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I pulled the white cotton sheet off the nails holding it to the side of the porch this morning and threw it in the garbage can. I’d hung it like a curtain early in the summer, and it blew like a sail in those winds, but now all the leaves are leaving the trees and it’s time for the world to be opening up & thinning out. I need that space for bunches of drying basil, too, which are there now, perfuming, making it feel like fall. And it was covered with stains and mildew and bug guts, etc. The season for flowing white curtains is over. You’d think the season for love is over for a while, too, but
Claire, roommate from Lille, has met a Phd student in applied linguistics and is now very confused about her life. She’s stayed up two nights in a row, now, talking with him and (I think) falling very much in love. She’s known him for a week and he’s already learning French and talking about going to France, and she says things like, “we think the same way” and “why did it have to happen here!“ She blooms, and doesn’t tell her parents, and misses class. It’s so exciting, and somehow it’s drenched in roses for me, too, because she first told me yesterday afternoon as I was cozily holed-up in my room, stitching pages for a baby book and watching Pride & Prejudice, and now she comes wandering in at 10 a.m. as I’m listening to the Pandora Radio Billie Holiday station: The Nearness of You, Every Time We Say Goodbye. “Who knows what will happen!” I say. “I don’t,” she says, not unhappily.
This is October, though, and I think it must be as magical a time to be in love as any, because the torches of our temperate forests will soon be hissing all day, and I know he will take her to the Smokies to see them. Seasons of living, starting like births all around the year, like mine began November 23 and swung me into a cold and brittle world. The colors and the 65 degrees must be like the final acceleration before a new tape is spliced. If I can fit as many metaphors here as possible. I want to recognize that the fall has always been that final acceleration, for me, the catapult into the New Next, which this year is not some surgery but is instead some growing wholer.
Lowell’s “To Speak of the Woe That is in Marriage” notwithstanding. I looked up the lyrics to the song “When a Woman Loves a Man,” because I am interested in that kind of thing, and found first a fascinating David Lehman poem (same title), then the Lowell, which I had forgotten about for more than a year. I love poetry. I love that I can read Lowell and feel like writing a response poem. Which of course I can’t, but may in twenty years. Anyways. This is shaping up to be a lovely day…
November is my birthmonth, June is the current month, and all these notes are flying around in the air like the sun filling all the air in the world, today, even the small pieces of cubic inches square in shadow, underneath leaves. Natalie gave me the black swimsuit she got in the mail yesterday that didn’t fit and has gone out of the house with Mrs. Dalloway and a towel, bound for some piece of water and some piece of sun. I am bound for some piece of forest, or some clearing in the forest where I’ll meet the known and the unknown, I know this because I’ve been reading Wendell Berry poetry and sitting up late on the back porch and talking about things no one knows anything about except yourself, after you weigh everything a hundred thousand times and decide to go ahead. because you thought weighing it would give you an idea of its safety or sureness, and weighing it over and over would show you the flaws, if there were any. and because after you step out somewhere, you know where you are only because you are there.
I have questions, a hundred thousand questions that I can’t think of, but I know they’re there, there in the same box I kept the answers to those other questions. I can look out the window, now, and see a lifting of my own heart out there and that’s something unusual and everyone’s going to the beach and I’m waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting to hear. bidden or not, God is present in the doorways of my mind and seems to be as gentle as I cannot imagine with me. I never wanted to be alone, even when I was a kid I wanted my sisters sleeping with me in our room and I have lived a long time alone with a preoccupation with both the silence of my life when I wasn’t talking and the voice of God in the silence of my life. I want to do things like learn, to run, to sprint, to play piano, guitar, to not be afraid anymore, to be brought to some place with a forgotten garden and to bring it to remembrance with pruning shears and turning over soil and the kiss of my hands on everything that needs the kiss of my hands.
Today Kayla and Irena came down from Nashville to visit, and I rolled out of bed at 10am to shower (become fragrant — important) and then run around downstairs putting dishes up and wiping off counters and stovetops and tables. Lighting candles, putting on Billie Holiday. Everything was ready when they came; then they came. How I’ve missed and love their faces, Kayla’s perfect slenderness and her precise words, surprising laugh, and Irena’s eyes, how serious they are about joy and profound significance, how they just take me in, serenely. Taking all this downtown for lunch, taking it all back for tea and fudge in our cold, lovely little kitchen, taking our time, taking the day. I do love those girls.
After this I laid down because I was starting to feel achy and extremely tired. I put on the Granados cd and have been listening to the cars drive past and those melodies like evening walks. I remember once in Sosua I was walking down a sideroad with Matt, late afternoon sun slanting and everyone’s trees growing over their wrought iron fences, hibiscus, mimosas and flame trees (my favorite I think), and he said, “I could walk down this road forever.” I thought, yes; I could walk down this road forever. I could too. Some of these songs are like that, closer to walking down a road (evening, flame trees, wrought iron) forever than most anything could be. And now, as always happens, my loneliness begins to cure and I keep imagining that I’m throwing off a sticky black net. Beginning to be free.
What WILL life be like when I’m 25? I was wondering this with Emily, who is a year past that, and feels old (how strange to feel old at 26!), and I almost wanted to go somewhere far and sit with my knees at my chest and look out over a great height. Finding wooded hills, leafmeal two feet deep, and a perch: I’ve always thought of everything best in that place. In the woods, you have trees a hundred feet tall at your back, stolid, safe as grandfathers, and covering you over from as far as you can see behind to as far as you can see ahead, running down and up in waves (like the most terrible storm at sea’s waves, frozen and furred with the growth of trees, miscellaneous shrubs, and others, like squirrels). Something about distance is so easy on my eyes. I do long for that. The clarity of those thoughts, the sacredness of them. (And the woods are so sacred.)
But about being 25: what? How? I want (more than I realized, in the hospital and during that initial week at home) to be loved and later have a baby. Having an ovary out and worrying about the other one makes one very aware. It’s depressingly predictable, unoriginal, but I do want these things only just less than I want to do whatever God asks me to do. If He were to ask me to love an incredible man, incredible: almost not credible, almost not to be believed, and then were to ask me to go ahead and be pregnant, well, I wouldn’t know what to do with my realization of that goodness. (I want these maybe [shockingly] more than I want to write mammoth and magnificent things. And I do want that, too.)
Somehow, in light of God speaking directly to my caught heart, bills almost wither in importance. Jobseeking and interpersonal conflict with friends, also. It’s surreal, in quality, His words in my ear. Chris W is in town and showed me a calendar he made of graph paper, photos, and type. It ends with a poem by Hafiz, a Persian poet who speaks of God as I speak of God, and I almost wept, reading it. It would only be fair to find it and post it here; I’ll see if I can’t find it. Finding God’s inexplicable words and almost voice at this difficult turn of my life is weighty, heavy, and unbearably light. Today I’m almost sure God promised me fecundity, that’s what I’m talking about, here. Difficult to put into words the weight of that moment on the couch, listening to Granados, like pulling aside a curtain so I should immediately notice that I was listening to a lullaby that I would play as a lullaby, sometime, in the future.
tasting of hot water and milk
thinking of you,
how unhealthy it is that I hate everything
I said or everything I wore whenever
I see you.
How on earth do I come to understand
the galaxy of heart and all
my desire,
how, how I wish I could see you all the time
and when I see you I
turn into someone else
whose whole life seems to be consumed
with the face of her, shifting like the rolling sets
on theater stages, clapping on inch-thick
whatever you may most be interested
in. Like not ending with a preposition,
or who knows
what else.
The drive of my living
has nothing to do
with you. Who
God knows has nothing to do with me.
What will it be like to live my days
with no unreasonable desire?
No fetching with hands white hot
the smallest live fish
from a cold stream no cold cream
no wind
taking me under the arms in the runway
of the smallest planes, no secret wishes
to meet St. Martin of the Fields
wishes sinewed with iron and weighted
with down.
And you in my mind, your face
and the way of your pen with your paper,
your words strung in the studio
like rosaries or Nepalese flags or no,
like the accidentally best portrait
of the ex-lover,
having to be displayed, having
to be seen, having still a grip
on the heart.
the phrase ‘I smell a rat’ has new meaning since we
found we had one and that the cabinet underneath
the sink was its patio.
early-morning sunlight seems young enough to get
arrested and even the dust lit lazy in the kitchen
air soothes my soul.
I’m leaving the door open on my pain again,
since coaxing it out of hiding will be the greatest
and most ruthless thing
I have ever done.
