When One Room Is Lit And Another Is Not

My current poem offering—because the thought of the calendar earning an extra day every four years fascinates me when our time on earth seems short and ever shorter sometimes. 

February 29

BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

An extra day—

Like the painting’s fifth cow,

who looks out directly,

straight toward you,

from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day—

Accidental, surely:

the made calendar stumbling over the real

as a drunk trips over a threshold

too low to see.

An extra day—

With a second cup of black coffee.

A friendly but businesslike phone call.

A mailed-back package.

Some extra work, but not too much—

just one day’s worth, exactly.

An extra day—

Not unlike the space

between a door and its frame

when one room is lit and another is not,

and one changes into the other

as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.

And still

there is some generosity to it,

like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

As Generously, As Inexhaustibly

A little reading for anyone coughing and sniffling their way through the second round of winter colds with me--a poem taken from my current obsession, The Beauty. The book is one of Jane Hirshfield's many collections and was a Christmas present from my sister. Despite my attempts to ration out the new poems, I finished it weeks ago and have no doubt there will be several more Hirshfield-inspired posts to come. 
                                                        

A Common Cold
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

A common cold, we say—
common, though it has encircled the globe
           seven times now handed traveler to traveler
           though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an
           seen Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi
           seen the emptied synagogues of Krasnogruda
           seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo

A common cold, we say—
common, though it is infinite and surely immortal
           common because it will almost never kill us
           and because it is shared among any who agree to or do not agree to
           and because it is unaristocratic
                     reducing to redness both profiled and front-viewed noses
                     reducing to coughing the once-articulate larynx
                     reducing to unhappy sleepless turning the pillows of down,
                          of wool, of straw, of foam, of kapok

A common cold, we say—
common because it is cloudy and changing and dulling
            because there are summer colds, winter colds, fall colds,
                     colds of the spring
            because these are always called colds, however they differ
                     beginning sore-throated
                     beginning sniffling
                     beginning a little tired or under the weather
                     beginning with one single innocuous untitled sneeze
           because it is bane of usually eight days’ duration
                     and two or three boxes of tissues at most

The common cold, we say—
and wonder, when did it join us
           when did it saunter into the Darwinian corridors of the human
           do manatees catch them do parrots I do not think so
           and who named it first, first described it, Imhotep, Asclepius,
                 Zhongjing
           and did they wonder, is it happy sharing our lives
                    as generously as inexhaustibly as it shares its own
                    virus dividing and changing while Piero’s girl gazes still
                         downward
                   five centuries still waiting still pondering still undivided

while in front of her someone hunts through her opening pockets for tissues
                         for more than one reason once

The World Is In Pencil

 This poem is on my mind tonight; I'm not sure why. It offers a subtle comfort though--the thought that all this, the world, is a loving work-in-progress, something about it always being erased and re-worked.

The World Is in Pencil

Related Poem Content Details

BY TODD BOSS

—not pen. It’s got

that same silken 

dust about it, doesn’t it, 

that same sense of 

having been roughed 

onto paper even  

as it was planned. 

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

taken its author some

time, some shove. 

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

of the ocean, and

the and and the and 

of the land. 

If You Want God Yet Sometimes Wonder

Last Saturday some of my closest friends from college and I had our annual Christmas party. We all ate a potluck Christmas dinner, had a white elephant gift exchange, sang Christmas carols (including my favorite, O Come O Come Emmanuel), read reflective Christmas Scripture passages, drank Kenyan tea, ate decorated sugar cookies, and played games like Catch Phrase and Taboo. It was lovely and restful and the first time this season I felt I was truly practicing Advent, fully anticipating the celebration of Christ's birth on the 25th.

Christmas is always the lightest spiritual season for me, a time when heavy questions about why there's so much suffering in the world quiet down and I'm left with an awe of the lengths that this God I don't understand took to connect with us. The red and green and gold everywhere make life feel a little crisper, a little cleaner to me. There was snow on the ground a few mornings ago, bright even as it melted. 

The physical celebration of Christmas, the hunting down and wrapping and giving of gifts, the travel home, the decorating, the baking--all things I love--sometimes requires so much physical energy that I have little strength or time to take in and store up the hope Christmas offers, the knowledge that humanity is not left alone on earth. With Christmas only days away, I was a bit frustrated and disappointed going into the party that I hadn't taken in much of the spiritual rest Advent offers. 

As I experienced this unease of missing out, I remembered a required reading from my senior year at JBU, a quote from a contemporary English Benedictine nun named Maria Boulding:

“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.”

So this morning, as I prepare for the drive back to East Texas, as I pack and load up my car with my miniature dachshund and her bed and the presents and all the luggage I think I need for the three-day trip, that hopeful thought is enough--We are walking with the God who comes to us in our wondering and our weariness, and there is a mercy beyond anything we could suspect.

Leaf Litter on Rock Face

Today I put up the four-foot office Christmas tree, wrapped strands of red and white LED lights around its branches, hung the shiny, red, child-proof ornament balls with paperclips, placed the vintage gold star on top. 

I cherish the Christmas season with all of its crisp hope and peppermint. Still. I need to pause a moment before December hits this week, to revel in all the falling yellow, to remember that last warm walk at Lincoln Lake, to chuckle over the frayed red and orange stars that swish back into the office entryway each time I sweep. 

Autumn, above all other seasons I think, reminds us that things on this clod of Earth simply don't stay still. But it also speaks of the beauty present in dormancy, transition, and rest. Its details offer a simultaneously whimsical and wistful picture of change--orange leaves blustered from the oaks along 49, floating above the highway before swinging out of sight.

"Leaf Litter on Rock Face" is a recent find from the Poetry Foundation app that balances the wistful and the whimsy of the season in a way that I found both delightful and thought-provoking:

Leaf Litter on Rock Face

Related Poem Content Details

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

Things are not 

unmoving (or else what   

is ing there for?) 

The things once-living   

fall on the never-living   

all the more movingly for the eye 

that passes over them. 

The wind wells up 

to spill a trail 

of onces off the nevers, 

take opaque from eye 

to mind, or near it — 

every rocking takes some leaving 

to a stonish spirit.

Those Colors Which Have No Name

After a long few months full of transition and multiple kinds of loss—the loss of two housemates who moved to other seasons of life, the loss of a love, the loss of my dad's job—sharing the following poem from Annie Dillard's book of found poems, Mornings Like This, feels appropriate. In her found poems, Dillard takes already existing literature, everything from the collection of van Gogh's letters to The Boy Scout Handbook, and she re-orders sentences and cuts words, creating poems without ever adding a word. I have a special admiration for this poem, which remains grounded in van Gogh's concrete scenes while inviting readers into larger themes he may have been reaching toward.

I Am Trying To Get At Something Utterly Heartbroken

—V. van Gogh, letters, 1873-1890, edited by I. Stone, translated by Johanna van Gogh

I

At the end of the road is a small cottage,

And over it all the blue sky.

I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.

The flying birds, the smoking chimneys,

And that figure loitering below in the yard—

If we do not learn from this, then from what shall we learn?

The miners go home in the white snow at twilight.

These people are quite black. Their houses are small.

The time for making dark studies is short.

A patch of brown heath through which a white

Path leads, and sky just delicately tinged,

Yet somewhat passionately brushed.

We who try our best to live, why do we not live more?

II

The branches of poplars and willows rigid like wire.

It may be true that there is no God here,

But there must be one not far off.

A studio with a cradle, a baby's high chair.

Those colors which have no name

Are the real foundation of everything.

What I want is more beautiful huts far away on the heath.

If we are tired, isn't it then because

We have already walked a long way?

The cart with the white horse brings

A wounded man home from the mines.

Bistre and bitumen, well applied,

Make the colouring ripe and mello and generous.

III

A ploughed field with clods of violet earth;

Over all a yellow sky with a yellow sun.

So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.

A bluish-grey line of trees with a few roofs.

I simply could not restrain myself or keep

My hands off it or allow myself to rest.

A mother with her child, in the shadow

Of a large tree against the dune.

To say how many green-greys there are is impossible.

I love so much, so very much, the effect

Of yellow leaves against green trunks.

This is not a thing that I have sought,

But it has come across my path and I have seized it.

Black with Grease and Strong with Gasoline

I recently began re-reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It's a novel written as a letter from an elderly and dying pastor, John Ames, to his young son, telling the story of the boy's family history in their hometown of Gilead, as well as the old man's contemplations about life and the wonder of existence. Of all the books I've read, right now it is my favorite. There's a certain passage at the beginning of Gilead I've especially come to love:

I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. (p 5)

I wasn’t sure why that section meant so much to me until I connected it with another page where Ames contemplates Heaven:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me try. (p 57)

Of course everyone knows we as human beings are transient, but Ames reminds us that our existence is also beautiful, that our daily humanness is lovely, that our mortality is not only fatal, but fantastic. He reminds us that when we expend our wicked laughter and our jokes and our cigarettes, and when we struggle with tears or are black with grease and strong with gasoline and must rest from our hard work in the sunlight, we contribute to an eternal epic, one that is great and bright, even if all this effort might one day seem like it was only a dream. And that is a stunning comfort to me.