Ink and Paper

I visited you this weekend. While I was home--home for two whirlwind days full of wedding planning and first visits to a beautiful, sacred place--I couldn't resist spending some time with you. I saw you every night, packed up demurely in the corner of my room, or stacked haphazardly in bags on the floor, and I had to let you know how loved you were.

So I unpacked those boxes, removed tape and peeled up labeled tabs, surrounding myself with stacks of wisdom and truth. Gently, I freed you from the precarious Jenga confinements of your cardboard prisons. I ruffled your pages and caressed highlighted words. Fanned out covers and re-read earmarked corners. Built walls around myself, walls of myth and lecture, poetry and essay. Basked in the constant waves of language as they swirled around me, feeding through eyes and ears and lips, filling my mind and spirit.

And then I packed you up again. I liberated a few sad souls, souls whose words I could not live without any longer, stuffing Billy Collins and The English Patient in my backpack. But as for the rest, you were delegated back into the shadowy corners. Left to dream of that glorious day, not too far off, when you will breathe on shelves doused in sunlight, the delicate touch of fingers on your spine and exhalations of wonder on your open pages.

A Tribute

Well here it is, Mother's Day. And here I am, resting in a small town just outside of Bellingham, WA, missing my mother in the most surprising and profound way. I'm not usually inclined towards homesickness, and especially not now, when I'm finally out of Utah and finally in a place where I can start to build something, where I can realize my full potential. But on a day set aside for honoring the noble women who sacrifice everything, I can't help but add my voice to the praise.

My mom is the single most important influence in my life. She raised me to value language, books, education. She set me on the path of knowledge that I follow today. She taught me about the gospel, the difference between right and wrong, and how to foster intelligence while maintaining high ideals. Her example was one of love, and service, and constant dedication to family. Even when I couldn't see my own potential my mom always did, and always had faith in me to be better and to do great things. I am so proud to be her daughter.

Whenever I try to put into words what my mom has done for me, or how grateful I am, it reminds me how woefully inadequate any statement is. Nothing can summarize the role of mothers. And then, after feeling helpless for a bit, I remember the poem "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins.

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I don't think anything can ever make us even, Mom. Thank you for everything. Know that I am thinking of you. You are amazing. You are so full of love and talent and warmth. I admire you and love you so much. Once again, I'm grateful that you are my mother.

Smoothbeautifully Folded

I still can't write. My mind is muddled mixing, mashed mirth and mourning, a mire of muffled musings.

I feel dried up. But I'd like to believe there is still beauty in this world. In honor of beauty, I give you this.

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer Lust

I long to sit in grass

enveloped in green ... yes,
that's the right word.
Emerald, with three syllables
and proper vowels is too cloying.
Verdant is better, but still borders
on lengthy, that extra
step that sinks the foot of description
into the slushy gutter
of overkill.
No, I'll stick with
green.
Fresh and bright, pure
crayon and light. Bursting
through closed eyelids with
it's warmth and smell,
like the new cut grass
on which I wish to rest.

Lost & Found: In Memoriam

Last winter I went to this totally amazing Billy Collins lecture and came out from it with a burning desire to write poetry. I scribbled a couple poems on loose pieces of paper and random notebooks, taking inspiration from my daily surroundings and trying to see life as I thought Collins did. It didn't last long, maybe a week or so. I got lazy and soon moved on.

A few months later, I found myself in a creative writing class that completely fostered my once imaginative soul. When we came to the poetry section of the course, I remembered one of the poems I wrote during the Week of Poetry, and decided to submit that for my piece. The night before the assignment was due, I looked for the paper I'd written it on, only to find it had disappeared. I threw together a new version on the same theme, but was mostly disappointed with it.

Recently, I found the original poem! It wasn't as earth-shatteringly poignant as I thought it was, but that's hindsight. Anyway, here's both versions, in chronological order. Any suggestions?

The silence serves as a haven.
I take out my book and read,
until the silence, and the luxury
of an entire couch to myself
steal my thoughts away.
I start from feigning death
to a room surrounded by it.
I realize this quiet, morbid room,
is full of students studying,
glued to books, computers,
iPods, and sweet surrender of sleep,
oblivious to the tomb they sit in.
Display cases full of gilded names and plastic
roses on black velveteen,
a dark silhouette against a white orb,
red white and blue.
I cannot use this place so casually.
Haunted by the mothers, the wives, the siblings,
I walk into the warmth outside.
Glad to have my homework finished.


MEMORIAL

An enveloping quiet
highlights the silent cases
full of memory and sorrow.

Rows of enameled names gleam
golden against the burnished backdrop
held in oaken arms.

An eternal rose rests resplendent
on dark velveteen fields, behind
the garish glass.

Above, a circlet of white, holding
silhouettes of towers and figures
within the square of black.

This hall of death is shrinking,
crushing with the weight of lives
sacrificed for the "greater good".

I leave the tomb-like room, and step
into the warmth of outside day,
glad to have finished my homework.

"Poets aren't quite like other people..."

Today BYU managed to get former Poet Laureate (and one of my favorite modern day poets. The other top one is Taylor Mali, but he is not the topic of this post, now is he?) Billy Collins to come and read poetry. I can die happy.

It was spectacular to sit in an auditorium, not too far back, and listen to a man whose works have been on AP tests. Think about that for a while. What was wonderful was the atmosphere in the room. As he spoke, I could feel myself (along with the hundred or so other people there) falling for his laid-back charm, being mesmerized by this unassuming man in a blue sweater.

When he stood up, he got straight to the point: poetry. He read and explained things he wrote in a soft voice. Thanks to a cold he apologized for, it was a little nasally but no less enthralling. True, at times it reminded me of Ben Stein's monotone, but the closer I listened the more I began to appreciate the subtleties of his recital. This droll little man with the droopy eyes was a mass of gentle humor. As he got further along the program, I saw his spirit. Here was a man who lived his life in a constant state of bored amusement. That sounds like a paradox, but that's what it was. You could tell he spent his life looking outwards, looking out his window as his poem "Monday" implies, but not judging what he saw. He liked the world, he wrote about it, and it brought him joy.

What was really beautiful was observing what happened when his "poem" voice, the voice that added a gentle emphasis and halting rhythm to his words, extended to his everyday voice, the one he used to talk about where the inspiration for such and such came from. When that happened, the most idle of comments became poetry, and so beautiful that you would have given anything at that moment to see life as he saw it.

After he had closed with the recitation of "On Turning Ten", preceded by the statement "If you are majoring in English, you are majoring in Death. So death is our thing" (poking fun of the abundance of mortality poems in the literary canon), I ran to get him to sign his newest book for me. I waited in a line that was more like a crowded corral, but it was worth it just to have something I can hold to remember the way I felt, sitting in an uncomfortable seat and wanting to be able to write like that when I grow up.

Anyway, here is a sample of his poetry, and one of my favorites, though it is really too hard to choose. It's the title poem from his latest book, The Trouble With Poetry.

The Trouble With Poetry

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along the beach one night-
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky-

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti-
to be perfectly honest for a moment-

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
i carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.