Three converging things:
1) the note I keep on my desk, advice from Sokuzan, my Buddhist teacher: “Don’t conclude anything.” 2) an interview with Stephen Dunn in the new issue of The Georgia Review, and 3) a note from an editor rejecting the poems I sent him, saying: “they all share a common characteristic that tips the scale toward the Return side: some bits of summation/explication that are unnecessary and/or less interesting than the images and anecdotes and implied metaphors.” Stephen Dunn: “The poem might be smart, but who cares? It has to get away from itself.” I’m not sure I agree with the editor about these particular poems. Nevertheless, it's true I am an expert at logic (summation/explication). I was trained to be logical. I was rewarded for logic by the attention of my father. I was punished for the lack of it by eye-rolling distain. Maybe I’ve spent the last 30 years meditating to try to break out of that prison. The best I can say now is that I can see the prison of it. I see when the poem’s locked up. I see when my thoughts are locked up. I see when I can’t WAIT to artfully conclude the poem, to return it to its snug harbor. 
No matter that I’ve taught for years that a poem should skate out into a widening sky rather than tie itself into a nice neat bow. That it should open the mind, not satisfy the mind. You can’t will this to happen. Dunn says, “I have to discover what’s beyond what I wanted to say.” If you’re not a writer, hang on. I am thinking beyond making poems. Remember I was going to talk about aging? Aren’t old people supposed to have a few wise conclusions based on their long life? And politics. God knows I have conclusions, opinions. 
As Sokuzan says, conclusions are like holding your hand in front of your face. You see the conclusion, not the truth. The truth (now this is me talking) is slippery. Even in science, we know how slippery the truth is. Can’t pin it down. Opinions should probably be held lightly. Logical conclusions better come with a caveat. Dunn: “[I had] the wish to live a coherent life, one that made sense or would hold up. I gave that up; it was impossible.” Eavan Boland: "Poetry begins where certitude ends." With each surgery, Jerry and I both thought, okay, this is it. This will surely take care of the issues. Giving up on believing my own scenario has been really helpful. I do hope and expect that his pain and his mobility will improve, but this is our life, now, and who knows what the next day will be? Big sigh of relief in that, actually. 
My junior high English teacher would give us extra credit for making booklets that illustrated and/or expanded on what we were studying in class. I realized very quickly that I could artfully paste some pictures, write a few captions, slap it all together, and get extra credit. Once I asked the art teacher to help me make a cover. She basically drew it for me. It was lovely, albeit not my work. Another few points of extra credit. At the time, my father made some scornful remarks about my not learning anything by this. He was right. It was a cheap cop-out and I knew it. So I bristled, of course. I have made poems like that. I have turned a poem loose at the exact point that I knew it was pleasing and/or funny, instead of keeping on to see what chaos might lie under it. I don’t know what can be done other than keep on keeping on, pushing the boundaries of the poem—or the essay—not giving up on it too soon. And pushing the boundaries of the mind by practicing listening well, making a deliberate intention to open rather than to close. It is entirely likely there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy.
My Wobbly Bicycle, 154
in Archive
Aging. Aging and the writer. That subject should keep me busy for a long while. Today the subject is caretaking. There are probably two dozen good blogs about caretaking out there. And books. You don’t need to bother with this blog. However, I hope you do. Breathes there a caretaker with soul so dead that he or she doesn’t sometimes flare with internal anger, doesn’t watch others head out on mountain biking trips and feel jealous? Who doesn’t fantasize living alone, eating toast over the sink instead of bothering to get out breakfast stuff? Who doesn’t stare long minutes out the window at the turning trees? 
There’s no point in trying to balance that with heart-warming tales of the blessings of sharing hard times, of having a long-time mate that you love, no matter what. The deepening of tenderness and closeness when it’s down to brass tacks. No sense balancing at all. It’s not one or the other, but both.(Above poem is my 100-year-old father's favorite. Thought you might enjoy it.) Things have turned mysterious. First there was Jerry’s hip replacement, then it failed, then it was replaced again. For a short time there was no pain. In the last couple of weeks there is a lot of pain in the area of the sacrum. He’s had steroid injections. No help from that yet. We don’t know exactly what’s pressing on what, but after two major back surgeries, plus the hip surgeries, is there any wonder something’s pressing on something that it shouldn’t be. Can this be remedied? I don’t even know what we’ll have for lunch, much less what will transpire tomorrow. 
Meanwhile, Jerry’s just celebrated his 78th birthday. We’ve had to give up our Alaska cruise, which was to be our present to each other. Note to reader: buy trip insurance (we did). We drove up the peninsula to look at trees and gorgeous water, the way old people do, and stopped for lunch along the way. My sister and brother in law picked up dinner for the four of us and brought it to our place. My children and grandchildren travel all over the place. Kelly’s family was in Croatia this spring. Scott’s in Italy right now. Interestingly, I have always been pretty content with a computer, paper, pen, trees, crickets, and water to swim in. I prefer our lake but I can make do with the Y. There are all sorts of explorations, both interior and exterior. I lean toward the interior, anyhow. The interior has its own cathedrals and canals. In less than two weeks, I’ll have arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus that has tormented me for almost six months (took a while to diagnose). I’ll be glad to get it fixed, but there’s Jerry, unable to help while I’m hobbling or whatever I’ll be. I mention this because this is how it is when you get old—people’s ailments don’t conveniently take turns. They sometimes come on simultaneously. Meanwhile, I’ve written a couple of essays I’m happy with this year, and more poems, good and bad, than I usually admit to. I tend to pretend I’m a total wuss as a writer. It seems to be my way of clearing the decks for the next thing. 
AND, the book I wrote with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, has just come out in paperback from Green Writers Press in Vermont. It has a great cover and a new chapter on politics. It’s gotten great response from people who’ve gotten hold of it. I ought to have a book launch! This needs to be another blog post—the need to publicize when you get older and basically all you want to do is write. 
Four years have been swept away in the twinkling of an eye. This is odd, you know, since I seem to have been here all along, writing posts now and then, pontificating and musing and drolling and trolling. Nonetheless, one day a few weeks ago, I looked around on my website and found a vacuum between 2014 and now. Apparently I have been in hibernation. My web guy, who designed and takes care of my lovely site basically as a favor these days, his interests being elsewhere, was as mystified as I. He tried to pull it back. Did you know there’s a program that can find old versions of things posted? You can take back the past. Yes, but it’s a random capture, and not much was captured. He was able to mostly rebuild my home page and he’s put back in the books that have come out since then. Apparently the server he was using had failed to update its security and there was a hole in the dyke. Through it poured the return of my hair after chemo, Jerry’s two back surgeries, his hip replacement and the ensuing miseries, my studies of Black writers in preparation for interviewing Nikki Giovanni, and so on. I DO have these in Word files, but rebuilding the posts is more work than I’m willing to do. After all, what am I, famous or something? After my death, maybe some diligent and earnest graduate student can retrieve them from the Cloud, if he or she is desperate enough for a dissertation topic. 
This all makes me think. Everything makes me think. I am stuck at home while Jerry serves his three-months' sentence after "revision"(that means it failed the first time) hip replacement. So instead of hiking or getting anywhere-the-heck-out-of-here for a while, I am thinking. That is, I am thinking between/during grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up and washing and folding and cleaning the litter box and helping Jerry bathe and dress, driving us to appointments, taking my father to appointments, and doing stretches to help my tendonitis (any wonder?). 
As the glorious northern summer rips by at warp speed, I am thinking of time and the perception of time. Where did the four years go? Were they an accumulation of dots along a continuum, of blog posts, or books? How narrow. Humans, in spite of our huge intelligence, have a truncated range of sensory perception compared to most creatures. Then we close even that in, to fit our preconceptions. It’s big out there. So, I am thinking about the width and breadth and depth of those four years, that still exist and no longer exist, depending on how you look at it. The older I get, the more complex things seem to be. 
Wally’s nugget for today: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” 
It’s 16 steps from our dining room table to the kitchen. Jerry prefers a complex mixture of dry cereal, granola, nuts, dried cherries, banana, and milk. Both of us also like cut-up fresh strawberries and blueberries on our cereal. Both of us like orange juice. I eat cooked oatmeal with ground flaxseed and yogurt. Plus, there are our vitamins. It's all up to me. In the first week of Jerry’s convalescence I clocked more daily steps on my Fitbit than before his surgery. 
Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Why have I never thought of a tray before? I can load it full and cut over half the trips. Then I load the dishwasher, clean up, add to my grocery list, get Jerry situated on the bed for his small exercises. Go wash my face and start my bathroom routine while he’s doing that. Then I come back and prop three pillows under his feet so he can lie there awhile to help reduce the swelling. I’ve gotten us here only until about 9:30. Oh no, the day begins much earlier. At 1 a.m. I am helping him into his (rented) recliner to spend the rest of the night because the brace becomes too uncomfortable in bed. I bring him water and pills. Then also I forgot the pre-breakfast routine, where I help him get partially dressed, feed Wally, clean the two lumps of misdirected kitty-poop off the floor. You get the idea. This will go on for three months, total. His left hip is not to bear any weight until the bone grafts and screws have firmly attached themselves. 
I’m sick of writing about such things, but such things are my life. Then I read the introduction to the new issue of Agni Magazine by its splendid editor, Sven Birkerts. Sven begins with his personal version of what we already know, that the “pile-up of consequential events is straining our ability to respond and changing the way we inhabit our lives.” He says he finds it hard to remember how things were before. Not that it hasn’t occurred to me before, but my life, fraught with constant calls for my attention, is a perfect mirror of what’s happening to us all, right now. Too much, too much. All Breaking News. Sven puts it: “To tune in is to be plunged into a quasi-hypnotic state, an ever-urgent ‘feed.’ It also occurs to me that the dwindling away of the dependent clause in poetry and in all writing, pretty much, these days is another perfect mirror of our inability to assign relative value. It’s all Breaking News. Nothing, as Sven says, is in the background. It’s all foreground. 
So where are our personal boundaries? he wonders. Where is the “I” when all is one giant news feed? Where is the writer in all this? “If our age’s drive is toward both speed and dispersion, or distraction, the making and encountering of art represent exactly the opposite principles. Art has always been about deceleration and attention. The made thing embodies labor and deep patience, and its nuances enforce slowness,” Sven writes. Hence, my opening passage. See. Here we are. Slowly living our lives. Even so, the unspoken tensions, the constant crises we all feel, are felt within the small, personal narrative. My overload is magnified by the national news overload. Inescapable. Yet art is the “locus of encounter,” as Sven says, “where meanings are tested.” I think of “tested” as seen and sorted out, given relative value. As in, my life is crucial, here, at this moment. 
