What am I doing with my life?

Stripes of sun on plaid. A scattering of clothespins in the yard, uncovered by melting snow.
What am I doing with my life?

Everything seems a chore in cold wind. The pond groans and snaps in the light. I listen to the the hum of the fridge and the screel of the clothesline pulley, tugged up and down by the wind.

I surf the textures and still pools of everyday life.  It is as if I am hibernating, waiting for something. Head down, trying to forestall dread: just keep the floor swept and the bed made. Your hair clean.

I am on call, but for what? And who will call? Which are the tasks for which we are preparing, squinting our eyes against the sun?

Afterthoughts for the last day of November

It's the last day of November and at the edge of the bay, the water is beginning to freeze. Where the tide has receded, brittle salt ice clings to the grasses and intertidal weeds; overnight the sea has tossed up opaque sheets a foot wide and thin as a snowflake. They shatter when we walk by, crumble into shimmering bits of dampness. The world is set to tumble into winter, but are we?

Of course we've pulled out coats and hats and mittens, and I keep trying to remember to bring my boots to the cobbler, because the sole is pulling away from the leather. I've got to repair them long enough to get to Montreal, where I'll buy a new pair. But rearranging the closets isn't really what I have in mind.   I wonder instead where all of this writing is going....what I am doing with this thing I call Visible Poetry?

I signed on to the challenge to post an entry a day this month in order to defend myself against the increasing encroachment of bureaucratic duties, the way an endless run of small tasks can slip into and fill every available hour. I wanted to recover some ground in which I was not simply responding to demands coming at me from the outside, but making something of my own, no matter how modest, each day, poetry or not. It seemed necessary, a way of finding my footing in spaces where I was feeling increasingly lost.

I am not sure that I am any less lost than I was at the beginning of the month; perhaps I have simply discovered, as Robert Lowell writes in the “Afterthought” to the third edition of his Notebook, a collection of sonnets built from letters and daily observations, that “For the poet without direction, poetry is a way of not saying what he has to say.” I fear this might be true; that although I've managed to carve a bit of space from each day for a few words and images of my own, these smaller undertakings are exercises in misdirection and work to sap larger projects. Still, perhaps I ought not be so hard on myself: as a long journey is built of shorter segments, so too are larger undertakings. How can I hope to find new routes through those more elaborate efforts if I do not also practice, when the stakes are lower, getting lost and pushing onward?

-->"Poetry is not a luxury" writes Audre Lorde in 1977; "it is the skeleton architecture of our lives." She is claiming here, as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva will in 1936, that poetry is "necessary as bread," an essential part of daily life, like water, like air, like hope, like dreams. Without it, something in us dies. "It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change...." Lorde writes.  "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought." 

I am not always reaching so far, perhaps, and yet, this writing is, if nothing else, a space of musing, of stretching of daring, of dreaming.  I should cling fast to Lorde's words then when I am feeling useless, or as if these little efforts are beside the point: "If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power...; we give up the future of our worlds." If I can believe this is true for others, why can't I believe it for myself?

There Where You Are Not

The hardest thing about death is the way your senses are trailed by ghosts.

For a very long time, maybe forever, a dead one whispers into your surround and you think you see this one, there, over there.  Or you pick up the drift of her scent, the timbre of his voice.  The corners of your eyes, the backs of your ears, the edges of your palate, sometimes even the insides of your elbows are in haunting collusion with the dead; together they conspire to keep you on the switchback between sudden hope and crushing sorrow.  Even today, nearly 15 years after my friend died in an airplane crash, I sometimes think I see him, in a city where he'd never been, striding down the street in a lemon yellow raincoat, hair flapping over his eyes, grizzled rain on Halifax sidewalks.

Love conjures these ghosts; we look for those we miss everywhere. Unceasingly, as if in prayer.

We returned from Mexico to a house without Linus, but her shade is with us still, in every creak and crack and wail and cranny of the house, in sunbeams and on blankets, in our gestures and responses, our habits of listening, of moving; she remains sewn through the motions and spaces of our daily living.

We will learn new habits, but we will never entirely lose the spectral sense of emptiness that particularizes these places, here, there, where she was and is home no longer. 

This is how we feel the proximities of each death: again and again, our hearts rent like fabric, a patchwork of tearing that can only continue until we too, will die.

Images
Linus spaces: chair and blanket, sunbeam and radiator, edge of the bath, food dish for raw liver, chair and bear, cat-clawed chair