to devour their share as three gulls from the larger group move in to perform roughly the same maneuvers as the last.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

“Sky burial, this is a kind of sky burial,” I think. The flightless, the dead, being consumed by the living. The dead weighing down the living. The dead being carried off in so many ever-expanding stomachs.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Here and there, clumps of feathers stick out of the sand: What is left over after the harvest cannot be called bodies, can it. Cannot be called flight, since it takes more than feathers to fly. Half-buried dirty broken ornaments these feathers are, nothing more.

The sixth bird is not yet dead. It sits facing the wind. It does not move, except to blink, shiver. Between the wind and the cold, it has been a hard day here for gulls. A dog named Lana tries to attack the dying bird. Lana’s owner pulls her away. Wind blows sheets of dry sand just over wet sand. A pile of sand accumulates in front of the dying bird’s body. Soon the bird is caked in sand, most of its feathers no longer visible. It continues to blink.

I sit alongside until dark. My husband stands behind me. A woman pauses, looks at the bird, says “Circle of life” before moving on. I pick up a small stone near the bird, slip it in my pocket, wish the bird well. We make our way back down the beach, toward the dead, deader.

I wonder if the gulls will wait or begin eating the sixth bird while it is still alive. They gather around the dying gull as we move away.

What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull

Flight

Because during the poetry class I was just in, a moth flitted across the room. Scratch that. Shot across the room with a speed and straight-line purpose seldom seen in moths, even those under round-the-clock observation. The moth went right into my left eye. The instructor was trying to keep things on task as I, an impacted vessel, held my hand to my face and listed a bit in the direction of my injury.

I believe all the voices in my head are my mother. My father has not once spoken to me since his death.

Nothing dramatic, not like the time a gnat flew into my right eye at full force over at Yellowstone when all I wanted was to relaxedly take in a little scenery. I was convinced the gnat had grown a stinger for the sole purpose of injecting me on the cornea. It had not in fact stung me, but came as close to the sensation of stinging as anything without a stinger could, so to this day I maintain that it stung. I screamed, jumped about and generally carried on.

Let’s face it. I make people uncomfortable. Even when I’m not screaming, jumping about and generally carrying on. Add to this winged creatures coming at my eyes, and (I can only envision) the feeling of uncomfortable-ness I cause in others would be increased, though by what positive exponent remains to be documented. If you are interested in that degree of specificity, further experiments and data analyses will be necessary, and I’m not really down with all that, being, as I happen to be, so uncomfortable both with: 1. making people any more uncomfortable than I usually do, and 2. having things with wings deliberately sent into my eye. I am a human, after all. And these are only moths and such. I am not earth, and they are not bombs. Let’s not forget these vital distinctions.

I want also to touch on this: Things without wings going into my eye I am not fond of either. Grit, pencil shavings, salt, etc. have all made their way in at one time or another. I can only imagine what’s accumulated behind my retinae. Some things might not dissolve and instead be siphoned up through my optic nerve. Especially et cetera. I bet et cetera has a long half-life. Can you imagine how long the list would be if we detailed everything et cetera houses? Set end to end, et cetera ‘s contents would entirely wrap each and every one of our bodies, like a good bandaging job for an everywhere injury. Imagine how et cetera weighs, what we’ve made it take on, you and I. It must surely feel like a moth is always in etc’s eye. Then, to add insult to injury, we abbreviate it. How etc. aches to be longer. For recognition of all we’ve made it become. Et cetera is a moth with its wings pulled off, a thing whose shadowy undertow has been erased.

But I risk losing my point if I start talking about anything other than today and this moth. So let’s stick with the moth for now. Actually, I feel I have exhausted the subject. I wouldn’t want to write past my ending. I could go into how I had to excuse myself from the class and make my way to the restroom, how the instructor did not acknowledge what was up with my eye and the whole leaning-slightly business, or how perhaps he did acknowledge it because I do seem to recall a disembodied voice saying “I saw that” after I finally worked up the courage to say, “A moth just flew into my eye. I am hurt.”

However, I couldn’t tell you with certainty if the person who replied was the instructor, a male student, or some voice of recognition in my head. The last notion really isn’t that absurd, except that studies show almost all imagined voices are female, not male. Something about the cadence and lilt women lend to the words they/we speak. (Sorry for the slip. I sometimes forget I am a woman when I speak of women. I wonder if “a moth” ever forgets it is “moth” and what it thinks it is instead, or if it ever feels it is nothing. If I were a moth, which I am not, I believe I would lapse into thinking I was all wing. Single wing like a small fan in nothing’s hand.)

But back to voices. I believe all the voices in my head are my mother. My father has not once spoken to me since his death. I do not love him less for it.

I almost forgot to mention how I could mention why I didn’t go back to the class. It wasn’t my hurt eye, although my eye hurt. It was fear. Or poetry. In that room, there was no air for poetry, not for me. My way of writing it. I should mention this was all playing out inside me, again no fault of the class or instructor. In fact nobody saw my discomfort, the air being pushed out of my lungs one breath at a time, less air coming back with each inhalation, a kind of measured dirge toward suffocation.

The moth knew this was happening, something close to panic but not quite panic. It doesn’t surprise me the moth would recognize panic in the making, given the tizzy of a short moth-life. Poetry was unsafe for me in that moment, and the moth knew it. Hence the speed. The direction. Self-sacrificing it went into me, my light, the window of my lighthouse, to protect me. It’s the only logical explanation.

A woman just slipped into the seat across from me in the computer lab where I’ve set up camp to write this. I told her my story. She listened. She said to take a spoon, fill it with water, and lower my eye into it. She, too, is a moth. Another kind of savior.

I could keep going and going, like a winged thing fighting its way to its destination: final, temporary or insulary. But I think I will stop with the sentence, “So let’s stick with the moth for now.” That seems a proper ending. But I will add this: My only regret is not having been considerate enough to make sure the moth was OK before running out of the room. We should treat those who save us with more kindness.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.

Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.

This is how night should come, I thought.

Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.

But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.

The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.

Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”

This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.

Yes, it should come just like this.

Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.

But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.