My Wobbly Bicycle, 33

This month is my “baby” sister (14 years younger) Michelle’s time at the lake (she owns 1/3 of the cottage, I own 2/3). She said that since she wasn’t able to visit when I was having chemo and radiation, she wanted to give me a lake-spa weekend.  She’s new to yoga this year, passionate about it, learning moves and practicing the techniques of “healing yoga” for herself. I had a session every day on the upstairs screened-in porch, waves lapping below, incense burning, woo-woo music on Pandora, and a little sister who loves me. If anything can cure a body, that ought to. Touch makes a huge difference, I think, not just when we’re sick. A masseuse is good, but someone who loves you is even better.

AND, I finally got in the lake!  I swam my usual swim to the boathouse three cottages down and back. We’ve always claimed the waters of our lake are the North American Lourdes, so I guess I’m doubly “cured.” But I have to say, my poor muscles are weak. It was a simple swim, breast stroke, not far, but it registered all over my body. Still does.  

I put on my swim cap ordered from one of the cancer sites. It’s white and ruffled and comes down over even my ears. It’s dopy. I look like Esther Williams. Michelle said something like, “Oh for Pete’s sake, take it off.” So I did. Here’s a photo, from a safe distance, but I put the cap back on when there were boaters or neighbors. And the photo Michelle took of the two of us, up close, my head shining in the sun? I can’t quite show you that one. I’m shy, obviously, about my head.   

I know, I know, a lot of young (particularly) people parade their bald heads around, an act of defiance of the disease, a statement that they feel okay no matter what they look like. I’m okay being bald, but I don’t like to be stared at, or have eyes drop when they see my head. I’m private. I’m okay with that.

I have days when I can walk over a mile, other days, like today, when I feel that chemo-y sick feeling and every movement is an effort. There seems to be no clear cause of either. My body just oscillates between okay and not-okay.

I feel somehow deficient that I haven’t been turning out poems about the cancer.  Other people have written really good poems about it. Though I’m reminded of what I said in my essay, “Mildred,” in Sydney Lea’s and my book (Growing Old in Poetry, on Kindle  from Autumn House. Ahem. Also a short version on Brevity’s website): you have to see things slant, you have to wait until they insinuate themselves in when the eyes are turned elsewhere.  I’d tried to write a poem about my adventure with Mildred the raccoon, but it was a failure. I’ve tried to write poems “about” this cancer experience. I only like one or two of them, if that.

“Emotion recollected in tranquility,” says Wordsworth. I say, if it’s tranquil, it’s lost its punch and you might as well not write it at all. However, if you let it sit, it will attach itself to the shirttail of some new  urgency and both will be charged by it.  Why did WW say “recollected”? Anything written about is recollected. “Tranquility” because almost certainly there’s much more to the poem/essay/story than the present scene yet knows. There’s a breadth and depth to be brought to bear upon it. There’s an assimilation that, if it happens, opens the door of the experience to let in the whole of our lives.

This relates to privacy, too, I think.  If we scatter ourselves all over Facebook, if we don’t allow enough pulling-back time, if we release every experience immediately into the general churning vat of conversation, OR (Ahem again) onto our blogs, how can we absorb, assimilate, and “see” what’s there? I’m not talking about making meaning of it, which is more akin to preaching than to writing. I’m talking about seeing by staying with it, by continuing to watch what emerges instead of quickly ossifying it into language, photos, and emoticons.

Quotes I've Saved and Why--#1

C.D. Wright: “Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.” [This is first in a series in which I take some quotes I’ve collected over time and try to figure out why I saved them.]   What is meant by “sounds better” has been exhaustively examined by every Introduction to Poetry book ever written, plus a passel of poets like C.D. Wright. Here is the beginning of one of Wright’s poems, “Why Ralph Refuses to Dance”:He would have to put out his smoke.At this time of year the snakes are slow and sorry-actingHis ice would melt. He’d lose his seat.you don’t take chances once in a while you still seeHe does not feel the beat.a coontail tied to an aerial but don’t lookHis pocket could be picked. His trousers rip. There are two points of view in this poem. The uncapitalized sentences are from Ralph, the others from someone else. “Sounds better” may mean that we are knocked slightly akilter, that the language doesn’t trot along as expected, so our ears are more interested. I would use that myself for a definition of “sounds better.” Now if I were taking the time here to write an essay rather than a blog entry, I’d talk about all the other poets—Coleridge, Keats, Rich, and basically every poet who’s ever written about poetry—and how they weigh in on this topic, which is a non-topic in the sense that sound and sense are not two, but one, and not one, but two, and can be talked about like a Zen koan. So being knocked akilter will be my catch-all phrase for being somehow being stricken by language instead of being completely sucked into the train ride toward meaning. Then the other piece of the quotation is “means more.” If you think about that, it's perfectly silly. Language can only mean what it means. Words have definitions. But of course words can allude, suggest, insinuate into multiple realms. They mean more when they mean two things at once. They mean more when they mysteriously open gaps in our linear path that point to something there are no words for. Then there’s the elephant in the room. “Better?” “More?” than what? Is poetry “more” than prose?  You can line up your “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind” guns, now.   “Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes,” says Joseph Roux. I’ve gotten myself into the position, now, of having to deal with the avalanche of self-aggrandizement. C.D. Wright’s words sum up the entire history of truisms about poetry. Which makes me want to look at that again, askance. What I think is that “Poetry” (say the word with a slightly British accent and the nose a bit upturned), meaning the best of it, not the worst, elevates itself. This is what I think. It decides that it gets to legislate; it decides that it points to the truth that it by-God-has-seen. The truth “Gleams like the flashing of a shield—the earth / and common face of Nature spake to me,” says Wordsworthin “The Prelude.” Poetry takes its own authority: we,  the readers/critics, don’t bestow it.FINE. The difference between “good” and “bad” poetry is that we believe the good poetry. We see that it is true, that the speaker has somehow taken upon herself a palpable truth. The more we read poems, the more we see the difference between the Truth and truthiness. It’s not a matter of sheer chutzpah. There are a million poems that think they have the “best words in the best order,” as Coleridge put it, pretty much sewn up. It seems to me to be some delicate balance of insight and fear. As in “I see, I must speak because I see, and I realize that speaking carries with it this weight of responsibility to speak it right: to make the words do their best.” We can feel all those things in the best poems: weight, fear, insight.