All around me things are dying

All around me things are dying –

Decay dripping from every limb

As down down down they fall

In streaks of gold, red, orange, brown.

Always brown – all will turn to crisp,

Brittle, broken, brown. 

They are dead, you see.

And they aren’t coming back.

We can talk with knowing nods

Of resurrection and rebirth –

But these dearly beloved will not rise

Rise but will be replaced.

Is that not, for you and for me

Our greatest and growing terror?

We who believe in the resurrection

Are not reassured that we will 

Recognize the reincarnated self.

Is my descent for naught?

Will the slow movement that manifests

In the briefest flash of seasons – 

The quick crawl from bud to bloom,

From green to gold to brown – have

Any echoed features in the hereafter?

Or only as a mirror dimmed?

But if I stretch it in my minds eye –

This breath, this blink of time and space –

I can find in it an infinitude all its own. 

And in this rain of rainbowed hues,

Is there any difference between

A moment and eternity? 

Of Activity And Making Space

This has been a summer of a great deal of outer activity.

We renovated a hundred year old home. We moved into said home, with all of the agony that moving involves. We traveled to Costa Rica as a family. We barely tolerated one of the hottest summers in our memories. We prepared (are preparing) for the youngest to start school.

Perhaps some people’s intellectual life is stimulated by outer activity. I find that my temperament (to my frequent consternation) requires quite a bit of inactivity in order to make space for rich internal activity.

I often think of this quote from the film Bright Star. The film is about the romantic relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, but I remember very little about the film except for this quote by the character Charles Brown:

If Mr. Keats and myself are strolling in a meadow, lounging on a sofa or staring into a wall, do not presume we're not working. Doing nothing is the musing of the poet.

It was funny at the time, and still is now, in a grim sort of way. But it’s also true. Pain, love, beauty, this all may be the substance of the poet. But staring at a wall or walking through a meadow or lounging on a sofa are all necessary parts of the writing process. Unfortunately, they also look like a complete lack of work ethic and productivity, two things highly prized by the society in which we live and work and find meaning.

If I could bring about any sudden change to life, I think it would be to provide a little more breathing room. Somewhere between the pressures of school and work, the tyranny of social engagements, little league, and ballet classes, there would be room to breathe — room for staring at the stars, room for long conversations, and room for thought.

I can’t suddenly strip away all of the external activities of my life, though I can constantly be about the work of purging them. But I can use my elbows and wrestle out a little breathing room from time to time. One of the surprising ways I’ve done this is through poetry. Not in writing it (though the one leads often to the other), but in reading it. There is something about the pace of poetry and what it demands of us that opens up a little room. It demands our attention. It makes us ponder both the small and large. It opens up our imagination to a capaciousness the relentless world overlooks. This is why the world makes little space for poetry and why it so desperately needs poetry.

So, if you haven’t done so, and even if you don’t like or understand poetry (perhaps especially so), make a little space for poetry. You might find that the nothing it seems you are doing, opens up a thousands somethings that are infinitely more valuable than mere productivity.

For practice, here’s a lovely little poem by Barbara Kingsolver called “How to Do Absolutely Nothing.”

Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin
but: Do not take your walking shoes.
Don’t take any clothes you’d wear
anyplace anyone would see you.
Don’t take your rechargeables.
Take Scrabble if you have to,
but not a dictionary and no
pencils for keeping score.
Don’t take a cookbook
or anything to cook.
A fishing pole, ok
but not the line,
hook, sinker,
leave it all.
Find out
what’s
left.

Truly Great Sentences

Have you ever come across a breathtaking or hilariously absurd sentence that stops you in your tracks?

This year I tried to record some of those as a read, beautiful, witty, powerful sentences. And these are a few of them…

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.” - Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I do not think that it is naive to think that it is the tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance.” - Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence…” - Fredrick Bachman, Anxious People

“I go down to the shore in the morning / and depending on the hour the waves / are rolling in or moving out, / and I say, oh, I am miserable, / what shall— / what should I do? And the sea says / in its lovely voice: / Excuse me, I have work to do.” - Mary Oliver, Devotions

“The point of the nights is that if you spend time with each other — if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen — then we would fall in love.” - Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.” - Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes.” - Amor Towels, A Gentleman In Moscow

“When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited. While those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.” - Amor Towels, A Gentleman In Moscow

“Two empty hours were a sinus infection bred.” - Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

How To Write Good

Here’s the truth. I don’t know.

That’s not entirely true. I know some of the things. I taught literature and writing for eleven years. I should know a few things. But I know what makes a poor sentence (like “How to write good.”) and I know the principles of rhetoric (fancy word for the art of persuasion). But to write a sentence that makes a person smile and her eyes light up or makes someone cry, hitting right in the bullseye of the soul, that I can’t give a formula for.

But it’s not magic. I always want to be clear about that.

That’s not entirely true. It’s a little bit of magic. But the only way I know how to write strong sentence is to read good sentences and to write a ridiculous amount of bad sentences. This isn’t anything insightful. I know it’s been said about three thousand times before. And still it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it. You write hundreds, maybe thousands of bad sentences and then, pushing yourself to find a vivacious verb and a handful of gritty nouns, you make a sentence that causes you to sit back and sigh. It’s a keeper.

But you aren’t suddenly cured. You’re still going to write ridiculously bad sentences. I’m sure most of these sentences are bad, and that’s ok. No one can hit home runs every time up at bat (You like how many metaphors I’ve worked into this short space?).

So if you want to write well, don’t. Read well and then write poorly. Just keep writing. And with writing and rewriting and fumbling around for quite a while, you may find yourself writing the kind of sentences, the kind of paragraphs, the kind of essays, and the kind of poetry you want to write some day.