Rythmn

For the last two years the patterns of my life have changed drastically. The reasons don’t matter as much as the reality of the change and the implications.  My rhythms are altered, varied, quickened, slowed down. My writing life, not lost but unrecognizable. I keep attempting a return to the discipline of my former life. It never sticks or restarts the way I envision. I keep wanting to return and when I’m unsuccessful I deem myself failed.

Today when rehearsing with the graduating students, I realized that I cannot return to the tried method: writing in the morning when I first wake, writing the few hours before leaving the house for my non-writing work. No, there are different beats and sounds under my skin, between my toes, in my throat, not to mention my heart.

The books I have been reading lately are not the newly beloved but the poems of those who have recently died: Kunitz, Rector, Shinder. I have been consumed with duende, angels, dark and otherwise. My angels have names and they talk to me and one another: Phoebe, Sophie, Isabelle. The conversation is often loving and sometimes critical. Harshness is never welcomed but sometimes invades the harmony of a quiet dinner of shrimp and salad.  On what shelf do the living belong?

I must allow new methods to take hold. I’m thinking staccato, syncopation, snare. I know little about percussion. A steady drum roll? And what about cadence? How does one learn, make room for the experiment that calls for repetition but not sameness.

I’m housed between mountain ranges. The valley wide with soft greens and moisture that clings to my blonde graying hair and helps to water the blueness of my eyes. The clouds are scattered. My poems are embedded deep within. They can’t wait any longer for an established routine that may never again exist.

   

 

Mountains

Traveling from the ocean to tne mountains,

realizing that the mountains shelter.

 

Swamp Iris

When I first arrive at Bennington and take that first walk or run, I always write about the wild iris that grow in the ditches here. And that same field of clover. Today there was a place where deer had rested. So clearly a resting place created in need. A place to rest and gather one’s self. That’s how I feel this morning.

Arriving at Bennington

A heatwave. Even after the storm.