Wandering and Wondering.

If life is a poem, then this line from Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry is a day, a year, two years, three, in this life -

“or walk inside the poem’s room
to feel the walls for a light switch.”

Katrina Kenison opens her book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, with a quote by John Tarrant: “Every step in the dark turns out, in the end, to have been on course after all.”

This, surely, is a gift to all. Not just to us who worry.

The A-Muse Mouse and the Poet.

This morning stepping out of bed, I noticed my joints were stiff and almost sticky. As I bent down to tie my walking shoe laces, my spine ached and cracked.

No, my physique is very well, thank you. What I’m talking about is the mental skeleton. Or more accurate, the muscles of the mind.

Walking is not just an exercise to get my physical pulse going. For lack of better words, I am training to improve that all important stamina of the soul. Or heart. Or whatever she is called, that conductor of my mental orchestra.

So when I closed the door behind me this morning, I held a poem in my hand, As I do every morning. I recite words with the same rhythm as I move my feet, hoping my hearts will expand (yes, the plural: body and soul) With a steady (inner!) voice and good intentions I move. When I am out of breath, I slow down.

Billy Collins in his Introduction to Poetry, asks his students to “take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide, or press an ear against its hive.” He says

“....drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out”

So that’s what I did. I slowed down to drop a mouse into that very poem.

I kept repeating the sentence again and again, to watch the mouse probe his way out. The idea got more and more absurd as I walked along, a mouse dropped into a pool of poetry! I imagined the little creature picked up by two giant fingers and then dropped just-like-that into a small lake. Water splashed everywhere. The mouse kicked and screamed, arms and legs and tail in one gigantic chaos. Till eventually he relaxed and realized the environment was friendly. That’s when the rhythm of his strokes changed from frantic doggy-paddle into front crawl.

But the absurdity did not stop here. For suddenly I myself was in the picture, I was that mouse, my feet kicking as I was picked up by two gigantic fingers. For a while I was in the air, dangling. Till I was dropped from a great height into the Grand Poem of Life. The water splashed when I hit water.

As I tried to familiarize myself with the surroundings, I said to myself - is this world basically friendly - or do I need to kick and fight for my life? Are my worries worth worrying about, or are my mental muscles stiff a result of bad habits?

I tried to relax, to change my stride, to slide along, making each stroke last longer. I wanted to see if my body would float.

And far away, on that distant shore, I caught sight of something gigantic. In a comforting moment, I imagined it was the Creator of all Poems, watching me as I probed my way out.

Camera-worthy.

Introducing Billy Collins yesterday was really a way into his Introduction to Poetry. In this poem Collins asks his students to

“...take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide”

When reading these lines I thought of all the color slides of the world, stacked into boxes and drawers and cellars and attics. I imagined mankind’s complete collection of family albums, Himalayas of binders, one on top of the other. I pictured each person’s computer files, hard disks, DVDs. We click click to save moments, click click to freeze time, click click to extract the essence of what we see. Or want to see.

Collins’ call to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide could be reversed. Take one of those color slides and hold it up to the light. Is there a poem here?

But what about all those moments when the camera is left in the bag? What about the moments when sunny skies and cheeeese smiles are sobs, clouds and drizzle?

Is every second of life camera-worthy? If not, why? Is there no beauty in the leftovers, the discarded, the moments I’d rather forget? And is beauty really the right word?

To Live the Moment.

Let me introduce Billy Collins.

The first poem I read by "America's most popular poet" (so called by the New York Times) was Tuesday, June 4th, 1991 (from The Art of Drowning). How could I not fall in love with this poet, this

"......secretary to the morning whose only

responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation

until it’s time to go to lunch......"

Collins writes about any ordinary day as if it’s special, unique, extraordinary! Which of course it is. For - can any moment, anyTHING, be called by the slightly soul-less word ordinary?

"If I look up, I see out the window the white stars

of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,

a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,

things you would expect to find outside a window,

all written down now and placed in the setting

of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated

in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.

Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,

an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands

are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,

....."

When viewed from a small distance, the habitual seems so totally out-of-the-ordinary. Or is it when I stand in the very middle and immerse my complete being in the NOW that I see every single second as the only one of its kind?

Sitting here, in my black swivel chair, feet elevated on a pile of old dictionaries, the fridge humming in the background, my tummy rumbling from lack of lunch, I see that this moment will never return, however ordinary it seems right now. It is early April, an overcast and sun-less

"...... Tuesday

that would quickly be forgotten were it not for my 

writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed

at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, light and sweet."

What is life if not a continuous string of special seconds?

I started this post with the intention of presenting Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins. The poem was in my hand while out walking, I was trying to memorize the first lines.

Sitting on my sofa an hour later, gold nib scratching across paper, trying to find something to say, I got all involved with different words.

To Live a Poem certainly reminds me to Live the Moment.

Poetic Medicine.

Can you write about poetry without questioning the form itself? Can you talk about poetry without stirring a barrel full of opinions, emotions, prejudices, passions?

Even today, when asking myself about poetry, there is a faint, feeble echo of a no, noo, nooo,.... At the same time I can hear my own vocal cords singing YES, YES, YES with a loud, clear voice.

I avoided the poetry assignments at school. There was something about the word “poetry analysis” that put me off. It seemed like an enormous task, like doing the dishes, or solving a mathematical riddle.

Then one day, when school was just a memory, a poem came knocking on my door. It was not one of those poems that shakes the earth with revolutionary truths about man and spirit and heaven and hell. This was a poem that wiped her feet before entering, a poem that demanded nothing of me, other than I noticed she was there.

Did William Carlos Williams write this poem on one of his prescription pads? I have no idea. Other than it worked as a wonder cure for me and my apprehension about poetry.


so much depends
upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Determined.

Appropriate words for this day of Easter is Mary Oliver's conclusive lines of The Journey:

determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

The first time I heard the in-flight safety announcements with a baby in my arms, I was not just startled, I was upset, agitated, stunned! “In case the cabin pressure changes, panels above your heads will open, revealing oxygen masks. Be sure to secure your own mask before helping others, including your children.” What? Securing myself before my child?

According to tiger mom instincts, the order of priority is totally contrary. I would rather die than......hmmm....wait a minute....If I’m dead from oxygen deficiency, who’s then to.....

You get the picture. As I did. Eventually.

Mary Oliver’s words carry a message not obvious at first glance. Save yourself might seem harsh and selfish. Yet, is there any other way? Does not Gandhi point towards the same when he urges us to be the very change we want to see in the world?

Then there are the biblical words of Paul - “Love other people as well as you do yourself.” The stress surely is on the latter part of the sentence - for can you really love your neighbor if you have no heart for yourself?

A voice of your own.

Just back from a week in England’s green and pleasant land, Mary Oliver’s The Journey is still with me:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world

The year is nineteen seventy four, winter is but scattered patches of snow on wet, brown grass. I am leaning out of a classroom window, breathing the air of spring. And freedom. For school is coming to an end, and so are years of compulsory education, of doing the expected. Suddenly I am the one to decide what to do with the rest of my life.

Or am I? What exactly is for me to decide, and what is this me anyway? What is my own voice and what are the echoes of parents, teachers, peers, culture, tradition?

“What are your plans, then?”
A friend is standing next to me, our school day is dedicated to our future.
“I just need to cross a border,” I say, “I need to go somewhere completely different.”

I had no idea what I meant, there was just this undefined longing.

Five months later I am in another classroom, in green and pleasant England. Upon my arrival, I felt the country had opened its arms to greet me. As if I had come back to a place that was mine from the very start.

As if the country had a voice of its own. A voice that spoke into my ear. And my heart. A voice that lead me to recognize my own. Though only slowly. Slowly.