Variations
by Marcella
It has been hard to entertain myself today. This morning I awoke to an empty bed, a cold room. I shuffled through the morning, teaching, thinking, speaking on the fly. Preparing for classes has me unraveled most days. It’s not that I can’t get into the subject matter, I just can’t get into my class. Half the class-exactly-is failing. They don’t show up, they don’t care, they text while I talk, then forget they didn’t get the assignment because they were off in cyberland. The other half is into it; we have discussions, we debate, we laugh. I am in it for them, exactly. So this afternoon, sitting here in front of the computer with papers to grade but no motivation, I shuffle through the motions once again, visit Salon, and Facebook, then Poetry.org. Poetry.org offers up something worth my focus. Poems offer something, always, even if that something is not quite clear. That feeling, that spark of oh! that flares up then fades as fast as it came on… THAT’s where breath happens. THAT’s where understanding is. THAT’s where life happens. I’ve found that moment three times today, here, in Billy Collins’ forgetfulness, where he writes on the process of forgetting:
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
That line at the end, with a love poem moon drifting across my stream of consciousness… that’s the moment I want to hold on to and know right now. I want to hold on to this image because in doing so I am reminded (I remember, not forget) all those times when a love poem moon has illuminated my face and heart. I am taken into the power of the word to alter memory (and thus reality). And here in Margaret Atwood’s Variation on the Word Sleep I find myself again wanting to participate, to know. To feel. To be something other than this, today.
I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
In poetry the nothingness of breath and the space of inhaling becomes something tangible, no more mere ideas but beings. Here, in poetry, in this moment of lungs expanding and mind knowing and ideas and memories connecting do I find myself centered, brough into a moment as I’m taken out of the one I’m really in.
I suppose I should be grateful that my boredom instantly leads me to Facebook, because FB is where I began my Poetry.org quest today, as someone had posted this think piece of a poem, Bruce Smith’s Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life].
I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed my life and one more change and I was back here looking up at a blue sky with russets and the World was hypnotic but it wasn’t great. I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss, I didn’t know about bliss. Is bliss just a rant about the size of the bowl? The trance was the true thing, no, the rant, no, the sky, now, that icy whiteness.
It’s so short, this poem, this snap, this moment of being here and alert, this life… One more, one more change indeed. But how to get there, to make that flash happen? Where to find the icy whiteness when it fails to shine outside words?
