I’ve written before what should be an elegy to my poetry teacher, a promise, a promise, a promise of what I took with me, the good of it, the feel in my hand of the pages of a book so small and containing such multitudes. Once upon a time I wanted to be a poet, a blacksmith of words at the forge, hands black with soot and ash and eyes alight with small flames. In high school, which more and more seems like the place where everything is not quite beginning, I read poem after poem, I feasted on them, I feared them, I raised a white flag in surrender to them.
Have you ever wondered how they do it - strip our world down into those few images, the repetition of the words or the lack of their repetition? It seems like magic, like lightning coming out of their hands. I used to want to be a poet.
In that dream life of mine, the one where I was a poet, I wore a beret and drank espresso straight. In that dream life the words fell from my fingers, sparking like lightning on some unsuspecting soul. I imagined that I would write something that would do to someone what poetry does to me: a heart attack, a shock. I keep repeating words in my attempt to describe it like poetry is electric. Perhaps they are electricians of words, rearranging their currents, setting the dials just so that when we flip the page (the switch), we are ignited.
Linda Pastan is such a poet to me. In my dream life I set my own heart on fire with my words, the way that her lines - fire, fire, fire about Dido, and ghosts whining at the gates of the afterlife - they make it harder to breathe for a moment. In that dream life that is what my words do.
But I am in this life, of comfortable, complete sentences. I write for the images that warm us, but do not ignite. The sentences that remember us to ourselves, why we are here, where the beauty might be. I want to write to you about ordinary things not because I set flame to them for you - Linda can, I know, I am still shaking ashes off myself - but because perhaps I can remind you that they are here, and they are beautiful.
Here in my prose let me tell you about the hawk I saw on Saturday driving to the barn. He was full-grown, wingspan wider than my own arms stretched to their fullest. He wheeled overhead and I slowed my car to a crawl just for a few more seconds to see the underside of him - the pinpricks of his striped belly and his darkness against a bright sky. In a poem perhaps the hawk would signify something, or I could find a metaphor inside the image or an image inside something else…
But I just want you to know he was here, with us, his beauty offered freely, his grace, his flight - it was ours to see. I want us to know that kind of beauty is here, not just in the electricity of the poems or the big moments of the wild or our biggest revelations.
The hawk flies overhead, and he is just as beautiful in a complete sentence.