Poem for Wednesday

I will I will I will start blogging again, soon, soon.  I have been finishing the first draft of a major report at work.  I am still not aware of how depleted I am.  I think that, because I am not writing every minute of my 8 or 9 hour workday, that I am fine.  But then I find myself refusing to answer my office phone, or losing my temper at a simple request, and I realize I am deeply drained.  I am learning that leading a team isn’t less exhausting than doing the work oneself — it’s differently exhausting (especially the first time you do it — this is my first time), and the ultimate product is significantly better.  I have to be aware and alert all the time.  I have to make more decisions.  I have to explain myself better.  I have to work harder, in some ways, so that others can keep up with their work.  Things should let up a bit next Tuesday.  I hope I will find blogging again restorative.

Ack!  I’ve just discovered I’ve already used the poem I had selected for Poem for Wednesday.  Damn.  This, however, is an excellent backup, and makes me think of Sister — Happy Birthday darling Sister:

Freedom and Chance

D. Nurske

She says, there is another city, exactly like this:
same sardonic cat, complacent dog, fat-chested sparrow
trilling its brains out before daybreak, identical abandon
and thrilling sorrow, familiar machinery chuffing
in darkness—belt sander, leaf blower, radial arm saw.
But that world is Queens, this is Brooklyn.
The law is like wind; it has no self.
There Frank Viola stars, here Julio Franco.
Here light is a wave, there a particle.
Here we marry, we grow old in a tiny house
with a porch swing and complicated locks.
There, you plod through deserted chain stores
in search of someone you cannot know. Here
the names of God, blurted from passing cars.
There, the milk truck and its loud crate of empties

This poem originally appeared in the September 15, 2011 issue of The New Republic magazine.

Poem for Wednesday

Today I am thankful for the hip-opening sequence in Yoga Body, Buddha Mind.  I had another baby dream last night, just hours after noticing how content I have been and how I feel like I am becoming a good new version of myself.  I dreamed that I was pregnant and had both just given birth and was just about to give birth again.  Most of the dream involved me being pregnant and being in my office, and given what’s happening at work and in my head, it’s very easy to see the dream as a metaphor both for this important project I’m working on (first deadline Sept 6th), and for my goals for work for the next year, and even some personal goals and changes that I thought about while on vacation.  So I could handle the content of the dream.  But it seemed fantastically unfair that, upon awaking from the dream at 5am, my stomach felt sore and exhausted.  Can’t the dreams just stay in my head? Do they have to trick my body as well?  I did the hip opening sequence in YBYM for my morning yoga practice and felt immensely better.  My hips are quite tight, even after 13 years of (irregular) yoga, but I love the hip opening sequences in this book — even though I am bad at them.  I love all the sequences in this book, actually.  Cyndi Lee is my yoga crush.

Daniel is enamored of Louis Mac Neice these days.  Last night he read this poem to me while I was doing the dishes.  It’s especially resonant given my unexpected break from blogging.  Perhaps I don’t want to be reflective any more (right now) either.

Wolves

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Louis Macneice

http://www.poemhunter.com/

Poem for Wednesday

I am just about ready to start blogging regularly again.  I am having experiences that I am starting to frame to myself as posts.

Last week there was a lot of drama in the marriage.  This particular category of drama is familiar, by now, but I am still not settled into it, nor immune to it.  It is a recurring infection that doesn’t create enough antibodies to keep me ever-well.  But perhaps a few are gaining ground.  I reminded myself throughout that what was happening was temporary.  And I think not blogging about it was a good idea. I think I may have wanted to stay in the moment and try to act differently, rather than getting some distance on it.  I think in writing about it, I would have found many ways to describe Daniel’s bad behavior and talk all about what was wrong with him, and that thicket of words would have kept me from understanding my own bad behavior.  Sometimes I write my way towards a realization, but sometimes I can write myself away from one.

Anyway, I found a gem on the Poetry Foundation website.  We came back from London loaded with poetry.  I have two volumes of Poem for the Day — anthologies of 366 (leap year) poems.  I haven’t looked at them yet, but I’m happy to know they are there.   Oh, here’s a realization I just wrote myself into: before vacation, I used to check my work and personal email every morning — before brushing my teeth, before yoga, before anything.  I’ve quit that terrible habit since we’ve been back from vacation — it’s easy for now because my office slows down a bit in August, although I’m working like mad and in fact should be working now rather than blogging.  It would be a great idea to grab a poem first thing in the morning instead.  I wonder if I will.

This is just the last stanza of Wild Peaches, by Elinor Wylie.  The entire poem is here.  And I have done you a disservice by posting only the last stanza, so you should click on the link before you do anything else.

 IV

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones

There’s something in this richness that I hate.

I love the look, austere, immaculate,

Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

There’s something in my very blood that owns

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

A thread of water, churned to milky spate

Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,

Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;

That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,

Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,

Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,

And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

 

Poem for Wednesday

We’re back from a truly lovely vacation in London.  We didn’t know the riots were happening until we got to the airport to catch our return flight on Monday.  I haven’t followed the news stories closely enough to know what’s fueling the violence.  Most of the reporting I’ve seen quotes people in the affected neighborhoods rejecting the “depraved on account of they’re deprived” hypothesis, which I find interesting.  The Guardian’s coverage seems comprehensive, and overwhelming. It must be absolutely terrifying to be there, or Birmingham, or any of the cities.  A store that we passed morning after morning on our way to the tube had its windows smashed.

In a troubling coincidence, none of the poems I found on the Poetry Foundation website about London were particularly pleasant.  Most of them described the city as harsh, dirty, cold, hostile.  I have always adored London, and found it thrilling, delightful, accessible.  London was the first world city I knew, and the first one (perhaps the only one) in which I was truly comfortable.

I covered a lot of psychological ground while I was in London, too.  The first few days I was really unsettled and in a lot of internal tumult, which I’ll write about later.  Then I leveled out, happily, and came back full of ideas and determination to live in a better way — and I’ll write about that, too.  But not for a while.  I’m trying very hard to hang on to the good after-effects of the vacation, and concentrate intently on implementing some of the good things I decided — to be gracious, to be fearless, to care less about how tidy the house is or isn’t.  I am trying to do less at home in the evenings, partly in deference to jet lag, partly because I like the feeling of doing less.  So there’s so much to blog about, but not quite yet.  I am still a bit on vacation.

But I can’t forgo Poem for Wednesday:

London, 1802

By William Wordsworth

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life’s common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.