I was walking in the forest, on a dim afternoon, hunting for mushrooms. Ruckus and the poodle were with me--the poodle dashing joyously ahead, Ruckus engaged in top-secret cat stuff in the brush. Suddenly a barred owl sailed silently through the tree trunks. It was close enough to touch, though I did not touch it. The owl rose and then folded itself onto the limb of a tall birch tree beside the pond. And there it sat, for as long as I watched it, a vivid mothy shadow in the faded daylight, looking down on the three of us, considering us as dinner prospects, I suppose. I picked up Ruckus, who was the only one of edible size, and I looked up at the owl, which looked down on me--tamely, one might say, or indifferently.

In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer writes of owl mythology. He not only records the common tale of the witch's familiar but notes that eating an owl's eyes is said to give a person the power to see in the dark. He also speaks of the owl's place in the traditions of "many tribes of South-eastern Australia," where "each woman believes that the lives of her mother, sisters, daughters, and so forth, equally with her own, are bound up with the lives of particular owls, and that in guarding the owl species she is guarding the lives of all her female relations besides her own."

But if anything, the owl I saw was guarding me. Or it was planning to eat my cat. The interaction was mysterious; it was both beautiful and ominous.

                                          Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still held taut between me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air. 

--from Denise Levertov, "Illustrious Ancestors"

From a November 1840 essay [title unknown] by Walt Whitman, age 21:

I have sometimes amused myself with picturing out a nation of loafers. Only think of it! an entire loafer kingdom! Give us the facilities of loafing, and you are welcome to all your benefits of your tariff system, your manufacturing privileges, and your cotton trade. For my part, I had serious thoughts of getting up a regular ticket for President and Congress and Governor and so on, for the loafer community in general.

[Having loafed for a good portion of my fifty years on this earth, I can tell you with authority that loafers make terrible politicians. Do not elect us.]

***

I apologize for not writing yesterday, but honestly, I was both exhausted by the essay I posted on Sunday and overwhelmed by the response. Thus far, that post has received more than 200 visits--by far the largest number that any of my posts has ever received. But writing it did wear me out, and I'm not sure why.

So now I'm off to spend my birthday in the most mundane ways possible: dealing with the guy who's arriving to replace our rusty propane tank; doing three loads of laundry; sitting beside a soccer field in the rain. Loafing, in other words . . . which, in Whitman's terms, also means that I am laughing and crying and watching and explaining and questioning and describing and exaggerating and saluting you, my dearest reader. Thank you for your bright and loving friendship.

[Helpful remark from my friend David: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” – Kurt Vonnegut]

On Turning Fifty

In two days I will celebrate my fiftieth birthday: a half-century spent clinging to the surface of this rolling planet, a half-century spent sleeping and waking and crawling and walking, a half-century spent--and still spent--as the little child of my parents. This last may be the oddest thought. In two days I will celebrate my fiftieth birthday, and my parents, as they do every year, will telephone me, and call me "Bunny," and reminisce about the day I was born. In two days I will celebrate my fiftieth birthday, but I am still an innocent because I am not yet an orphan.

When I was ten years old, I cringed at the thought of age. "How could such a thing happen to me?" I scoffed. Today, on the cusp of fifty, I look back at my small protoplasmic self with affection but not envy.

The short answer is: I love being alive.

In two days I will celebrate my fiftieth birthday, and I have so much to celebrate: the human connections, of course--my family, my lovers past and present; the dear friends of my heart; an open book under lamplight and music under my fingers. And the land and the animals, of course--a yellowing plum tree glowing in the drizzled morning light; the blue-eyed cat asleep in a wooden box on the windowsill.

But the world is not only beauty, not even mostly beauty; and celebrate is the wrong word for what I want to describe here, which is nothing that my ten-year-old self would have understood in any conscious way: that is, the power of being awake to ugliness and despair and grief; of attending to them, both as internal definition of the self and as trenchant conditions of life on earth.

I read somewhere, I forget where, that it's not a poet's job to fix the world. It's a poet's job to see the world and then use her artisan skills to reveal it sharply, poignantly, personally, universally. This is the bardic impulse, a way of reading Shelley's claim that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." At the same time, we swim in our own cramped and cluttered seas. We look out of our own windows, and see our own plum trees. We weep over our own losses.

I love being alive. But being alive means losing everything, slowly or suddenly, violently or peacefully. It exacts a terrible price, this gift of existence.

"Poetry has a vested interest in sorrow," wrote Robert Frost, yet that vested interest is, in its own way, a version of celebration. We seize sorrow; we examine, imitate, replicate, exaggerate it. We do not let it go.

In two days I will turn fifty. The sun will rise. A barred owl will float silently across the clearing. I will wake in a small bed, next to a warm and breathing body. "One day," as Jane Kenyon wrote, "I know it will be otherwise."

Otherwise arrives, and will arrive, on tender infant feet, and on the cloven hooves of the devil. It arrives, and will arrive.

In two days I will turn fifty, and I am lonely for the loves I have already lost. But I celebrate them too, because I miss them, because I cast and recast their shadows in my heart. The faucet drips in the kitchen. A car swishes by on the wet road. I am here. My eyes and ears have not yet stopped sponging up the busy, petty, present tense. Words flow from my fingers; a clumsy song searches for its shape.

The short answer is: I am alive.

Notes on yesterday's post:

The confusions in Vanzetti's statement exist in the official record, yet they are subtle enough to ignore if one is in the mood to convict a man.

Antheil's noisy ballet was apparently a shock. So why didn't the traffic sounds in Gershwin's 1928 American in Paris also upset contemporaneous listeners?

Barbara Kulbacki was my great-grandmother. My grandmother was one of the five hungry children. My mother went to her senior prom with the son of one of the girls next door. He grew up to be the foremost proponent of Middle Eastern dance in the United States, and he and his mother are the subjects of another poem in the manuscript.

I have an intense image of Chiang Kai-Shek "rub[bing] the top of his head with both hands."

Week in Review (1927)

Dawn Potter

BOSTON, MASS., April 9—

Bartolomeo Vanzetti explains to the judge,

“I would not wish

to a dog or to a snake,

to the most low and misfortunate

creature of the earth—

I would not wish to any of them

what I have had to suffer

for things that I am not guilty of.

But my conviction is

that I have suffered

for things that I am guilty of.”

NEW YORK CITY, April 10—

Premiering tonight at Carnegie Hall,

George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique

features full orchestra and the sounds

of elevated trains, aeroplanes, and canneries.

Thus far the audience is highly displeased.

SCOTTDALE, PENNA., April 11—

The funeral of Mrs. Barbara Kulbacki, age 42, of Everson

will be held at St. Joseph’s Church

at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning.

Now, on this rainy evening,

as new grass flourishes among the chinks and crevices of the street

and the Syrian girls clatter pot lids in their next-door kitchen,

her five children still huddle in the cold bedroom above the store.

Eventually someone will remember to feed them.

SHANGHAI, CHINA, April 12—

Well before dawn streaks the eastern sky,

Chiang Kai-shek frowns.

He rubs the top of his head with both hands.

And now he shrugs and tells Du Yuesheng

to go ahead and let his Green Gang

start slaughtering all the Communists

they can find.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse-history-in-progress of southwestern Pennsylvania (and, in this case, the world beyond the mountains)]

Driving home from band practice can be exciting, and I'm sure that all my Frost Place friends will be thrilled to learn that I finally saw a bear last night. It crossed the road in front of my car and, in the wonky shine of the headlights, bore a striking resemblance to a cartoon gorilla. However, I'd already had an exciting animal sighting just minutes before: a Scotch Highland cow (long horns, thick bangs, physique of a stuffed animal) looming out of a driveway like a hairy mailbox.

I had such a good day yesterday. The Chestnut Ridge ms is finally in groomable order, by which I mean that I've found a thematic structure. However, the ms is far too long and it's boggy and dull in places; so what I need to do now is delete poems, move the rest around, combine sections, break sections--all regular revision stuff, but much easier now that I've got a shape in my head. This work may or may not begin to happen today, but even if it doesn't, the shape exists and will persist, and that is a great happiness.

Yesterday I read and sang and baked bread and read and sang and revised poems and sorted poems, and it was all such a relief. Today will be more of the same, and how aware I am of the need behind these desultory acts.

In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness; we turn, and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgment in us of necessity, and of the lands. 

--Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

And this was the song I was singing over and over . . . and my son, too: he was singing this song, with me and alone. And then he played it for my husband, and the three of us stood in the darkening kitchen and the song sang to us.